I stopped at Wal-Mart the other day and picked up the first two Dragonball GT DVDs.

For those of you unfamiliar with the series, I'll give you a quick backstory:

Ten years after the end of DBZ, Goku is wished into a little kid by Emperor Pilaf (yes, Pilaf, the little blue loser from Dragonball) with the Black Star Dragonballs. These balls are scattered all over the universe (instead of just scattered all over Earth). Now, Goku, Trunks, and Pan must retrieve the Dragonballs within a year before the Earth explodes (the side effect of the black star balls).

On the way, our Saiyan trio run into a poverty stricken planet, tear down an evil cult, and land on a trap planet and...

Oh yeah, I forgot, FUNimation opted to skip the first 15 episodes and screw all the fans out of some good stuff. The series actually starts at the start of episode 16, where their new robot friend, Giru, shows his true colors and gets our heroes captured by the robot army of Dr. Myuu. But, they at least catch us up by showing about 10 minutes of episode one and about three minutes of episode two.

For those of you who didn't spent weeks downloading the Japanese versions of these episodes (like myself) and were expecting all the sweet action we saw on the American DVDs are royally boned as the people who waited for it won't even notice anything wrong. It's almost like if when you were 16 and your parents promised you a car for Christmas, they got you a rust pile. You feel just a little let down.

Well, as I have probubly scared off most of my readers with my rightful venting, the rest of you are going to be gifted with what is still a pretty good DVD, save for the missing episodes.

The first episode on the DVD (or, as the packaging calls it, "Bonus Introduction To DBGT"), "A Grand Problem", starts off with Goku & Trunks getting captured by the Sigma Force. You will feel out of the loop until Goku says "and to think, all this started with a greedy wish".

This launches us to flashback land, where we are caught up on everything that happened between then and now, while still skipping 13 episodes. The least they could have left in is us seeing the trio get the three Dragonballs up till now, but that is never seen.

The rest of the DVD is the full episodes from Japan (I'm shocked!!), so there isn't anything to gripe about here. I don't want to tell you anything more about the story, because you should at least rent this one and see for yourself. Even though they cut out a lot of stuff, they still at least do it right.

The only real problem with the DVD (besides the mentioned missing episodes) is the theme. We have some rap wannabes just chanting Grand Tour (which is what GT stands for, FYI) and telling us how the story started. Just picture it if the DBZ theme was like this (where the singer would just chant Zero and sing about the Saiyans)

At least the music in the episodes' music is better than the stuff from DBZ, because fans rejoice, they fired Bruce Falconer [insert loud roar of crowd here]. Anything is better than Falconer's techo/rock/noisey as hell cr@p. It still isn't as good as the original Japanese score, but FUNimation won't give their fans that much.

Overall, loyal reader, I would have to give the DVD itself a three out of five for at least being entertaining and still having three mostly uncut episodes (FUNimation still insists on rewriting Akira Toriyama's stories).

As for FUNimation, for giving us a series after cutting out over a sixth of it, they, and all the people responsible for defacing a potentially classic series, I give them one half star and wish to see them all tortured by fans of the shows (Dragonball, Dragonball Z, and now Dragonball GT) for not giving us the real deal, and only giving us a product of less than bootleg quality.

Trust me on this one. You'll thank me later.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for Groups
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older