Superhero Media: Dragon Ball Z The World's Strongest

Ok, so I don't really follow all of the big developments across the DBZ fandom, so I never realised that DBZ Kai had a partially different voice cast until I watched my new DVD of The World's Strongest from the Dragon Ball Z Remastered Movie Collection. I don't want to be one of those fans who says that the version they knew first is better, but the original English voices for Doctors Wheelo and Kochin were far more memorable than the new ones, which are just kind of bland and generically sinister. I was genuinely disappointed to find this, as The World's Strongest is one of my favourite DBZ films, and some of the first DBZ I really saw, renting the DVD when I couldn't see the episodes of a morning like my friends. As such, I had quite an odd idea of what DBZ was for a little while, but that's a story for another time. The brilliant, yet deranged, Doctor Wheelo almost died, but his brain was preserved and now he seeks the world's strongest fighter to be his new body. His information being out of date, however, he kidnaps Master Roshi and Goku and friends have to come to the rescue. 

Doctors Wheelo and Kochin live in a wonderfully Giger-esque fortress in the mountain wilderness, filled with impossibly-large open spaces, traps, towers and even mist somehow. For the terrain fanatics that read my blog, The World's Strongest may well be worth checking out for the aesthetic alone; I certainly wish I had the skills with plaster and resin to pull something like this off on the table top. The World's Strongest, much like Tree of Might and Lord Slug, the next two films in the series, are most definitely not in the DBZ canon, as Goku has access to the Kaio Ken and Spirit Bomb techniques, but can't turn Super Sayian as yet. This "extra-narrative" nature means that many fans tend to pass the movies over or have an outright hostility towards them, which I find more puzzling than anything. Yes, I'm one of those weird DBZ fans who enjoys the filler and thinks Goku is boring, but I can't understand why having more DBZ content can be a bad thing, especially when the lack of restrictions allow the stories and fights to do things the series can't; for example, having the gang fight a brain in a robot body in the ruins of a cyclopean fortress. 

As I've mentioned before, Doctor Wheelo is one of my favourite DBZ villains. Partially because "brain is a jar" is always a great trope, but also because cyborgs are great villains. Yeah, forget Lapis, Lazuli and Doctor Gero, the original cyborg monsters to battle Goku are Kishime, Ebifurya and Doctor Wheelo. Probably worth mentioning that there's a musical number in The World's Strongest, sung by Gohan about Piccolo, it's pretty strange and breaks the tone, but is all of two minutes long if you're really that put off by it. Man, I need to start making these articles on the DBZ movies a bit shorter, I always run out of stuff to say other than "Hey Jasco, where's that DBZ minis game you promised?", you bet I'd buy a Wheelo as soon as I could, he's just such a cool looking bad guy. Well, until the glorious day I can get more 28mm Dragon Ball characters, I guess I'll just dream about teaming Doctor Wheelo up with The Brain and Helsingard for some kind of villainous "brains trust".