Episode 149 of Dragon Ball, first broadcast in Japan on March 15, 1989 and known in the English dub as Dress in Flames, kicks off the original series' final adventure, a five-part story created for the anime. With the tournament behind them, Goku and Chi-Chi head to the Ox-King's castle to get married, only for Fire Mountain to start burning all over again.
Summary
Goku and Chi-Chi ride the Flying Nimbus to Mt. Frypan, where the Ox-King welcomes them with open arms. The giant expected his daughter to come home with tournament stories, not a husband, but it is the best surprise he could have asked for. He blesses the match on the spot and lets his future son-in-law, the grandson of his old training partner Gohan, plow through an entire banquet. Then he leads the couple into the treasure room and shows Chi-Chi her late mother's wedding dress, kept as a family keepsake. The wedding, he announces, will be the grandest the world has ever seen.
The castle fills with decorations, the Ox-King rehearses his speech and Chi-Chi tries to teach Goku how to dance. Suddenly the ground shakes and pillars of fire burst from the earth, ringing the palace. Everyone flees, but the Ox-King runs back for the dress and ends up trapped inside. Goku tries to blow out the blaze with a Kamehameha, then to punch through it on the Nimbus, with no luck. From within, Chi-Chi's father shouts the only answer he knows: the Bansho Fan.
The catch is that the fan no longer exists. Years earlier Master Roshi ruined it and threw it out. So Goku turns to Fortuneteller Baba. The witch, however, is in bed with a cold, and her crystal ball offers only a vague clue: the fan lies to the east, somewhere connected to an octagon. Goku scoops up Chi-Chi and the old woman and sets off.
They reach Octagon Village, Oolong's hometown, populated by pigs who share more than his looks. While Goku scouts around, two locals talk Chi-Chi into a dip in the hot springs, purely so they can peek. The prank backfires on them, but Goku spots something at the bottom of the pool. He pulls the plug, the water drains, and a stone pillar appears, carved with instructions for making the fan. Baba recognizes the diagram at once: she has seen the same drawing at Kame House.
Our take
After an entire saga of tension, the series allows itself a light epilogue, and the mood shifts instantly: no demons, no fate of the world, just a wedding to rescue. It is a sensible choice. Goku agreed to marry Chi-Chi during the tournament, and viewers deserve to see that promise kept before the curtain falls.
The story openly plays with the show's past. The burning mountain, the lost fan, the trip to Roshi's island: these are the same ingredients as episodes 7 and 8, back when Goku was a little boy and Chi-Chi a girl he met by chance. Finding them again on the eve of the wedding closes a circle with real tenderness.
Oolong's village is the comic relief, perhaps a little easy, but true to the spirit of Akira Toriyama's early chapters. The sniffling Baba works better, turning the search into a riddle instead of a simple handover of coordinates.
Trivia
- Anime-original episode: none of the last five episodes of Dragon Ball has a counterpart in the manga. It drew a 16.9% ratings share in Japan.
- Written by Takao Koyama, directed by Daisuke Nishio, with animation direction by Mitsuo Shindō.
- In Japanese, the village is Hakkaku-mura, literally "Octagon Village", and the two peeping pigs are named Jasmine and Un'nan.
- The two pigs have their own voice actors in Japanese, while both English dubs simply had Oolong's actor voice them.
- Goku has his Power Pole on his back in some shots and not in the next.
Did you know? Goku wolfs down a full banquet here even though he ate a Senzu Bean only hours earlier, and the beans are supposed to keep hunger away for days.