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  • Americans Hate Tingle: It's more like a Broken Base, but GT's detractors do reach hatedom levels in the English-speaking fandom. In Japan, however, it's generally fairly decently-regarded. Its ratings weren't that great, but looking at how it compares to the end of Dragon Ball Z, the ratings were falling off at about the same rate, and in retrospect, it seems time has been rather kind to GT in Japan.
  • And the Fandom Rejoiced: GT is being re-aired on Nicktoons, starting in January 2012.
  • Archive Panic: Combined with the other two shows, there's 508 episodes. Even though they are (on average) 20 minutes long, that's still 254 hour-long shows (really about 40 minutes long). That's longer than all 7 seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
  • Awesome Music:
  • Contested Sequel/Sequelitis: To Dragon Ball Z. It does have its strengths, such as better pacing compared with DBZ's frequent Arc Fatigue and genuinely good ideas for continuing the series. On the other hand, the decreasing relevance in fights of everyone not named Goku (and to a lesser extent, Pan) and the poor execution of the plot are huge marks against it.
  • Continuity Lock Out: Relies heavily on the backstories of both DBZ and the original anime. It also occasionally treats both DBZ filler and the Non-Serial Movies (the Garlic Jr. Saga's Sacred Water, Hell being depicted like it was in DBZ, the appearance of Cooler) as canon, which can be confusing if one goes from reading the manga or watching Dragon Ball Kai to watching GT.
  • Crowning Moment of Awesome: Goku going Super Saiyan 4 and curb-stomping Baby Vegeta in their rematch.
  • Crowning Moment of Heartwarming: Whether you like them or not, or even consider their existence canon, watching Goku Jr. and Vegeta Jr. is surprisingly adorable. The pair are polite to one another during their match (even if, true to his ancestor, Vegeta Jr. used a little Trash Talk early on), and seemed to genuinely enjoy themselves during the fight.
    • Goku and Krillin's conversation in the last episode. Even more of a heartwarming moment with the Japanese music.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Nuova Shenron. Fan demand even got him added to Budokai Tenkaichi 3. (His alternate outfit uses the colour scheme of his brother, Eis.)
    • Regarding transformations, Super Saiyan 4 is well-liked, even by the series' detractors, due to its unique design.
  • Family-Unfriendly Aesop: The Shadow Dragons Saga contains one - "Even the most selfless acts of good can end up having disastrous consequences."
  • Fashion Victim Villain: Baby is probably the most widely-regarded as this, between the wraparound shades, Pajama Sam-esque skin, weird flesh-pompadour and primary-colored spandex. At least he spends most of his arc fused with someone else.
  • God Mode Sue: Goku, easily. He defeats pretty much every Monster of the Week. He defeats all three of the Big Bads. In fact, the last two Big Bads were destroyed by him after he was forcibly powered down to his base form, including one who arguably shouldn't have died as a Big Bad.
  • Growing the Beard: GT's fans and detractors both agree that the series really started to pick up once the Z-Fighters arrived on Planet M-2; the more-episodic adventure storytelling from before was dropped in favor of an arc-based, villain-centric style, with the villain of that moment being General Rilldo, which fairly quickly led into the action-oriented Baby Saga. Though some would point out that this progression began quite a bit earlier in episode 9 with the Luud cult, it's generally agreed the M-2 material is the actual moment when the series found its feet.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • Considering that Super is generally better-received than GT (mostly due to Toriyama being more involved in the former), it's a bit ironic that both shows end with an episode titled "Goodbye, Goku... Until The Day We Meet Again".
    • The German dub of GT renamed the Black Star Dragon Balls as the "Super Dragon Balls". Take a wild guess what the next new set of Dragon Balls to be introduced into the series canon would be named...
  • Just Here for Godzilla: Years after the series' end, the most iconic element of the series to really stick out for the franchise as a whole is Super Saiyan 4, especially with all the hypothetical fan art on further evolutions based on this idea. It helps that the "Super Saiyan God" and "Super Saiyan Blue" forms from Super are much less impressive to look at.
  • Macekre:
    • FUNimation infamously produced a terrible rap song for their theme and skipped the first 16 episodes, expecting the audience to catch up using a Recap Episode. Thankfully, they backtracked on this and later released the series in full, and the "Season" DVDs don't include the rap song at all.
