Dragon Ball Daima

Episode 13

After taking a week off, Daima is back and there's plenty to talk about. Not just with today's episode, but also the English dub, which has finally hit Crunchyroll today after a bit of a long wait. While I am glad that reviewing this show week to week has given me an opportunity to get more familiar with Masako Nozawa's Goku, and it's been plenty charming to listen to, like any 90's kid in the U.S, I associate the Dragon Ball franchise with the Funimation dub cast, so I've been eager to check out the dub. In particular I've been looking forward to getting to hear Stephanie Nadolny play Kid Goku for the first time in over a decade, and while I would have been more than fine with Colleen Clinkenbeard playing him as she has for the last few years, I'd be lying if I said I didn't associate Kid Goku a little more with Stephanie's performance, so it's nice to have it back for this. Unfortunately the fact that we don't get the kid versions of the characters until the end of the episode means that we don't get to hear it, but we do have plenty of time to get acquainted with our new cast members, and they all sound great.

Tom Laflin in particular pretty much steals the show as King Gomah, and does a great job of making him sound delightfully childish and petty, while Landon McDonald is just as great at making Degesu sound like a snide yes man, and the two have some great comedic delivery bouncing off each other. The returning cast members all sound as strong as ever, and while they mostly aren't going to be in the show after this out, it's always a great time hearing Sean Schemmel and Chris Sabat playing off of each other as Goku and Vegeta. Speaking of Chris Sabat, the dub for Dragon Ball Daima is interesting in that he's not producing and directing it at Okatron 5000, as has been the case for most Dragon Ball dubs. Instead it looks like this one is being done in-house at Crunchyroll under a different ADR Director, Jonathan Rigg, and while I was kinda worried how consistent this would sound next to other Dragon Ball entries, I didn't feel much of a difference and everyone here sounded solid, so I think it's safe to say the dub is in good hands. I'll probably check back in here with the dub to see how Stephanie Nadolny and the all the new actors for the kid versions of the other characters sound, but for now, it seems like the dub is off to a strong start.

Now let's finally dig into this week's episode, which has turned out to be big in more ways than one. Realizing the danger he'll be in if Goku and the gang manage to make it to the First Demon World, King Gomah orders Degesu to shut down the Warps and leave them without a way to get to him. However, the gang's got other things to worry about, as when their ship suffers yet another crash, it leaves them stranded on a planet called Mega, where everything is giant. Now this might sound fairly standard compared to the kind of threats Goku and the others have faced on the regular basis, but when Neva starts panicking about how much trouble they'll be in if they stay for too long, it's hard not to imagine what kind of monstrosities are lying in wait for them. Imagine my surprise then, when the first thing they get attacked by are…giant hamsters. No, you didn't read that wrong. We do quite literally get a sequence where Goku, Vegeta and Piccolo get attacked by an army of giant hamsters. Not only that, but the hamsters actually give them a decent run for their money, and have them pretty overwhelmed for a while. Even for how silly most of Daima has been by modern Dragon Ball standards, this might be one of its goofiest moments yet, and I'm honestly here for it. While I like the action heavy side of the franchise well enough, the tendency to see Dragon Ball as purely a hard hitting action franchise does sometimes result in it being taken more seriously than it actually is, and it's been nice that Daima hasn't been afraid to let loose with stuff like this. Truth be told, I would have been plenty content had this been the plot of the entire episode, but we've yet to get to the actual joke at play this week, and it's a thing of beauty.

As dangerous as the giant hamster army was, they end up scurrying for the hills when they sense a dangerous threat approaching. What threat you might ask? A boy and his dog. Now, to be more accurate, we're talking about a giant boy and his giant dog, but compared to the genocidal tyrant, bio superweapon, and ancient demon that have served among Goku's greatest foes, a giant seems pretty mundane comparatively. “Seems” being the keyword here, because the second this kid and his dog are alerted to the gang's presence, they find themselves in some hilarious forms of mortal peril, like almost getting skewered by the kid's giant pencils or getting crushed to death in between one of his notebooks. Meanwhile, from the kid's perspective, he's just messing around with some weird bugs he's found, and even Goku and Vegeta's Super Sayain forms don't register as much more than some really pesky mosquitoes.

Given how very seriously power levels can be taken by parts of the Dragon Ball fandom, I can imagine there being some fans who don't take too kindly to the idea of Goku and Vegeta getting bested by a literal (giant) child, but that kinda made the episode for me. As fun as power level debates can be, it's a bit of a bummer that so much conversation around Dragon Ball centers around power scaling when so many of its roots have been in comedy, and Toriyama never really concerned himself much in trying to keep all the scaling consistent. After seeing debates reach the point where there are multiple calculations about how many universes Goku should be able to blow up, there's honestly something kinda charming about him struggling against something so seemingly mundane, and I'm glad that Daima has found plenty of creative ways for him to struggle a bit.

It's a good reminder to take all the power level stuff only so seriously, and while I'm sure this whole scenario probably wasn't meant to be much more than a silly gag on Toriyama's part, I appreciate it all the same. If you do wanna apply this to power scaling though, then it also meshes pretty well with the the lesson Goku learned from Beerus at the end of Battle of Gods: that there's always someone stronger, and while it might be a little surreal to think there's an entire race of beings (well, technically two, since Neva claims there's another race that's even bigger than these guys) that might be casually stronger, it's still a good lesson to learn, and it helps keep Dragon Ball's universe more interesting. Having said that, I can't pretend it's not funny that based on what we saw here, Goku probably should have been trying to make friends with these giants, because if a kid is this strong, then I'm pretty sure the adults could solo Beerus and Black Freeza and solve most of his problems in Super. Needless to say this was a very strange episode, but it was a lot of fun, and while it's become increasingly clear this show doesn't hold the action side of Dragon Ball as sacred as other iterations, its willingness to do so is part of why I've fallen so hard for it.

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Dragon Ball Daima is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.