For years, fans of Team Four Star’s Dragon Ball Abridged
have asked: “Wen Broly?” Then on Christmas fans finally received Broly Abridged…part
one. Now don’t get me wrong, part one was great but a lot of people where left
asking: “Wen Broly?” We then heard that the second part would be released on
New Year’s, and only twelve days after that the complete movie came out.
Reaction so far has been overwhelmingly positive, despite the setbacks it
suffered in production.
The story of Broly Abridged is of course similar to that of
the real movie. When South Galaxy is destroyed, South Kai pleads with North
Kai-- that is King Kai to help him. King Kai calls in Goku to track down
whoever it is that destroyed a galaxy. Meanwhile a saiyan comes to Recruit Vegeta
to rule his saiyan colony of New Vegeta. His ego sufficiently stroke he
abandons Earth, followed by most o the cast for one reason or another.
Eventually things come to a head on New Vegeta as a saiyan named Broly is shown
to have destroyed the galaxy, and reveals that he is in fact the legendary
super saiyan.
This movie has a lot of strong points. The voice acting,
which has always been one of DBZA’s strong points, was great. WTSRemix’s
rendition of Broly started out creepy-which totally fit the script-then went
pure Broly when he went supersaiyan. His
creepy come-ons are some of the best parts of the movie. The humor is also on
point. True, a lot of the jokes are in-jokes: references to Dragon Ball and
DBZA that you probably won’t get unless you are a longtime fan. But that is the
movies core audience, and they don’t only rely on these. The entire satire was
handled very well, and holds up on rewatch.
The last third of the movie is the weakest. It feels a bit
rushed and anticlimactic. I think this is reflected in the exasperation and
exhaustion various members of TFS have expressed over the movie. Apparently
there were problems fitting the script to the footage and the script went
through several versions before they finished. Exhaustion can destroy a
product, as artists take short cuts to finish a work they don’t feel like
working on. Fortunately The flaws that seemed to have creeped in are few and
far between. Broly Abridged as turned out to be one of TFS’s better works.
While many have accused Dragon Ball Abridged of getting
lazy, Broly Abridged proves TFS is still capable of producing a funny but
loving parody. It was well acted, well
written and well edited. Those of you who love DBZA have to see it, and those
of you who liked the first few seasons but fell off need to consider watching
it.
8.3 out of 10
-Gedaemon
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