    • Averted in the UK and Canada, where the show had a different dub done by Blue Water Studios, using the original Japanese score, scripts with proper, accurate translations and a general tone that matched the original Japanese version perfectly. As a TV dub produced by Ocean, many assume it would be heavily censored and edited for time, just like the Saban-produced 1996 dub of the first two seasons of DBZ, the Trimark-produced 1995 dub of the first season of the original series, and the AB Groupe-produced "Westwood" dub of Seasons 4 onwards of DBZ,[1] but in fact, aside from one 15-second sequence from episode 8 that had to be cut due to Goku's junk showing, the dub is actually entirely uncut, and unlike previous TV dubs, instead of censoring "Hell" to "HFIL",[2] they went with "Hades" or "The Underworld", depending on the context.[3]
    • Actually happened with the French dub. They fired the whole cast of veteran voice actors, who had gone on strike over wage disputes, and hired a group of Z-list actors to replace them.[4] Also, they fudged the translation quite a bit (namely references to Vegeta NOT being a full-blooded Saiyan) and added tons of wacky dialogue (Gohan going on an emo rant about how he hates Piccolo for dying on him) that felt very out of place, and it can be argued that this is one of the biggest reasons why GT got so much hate in France.
    • In Germany, tons of episodes were skipped, the ones that were dubbed were heavily cut-down and edited into each-other in a rather haphazard way, and the scripts were based on the already-terrible French dub.
  • Memetic Badass:
    • GT's infamous issues with consistent power levels, combined with Goku defeating major villains more easily in his base form while having more trouble with them in any of his various Super Saiyan forms, created the idea of base form Kid Goku being more powerful than anyone else in the franchise.
    • The fact that an elderly Krillin was able to land a hit on Goku during their friendly fight in the final episode (Goku was obviously not fighting at full power) has prompted a meme that Old Man Krillin is the biggest badass ever who could defeat anyone with ease.
  • Moral Event Horizon:
  • Never Live It Down: You'd think the only thing that happens with Vegeta in this series is him growing a moustache. In reality, he had it on-screen for only three episodes before his daughter yelled at him to shave it off.
  • Nightmare Fuel:
  • The Problem with Licensed Games: Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout is an awful fighting game with shoddy controls, awful visuals and animation, Camera Screw, little-to-no character variety and an dub so bad that even Steve Blum's portrayal of Goku isn't redeemable. The only thing really notable about it is that it's the first Dragon Ball game to come to the West with the license intact, albeit as a very limited release.
  • Recycled Script: The Super 17 Saga and the villains escaping from Hell was literally a retake on the Dragon Ball Z movie Fusion Reborn.
  • Rescued From the Scrappy Heap:
    • Elderly Pan from episode 64 and "A Hero's Legacy", due to having outgrown her whininess.
    • Bra also goes from "spoiled teenager" to awesome just on the strength of her getting Vegeta to shave off that godawful mustache.
  • Scapegoat Creator: In an odd reversal, many detractors of the series point to Akira Toriyama's lack of involvement in the show's creative process. In reality, he was involved to a degree (he named the series, acted as a consultant for plot ideas and designed the aged characters. So, yes, Akira Toriyama was the one who gave Vegeta a flat-top and moustache), and going further than that, he's stated several times he's actually a big fan of the series. He even doodled a sketch of Super Saiyan 4 Goku on the side of his blurb for the GT Dragon Box. Think about that for a second: the creator of Dragonball drew fanart of someone else's transformation made for one of his characters.
  • The Scrappy: Pan and Giru.
    • When it comes to Arc Villains in the Dragon Ball franchise as a whole, Super 17 is among the few villains who has next-to-no fans. He doesn't make much sense as a villain, as he exists solely to make Android 17 evil again and boast about how superior he is to humans (especially considering he used to be a human himself). Many fans who watch the series tend to downright skip his arc altogether. Despite this, he somehow keeps appearing as a playable fighter in any game that has GT characters in it, most likely due to being a major villain in the franchise, though Baby and the Super One-Star Dragon[5] far surpass him in terms of popularity.
