Episode 51 of Dragon Ball GT, first broadcast in Japan on July 2, 1997 and titled The Six-Star Dragon in Funimation's dub, is the lightest of the Shadow Dragon arc's opening chapters. Goku and Pan face Oceanus Shenron (Ryū Shinron in Japanese), the six-star dragon, who is worshipped by a fishing village in the guise of the beautiful Princess Oto. Her origin is the most embarrassing of them all, and this time it is Pan who cracks the fight.
Summary
Goku, Pan and Giru reach a fishing village that seems deserted, until an octopus drops out of the sky onto Pan's head. Fish of every kind rain down right after, and the village men rush out to collect the haul. A blond boy, the only skeptic, explains that this miraculous catch has made them lazy: they no longer work and spend their days partying. The local seagulls, meanwhile, are injured and can no longer fly; he carries one with him wherever he goes. The fish, he says, are dropped by Princess Oto, whom the village adores.
When the princess shows up again, Giru detects a Dragon Ball in her direction. Goku sends the villagers running, and she, furious, reveals what she really is: Oceanus Shenron, the dragon who commands the wind. Visibly embarrassed, she admits she was born from the very first wish in the story, the one Oolong made to foil Emperor Pilaf's plan, asking Shenron for a pair of panties. Pan shares her discomfort, while Goku laughs at the memory and makes her angrier.
The princess deflects the Saiyans' blows without blinking, and one of her attacks shreds Goku's clothes, leaving him stark naked. Pan blushes, her grandfather could not care less, and she hands him a change of clothes without a word. That attack, though, shows Goku the secret of the technique: it all depends on the way the dragon spins. Exposed, Oceanus briefly shows her true, monstrous form, warning that no one who has seen it has lived.
Goku tries copying her spin and lands a hit, but a huge gust pins him against a cliff. The boy's seagull flies into the eye of the tornado and distracts her for an instant. Then Pan figures it out: the eye of the vortex is the one unprotected spot. She fires a Kamehameha straight into it, the dragon reverts to her true form, and Goku finishes her off with a full-power blast. The fishermen promise to go back to work, and Pan invites the boy to Mount Paozu to teach him how to fly.
Our take
After two dragons born from "noble" wishes, GT picks the silliest of all, the one that closed the very first Dragon Ball hunt in 1986 with a gag. The arc becomes a journey back through the history of Dragon Ball, wish by wish, and a dragon ashamed of her own origins is a joke that lands.
Underneath the comedy, though, sits the same moral as the whole arc. A village that stops working because food falls from the sky mirrors a group of heroes who spent years solving everything with the Dragon Balls: easy riches come at a price, and here even the seagulls pay it. It is also satisfying that Pan settles the fight, with the first Kamehameha she fires on her own.
Trivia
- Written by Atsushi Maekawa and directed by Takahiro Imamura, with Kazuya Hisada as animation director.
- From this episode, the Japanese ending theme becomes Wands' Sabitsuita Machine Gun de Ima o Uchinukō, used for the rest of the series except the final episode.
- Oolong's wish comes from Dragon Ball Episode 12. Funimation softened it to "comfortable underwear".
- Oceanus is the only Shadow Dragon Goku fights without turning Super Saiyan.
- In the Funimation dub Goku hums the original Dragon Ball theme while cooking the fish, and the dragon's true form was Steve Sanders' last role in the franchise.
Did you know? Oto-hime is the princess of Ryūgū-jō, the dragon palace beneath the sea, in the Japanese folk tale of Urashima Tarō: for a dragon who makes fish rain from the sky, the disguise could hardly be more fitting.
Characters
- Goku, Pan and Giru
- Oceanus Shenron (Princess Oto)
- The village boy and his seagull
- The village fishermen