Episode 11 of Dragon Ball GT, first broadcast in Japan on May 8, 1996 and titled Lord Luud's Curse in Funimation's dub, finally takes the heroes to the Para Para Brothers' home planet. Pan gets there first, by accident and with no backup, and pays for her impatience when Cardinal Mutchy Mutchy turns her into a doll. By the time Goku and Trunks catch up, the real enemy reveals itself in a shape nobody saw coming.
Summary
The accidental take-off at the end of the previous episode has a simple explanation: the Para Para Brothers' ship is set to fly itself home. Pan and Giru are dumped on planet Luud after a bumpy landing, and the Dragon Radar points them toward a strange castle where the six-star ball is waiting. Giru is far too scared to go in and flies off. Pan heads inside alone, past rows of creepy statues, until she reaches a temple full of worshippers praying for Luud to awaken.
Meanwhile, Goku and Trunks have squeezed the ship's destination out of the three defeated brothers and land on the planet with them in tow, tied up. Giru finds them and warns them that Pan is in danger. She, in the meantime, has kicked her way past the guards into the main chamber. While Mutchy Mutchy holds forth about Luud, the planet's god of destruction, she snatches the Dragon Ball off the altar, but before she can escape she is hit by a beam and shrinks into a doll.
The Cardinal is about to toss her into a giant cauldron when Goku and Trunks burst in. Furious that the brothers failed to bring back the heroes' other Dragon Ball, Mutchy Mutchy turns them into dolls too and feeds them to Luud. He then sets a giant lion on the two Saiyans, which Goku handles without even trading blows: he blasts the cliff wall and lets a huge boulder drop on the beast. The lion turns out to be a robot, and its explosion takes the Cardinal with it.
It looks like a win, until the whip Mutchy Mutchy was carrying comes alive and turns into a golden creature with stretching arms and an energy level that catches even Goku off guard. The whip was the real threat all along. In the confusion, Giru finds Pan's doll, only to lose it again: it is picked up by a figure still hidden in the shadows, Dolltaki.
Our take
This is the episode where the Luud arc stops joking around and shows its teeth. After the Para Para Brothers' hypnotic dance routine, turning Pan into a doll is a genuinely unsettling idea for a series that had leaned mostly on comedy so far: the main character reduced to an object, silent and helpless, raises the stakes more than any fight could.
Pan remains the engine of the story, for better and for worse. Her stubbornness fits the granddaughter of Goku that GT wants to portray, but this time the script punishes her without mercy, and it is right to. Giru settles further into his role as the cowardly comic sidekick, even though he is the one who raises the alarm.
Goku's answer to the lion is pure early Dragon Ball: no show of power, just a quick look at the terrain and one well-placed shot. The living-whip twist is odd and a little arbitrary, but it keeps the pace up on the road to Luud's awakening.
Trivia
- Written by Masashi Kubota and directed (storyboard) by Kazuhito Kikuchi, with Akira Inagami as animation director and Tsutomu Fujita as art director.
- In the Japanese version the three Para Para Brothers are voiced by Bin Shimada, Yukitoshi Hori and Kazunari Tanaka.
- In Spain the episode is titled "La maldición de Loud", with the god renamed Loud.
- American audiences only saw it on April 2, 2005, paired with episode 12, almost four years after it aired in Italy: Funimation had skipped the first sixteen episodes and brought them back later as "The Lost Episodes".
Characters
- Pan and Giru
- Goku and Trunks
- Cardinal Mutchy Mutchy and his whip
- The Para Para Brothers
- Dolltaki, still in the shadows
- Worshippers and guards of the Luud Cult