#The whole dragon ball z series series#

Toriyama invented power levels as a short-hand for the audience to understand the stakes of a Dragon Ball encounter, but the stats also meant Goku and the other heroes could learn to fool them by suppressing their power levels. Goku’s former rival Piccolo charges up from 408 to 1480 when unleashing his Special Beam Cannon, fatefully and fatally surprising the villain Raditz.

#The whole dragon ball z series series#

Early power levels in the series include a farmer with a gun (5) and our hero Goku without his weighted clothing (416).

They could determine whether a planet’s inhabitants were weak enough to bulldoze or strong enough to require reinforcements. Members of the villain Frieza’s army, a paramilitary for a galactic real estate company, were equipped with augmented reality lenses that would display the power level of the person in their sights. Focused punches could become focused energy blasts.ĭragon Ball’s characters could learn to sense each other’s ki - mostly its strength, valence, and personal flavor - but in Dragon Ball Z, Toriyama introduced a technological complement to the technique in the form of power levels and scouters. High jumps had the potential to evolve into flight. Its depiction resonates with historical qigong techniques, kung fu movies, and Journey to the West, Dragon Ball’s distant source material. In the original Dragon Ball, ki was a mystical energy developed through meditation and training with the world’s masters. The soul of Toriyama’s was once mysterious. Prepare yourself for Polygon’s Who Would Win Week. One eternal question spans all of pop culture: 'Who would win?” That's why we're dedicating an entire week to debates that have shaped comics, movies, TV, and games, for better and worse.

But I severely underestimated the imagination of forum-dwellers. I wanted to come to a greater conclusion. I wanted to understand just how strong Goku and his fellow fighters were based on years of fan-driven mathematical speculation. And now, after mining Dragon Ball Z power-level numbers, it backfires on me. Just as it backfired on MacDougall, it backfired on Toriyama. I do blame Akira Toriyama, though, for introducing this morality play in the pages of Dragon Ball Z in 1988. It’s hard to blame people for being tempted by Promethean power: they learn the error of their ways, one way or another. MacDougall was never able to put any more dying people on his scales, and his experiments were fundamentally flawed, of course, but his dismal nonsense represents an attempt to bridge the gap not only between the quantitative and the qualitative but between the profane and the sacred, between the known and the felt. After millennia of evolution from the pneuma in The Iliad and qi of ancient Chinese humoral medicine, this figure of 21 grams was the first attempt at quantifying the vital force of a human being. But one subject lost 21 grams at the moment of death. In the end, one of the dogs lost weight, and five of the people lost and gained weight in unpredictable ways.

MacDougall hoped to weigh his subjects’ souls as they died, measuring their wasting bodies on precisely calibrated scales. In 1907, a Massachusetts physician named Duncan MacDougall performed several experiments on dying dogs and people. “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and Dragon Ball Z power levels.”