Episode 67 of Dragon Ball, first broadcast in Japan on June 24, 1987 and known in the English dub as The End of Commander Red, unmasks the man at the top of the Red Ribbon Army. As Goku tears the base apart, Commander Red reveals the wish for which he sent hundreds of men to their deaths: he wants to be taller. That is too much even for his loyal Staff Officer Black, and the Japanese title leaves no doubt about how it ends.
Summary
The army is collapsing under Goku's assault. From his office Red rails at his soldiers for failing to stop a child and blames Black for training them poorly. Colonel Violet, realizing it is over, empties the organization's vault and leaves with the loot as her severance package, strolling right past a security camera: nobody is in a position to stop her anymore. The soldiers flee en masse, and Red orders them to hold their posts.
The commander will neither run nor fight, so he sends Black after Goku. When the boy asks whether he is the boss, Black says no and promises Goku will meet the commander, in pieces. Black holds his own better than expected, but in the end a punch sends him flying out of a window. Red, watching from above, then triggers a trap ceiling that comes crashing down on Goku.
Believing both Goku and Black dead, Red lets his guard down and savors the wish to come. It is not world domination, as he led everyone to believe, but a few extra inches: mocked all his life for his short stature, he wants at last to be tall. Black, who survived, hears every word. Hundreds of men have died for their leader's vanity, and he himself nearly ended up crushed. When Red treats him with contempt once again, Black shoots him dead.
Goku climbs out of the rubble. Black, now master of the army, invites him to join forces and conquer the world with the Dragon Balls, but Goku refuses without a second thought. So Black climbs into a giant Battle Jacket, a combat robot piloted from inside. Meanwhile Yamcha's plane and Violet's escaping helicopter nearly collide in midair. Back at the base the robot overwhelms Goku, knocks him down and aims a lethal weapon at him.
Our take
Red's confession is one of Toriyama's most savage ideas: after nearly forty episodes in which the Red Ribbon Army looks like the ultimate threat, we learn that all the bloodshed served a purely personal hang-up. It is a satire of tin-pot dictators, and it lands because it arrives at the right moment, just as Red's power is already crumbling.
The anime changes the dynamic from the manga. There, Red blurts out his wish in a panic in front of Black, before Goku even reaches the office; here he tries to kill his right-hand man along with the enemy, which gives Black one more reason to snap. The scene gains tension, though it loses some of the original's deadpan comedy.
Black, until now the silent servant, takes his master's place in an instant, and his offer to Goku shows how little he understands the boy. The cliffhanger, with Goku down in front of the robot, is a fitting springboard into the final act.
Trivia
- The episode adapts chapter 95 and the first pages of chapter 96 of Akira Toriyama's manga and drew a 21.8% ratings share in Japan.
- All of Violet's scenes are anime-only: in the manga she neither raids the vault nor crosses paths with Goku's friends.
- In the Japanese version Red also admits he wants to be tall so women will like him, and recalls being teased about his height since grade school. Funimation's dub rewrote the whole exchange between Red and Black.
Did you know? In the original Japanese broadcast, half of the next-episode preview was given over to a ticket giveaway for Sleeping Princess in Devil's Castle, the second Dragon Ball movie, which opened on July 18, 1987.