Superhero Media: Dragon Ball Z - Return of Cooler

Return of Cooler has a reputation for being one of the cheapest looking Dragon Ball productions ever, and whilst it's visually not great, I certainly have seen far worse back in the dim days of the 1990s, where we grabbed whatever anime we could find at the back of the video store. When New Namek is attacked by the hilariously named Big Ghetty Star, a call is put out to Earth and soon the Z Fighters arrive to discover an army of robots lead by none other than Cooler! Who is now also a robot and called "Meta Cooler" because anime. Aside from the Androids and some other Red Ribbon stuff, DB doesn't feature a great deal of people fighting robots, so Return of Cooler gets points for at least having some unique moments of action and an enemy that can't be overcome with the character's usual tactics. Seeing the team with bruised and torn hands from punching metal makes me wonder why there aren't more robots kicking around the franchise. 

Much as with the previous film, it's the antagonist of Return of Cooler that I find the most interesting, not simply Cooler himself, but the whole package of the Big Ghetty Star, which has a fun mix of Borg, Skynet and Galactus. Born of an "Intelligent Computer Chip" that began to assimilate all around it, the Big Ghetty Star became a major threat when it found the remains of Cooler floating through the void, and added physical power to it's machine abilities. That's a pretty solid villain origin right there, and I could easily see the Guardians of the Galaxy or Green Lantern Corps taking on something like that with minimal modifications. The Big Ghetty Star consumes all in its path, using biological matter of all kinds to fuel itself, throwing it in the Galactus/Unicron ballpark pretty handily, and I can see there may be a possible connection to DBGT's planet M-2 and the Machine Mutants, if you like that kind of thing. 

Is Return of Cooler the first piece of DB media where Goku and Vegeta have to team up to win? I honestly much prefer it to either fighting alone for the thousandth time, even if they have a habit of taking turns rather than actually working together. The ending is pretty unsatisfying, with Goku and Vegeta suddenly being too powerful for Cooler and the Big Ghetty Star to handle, despite almost being dead, and the rotting, Borg-esque, "Core Cooler" seems like a waste of a really cool design. That said, Return of Cooler is probably better than most give it credit for, even with the dodgy animation and rather bland story, because at least there is some variation in theme and look over the normal DBZ fare. I have to say that I was pretty tired of these films, but Return of Cooler has given me a little boost that will at least get me through the next few.