      • It doesn't help that the Universe Survival Saga of Super turned 17 into a huge Ensemble Darkhorse and even had him win the Tournament of Power the saga is centered around, leading to even more fans hating on Super 17.
  • So Okay It's Average: Most fans seem to view GT as having some genuinely good ideas that were poorly executed and overshadowed by some of the less-savory decisions and designs, and that the series as a whole is fine enough, even if it never really lives up to its full potential.
  • Soundtrack Dissonance: Quite a few of the songs used in GT's soundtrack, including the opening and ending songs, are pretty blatantly romantic in nature. While Goku and Pan do love each other very much, it's probably not even remotely in that way, and it doesn't really fit any part of the series at that. They are still very good songs, nonetheless.
  • Squick: Bra looks and acts like a teenager, and has multiple fanservice tropes thanks to her attire showing off her legs and stomach, as well as being a tease to the multiple men in the series, who vary from early teens to fully-grown adults. Sounds normal, right? Well, keep in mind that she's actually 10-years-old. This makes all the scenes where she's being hit on extremely hard to watch, though it does make Vegeta's Papa Wolf tendencies seem a lot more reasonable.
  • Tear Jerker: Piccolo's Heroic Sacrifice. Even worse, his final words to Gohan are "Goodbye, my son...".
    • Good Buu saying goodbye to Mr. Satan before merging with Uub, effectively ceasing to exist.
    • Krillin's senseless murder at the hands of the Brainwashed and Crazy Android 17, and Android 18's subsequent Anguished Declaration of Love.
    • The final episode, "Goodbye, Goku... Until the Day We Meet Again". Goku is forced to leave Earth after saving it for the umpteenth time... and after all that effort against that arc's Big Bad, with the majority of the cast not even aware that he has to leave them for a good century, was really depressing.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
    • Some would argue everyone who wasn't Goku was this, though GT's fans argue that because the cast is so large, instead of having everyone appear together and not be able to do anything noteworthy individually, in GT, each character got their moment in the spotlight for at least an episode or two.
    • Uub is the entire reason Goku was in the right place to kick off the events of GT, but he only has two fight scenes worth remembering and a sole Big Damn Heroes moment before becoming irrelevant to the story.
    • Ledgic has a fairly memorable design and powers similar to Dabura, back when powers similar to Dabura's hadn't been played out yet. He works for a greedy tyrant, but not eagerly, seeming to be a Noble Top Enforcer looking for an excuse to quit his job. He has some sort of connection to Saiyans, which can go any number of ways, and takes up Goku on his challenge to train for a rematch. Of course, he's never seen again.
    • General Rilldo. One of the first characters introduced in GT who can truly challenge Goku. He is stronger than Majin Buu in his base form and can regenerate as long as there's metal around, which is the entire planet, making him close to invincible. He is also only the second Benevolent Boss villain introduced in the series and has the Story-Breaker Power of turning anyone hit with his mouth beam into metal. He's sort of like a cross between Buu and Dabura. He would have been an interesting villain on his own, but unfortunately got a bridge dropped on him to make room for Baby. Worse, when he briefly returns in the Super 17 Saga, he fights Gohan and actually gives him a hard time, managing to turn Gohan's arm into metal. He's then one-shotted by Uub with zero fanfare.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
    • GT had lots of good ideas for epic story arcs, like a Tuffle experiment trying to avenge their race by taking over Earthlings to convert them into its own kind, Tuffleized variations of the Super Saiyan transformations, a new Great Ape form based on the Super Saiyan transformation, a new Super Saiyan transformation based on the Great Ape form, the return of every previous villain in the series as they escape from Hell, a souped-up super android created as an instrument of Dr. Gero's vengeance from beyond the grave, and evil manifestations of a negative Shenron while finally having consequences for overusing the Dragon Balls to provide a Reset Button in previous stories. However, many argue that characters are wasted and the plotting is iffy, leading to this potential being wasted.
    • Earlier in the Baby Saga, Baby contemplated possessing Goku, even saying if he had Goku's power he would be invincible. He never follows through with this. Even when he has Goku on the ropes, instead of possessing him, he tries to kill him with a Revenge Death Ball. This is despite Goku being the strongest character, even stuck in a child's body, and thus a better would-be host than Vegeta. After being defeated by Goku, instead of trying to possess Goku, he instead runs away, though one could argue that since Goku was curb-stomping him by that point, any attempt to possess him would be met by a 10x Kamehameha, leading to his death anyway.
