Dragon Ball is one of the most popular anime titles of our time, when ever you look up at message boards where someone starts a topic about which anime should be broadcast on TV again, this title is bound to be mentioned. I myself have no clue why. Watching Dragon Ball is like watching a Steven Segal or a Chuck Norris action flick: an endless array of fights, the main hero always wins. There are no surprises here, everything is predictable, everything is the same... And worst of all, it goes on and on. This show has no common sense to end the story at least in a fair amount of time, to qualify for a guilty pleasure. No. Instead it sets itself to become one of the longest soap operas ever, an epic garbage. Imagine a Sergio Leone epic without Leone's sense for style, measure and weight, and you have Dragon Ball. The first, original season had 153 episodes, the second one, Dragon Ball Z, had 291 (!), and if that weren't enough we have another 64 episodes of Dragon Ball GT, and - I kid you not - another 98 episodes of Dragon Ball Kai. But do not be fooled, folks. This is no Tolstoy, not by a long shot. Sheer quantity over quality can easily become an overkill.

Here on IMDb, Dragon Ball has a rating of 8.6 out of 10, but Segal's movie Out for a Kill has only 3.1 out of 10. Why the discrepancy when both are of equal merit? I have to ask the voters who gave Dragon Ball a 10 (or even a 7) the same question as one of the protagonists posed to writer David in Ingmar Bergman's tragedy Through a Glass Darkly (1961): "What life truths have you done in your work?" The questions seems almost ridiculous for this show: it has no truths about life, not a single one. When you encounter a problem, what are you gonna do, perform a kame-hame-ha? When you have to train, are you seriously gonna copy Son Goku's moves? The experience you take away from this show is nonexistent, it is just some guys fantasy about beating up stronger people around him stemming from his frustration. I enjoy a few humorous moments involving Bulma and Kuririn, and that's why I give it two stars. Other than that, I do not want to waste my time on such a long and bad show that is just one huge wrestlemania (and not a good one, at that, either. Compare this to One Piece, which has much more style, imagination and capability of crafting great fights and showdowns). I know I am gonna get hate mail after this, but I don't care, it is irelevant. I enjoy trash and cheese when I want to relax, but I am never gonna say that trash is something great. If you want to spend over 100 hours of fights to get nowhere, enjoy Dragon Ball. If you really want to grow up and realize there is so much more to life, do yourself a favor and watch some epics that nobody heard of, but are classics of wisdom and intelligence, like Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Evangelion or Steins Gate.