    • The Machine Mutants, an emergent artificial species largely designed for combat that are cusp of becoming an interstellar terror. They were indirectly created by Baby, and are in fact based on him. For those who disliked the Shadow Dragons, they were the best thing GT created. Not only are there are so many potential character designs and stories that can come from this, but the idea of a Tuffle revenge project producing something Not So Different from the Saiyans his creators despised, and not even realizing the irony, is humorous. While a timid non-combat drone was a good way to ease viewers into the concept, showing that they had individual personalities and moral agency, said drone is the only one viewers get to know before Baby enters the plot and all of the Machine Mutants are left behind. The concept comes back in the next arc, but only in the form of an Evil Knockoff of Android 17 that serves as a plot device to kick off an otherwise-unrelated conflict, and in the return of a (quickly defeated) General Rilldo.
    • The Shadow Dragons, and the nature of their birth. Each of the seven dragons are born from one of the major wishes in Dragon Ball history, with the more selfless wishes supposedly creating more powerful dragons, and each one having different Elemental Powers. The arc easily could have had the heroes split up and confront them, not only giving much-needed screentime to the other characters, but also using the concept of the karma built up by the Dragon Balls to explore the past of the heroes or give the villains intriguing motivations. Instead, the arc involves Goku and Pan traveling around Earth and fighting them, and all but the One-Star, Three-Star and Four-Star Dragons are extremely weak foes that only use the wish that created them as a cheap Call Back. The only reason the fights with all but the last three end up lasting as long as they do is thanks to Goku or Pan holding the Idiot Ball and creating unnecessary drama. Furthermore, with the exception of the Four-Star Dragon, none of them have anything going on besides For the Evulz. This extends to the One-Star Dragon, whose Super Shadow Dragon form allows him to use all of his siblings' powers, and is the strongest villain of the original Dragon Ball anime trilogy, but his overall motivations and connection to the idea of karmic punishment to the heroes is quickly tossed aside.
  • Villain Decay: Frieza and Cell in the Super 17 Saga. Could perhaps overlap with Villain Forgot to Level Grind, but Goku had been shrunken to child size and didn't even bother using his Super Mode.
  • Vindicated by History: The Super Saiyan 4 transformation was originally seen as a bit weird, and perhaps too much of a departure from the traditional Super Saiyan "look". After Battle of the Gods and Resurrection 'F' revealed the divisive Super Saiyan God and Super Saiyan Blue forms, Super Saiyan 4 has gained back several fans who used to dislike the form due to it being both visually distinctive and harkening back to the old associations between Saiyans and Great Apes.
  • WTH? Casting Agency: Funimation somehow managed to get the late Peter Mayhew (better known as Chewbacca) to voice a villain in A Hero's Legacy.
  • WTH Costuming Department:
    • Akira Toriyama's initial design for Vegeta, which gave him a flat-top haircut, a mustache and the dorkiest '90s dad clothes ever. Thankfully, the mustache was shaved off, his hair became spiky again and the clothes were changed to '90s punk clothing.
    • Trunks' outfit, consisting of a black turtleneck, gray sports coat, blue neckerchief and khaki shorts. The idea seemed to try and be a call-back to his future incarnation while incorporating Bulma's design as well, but the overall design looks far more silly than it should have. IGN in particular criticized his new design as overly goofy.
  1. Which used the same scripts as the TV edit of Funimation's dub, with some small adjustments likely ad-libbed by the actors in the studio, and had tons of little trims including coverage shots and many closeups that were removed; most of these, you wouldn't notice in normal viewing, but ultimately, it meant it was a TV dub through-and-through.
  2. "Home For Infinite Losers"
  3. Granted, you could argue this is still censorship, but if you didn't know about it, you wouldn't notice it. Plus, it sounds really cool...
  4. Goku and Vegeta's voice actors (to only mention them) have reached proper fame and legend status in France, even reprising their roles for Super
  5. AKA Yi Xing Long, Ii Shenron and Omega Shenron
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