Episode 52 of Dragon Ball Z, first broadcast in Japan on June 20, 1990, is the one where the name Frieza makes even a god tremble. Known as The Past and Future in Funimation's 2005 uncut dub (and Stay Away From Frieza in the original Ocean/Saban version), it has King Kai realize who is waiting on Namek and plead with Goku to keep his distance, while Vegeta finally catches Zarbon on his own.
Summary
On King Kai's planet, Yamcha says hello to Goku by resting a hand on the god's shoulder. Goku, en route to Namek and training at thirty times Earth's gravity, explains that Vegeta is there too, along with armored soldiers whose leader is even stronger. King Kai searches with his antennae and confirms the worst: it is Frieza. Visibly shaking, he calls him the fiercest opponent imaginable and makes Goku promise not to go near him. Piccolo cuts in and tells Goku to ignore the warning: gather the Dragon Balls, bring them back, and the four of them will deal with Frieza after some training. King Kai agrees to teach the newcomers only if nobody fights Frieza, and Piccolo promises while thinking the exact opposite.
The first test is to make King Kai laugh. Yamcha and Chiaotzu pass right away; Tien freezes and only gets through with a joke fed to him by Yamcha. Then the hunt for Bubbles begins, and Piccolo grabs the monkey almost instantly, earning an accidental laugh with his deadpan complaint. In space, Goku decides to crank the gravity up to fifty.
On Namek, Krillin and Dende fly toward Grand Elder Guru's house, five hours away. Vegeta, who now senses energy without a scouter, starts tailing them, then veers off when he feels a much bigger power: Zarbon, out searching for villages. The prince announces that he has already killed Dodoria and that, once immortal, he will watch Frieza grovel. Zarbon retorts that Frieza only ever feared the Saiyans as a united race. The fight begins and Vegeta is in control: he swats away the Elegant Blaster, outpaces every kick, and drives Zarbon face-first into the dirt. Krillin seizes the moment and flees with Dende. But Zarbon, still on his knees, starts to chuckle. Vegeta has improved, he says, just not enough.
Our take
This episode does something smart: it builds up Frieza without showing him. We have already seen him kill Namekians with a polite smile, but King Kai's fear lands differently. This is a god who trained Goku and rarely loses his composure, and if he is shaking, the audience understands that the power levels from the Earth battles are about to become a footnote.
The tonal contrast is deliberate. The joke test and the Bubbles chase are anime material, expanded from a single narrator line in the manga, and they also help slow Goku's arrival so it lines up with the story on Namek. They work because of Piccolo, a perfect straight man; his irritation with King Kai's methods is one of the small joys of this stretch.
The Zarbon fight then plays with expectations. Vegeta wins easily, laughs, and the episode freezes him with his opponent's smirk.
Trivia
- Written by Aya Matsui, directed by Mitsuo Hashimoto, with animation supervision by Mitsuo Shindō. Ratings share: 22.6%.
- It adapts chapter 261 from page 3 onward and chapter 262.
- In the manga King Kai believes Piccolo's promise because he has an honest face, and Piccolo thinks the god must have poor eyesight. The exchange is gone from the anime.
- It is the first episode since his introduction in which Gohan never appears.
- In the original Japanese broadcast, half of the next-episode preview was given over to a ticket lottery for Dragon Ball Z: The Tree of Might, released on July 7, 1990.
Did you know? Tien's joke changes from dub to dub: in Japanese it is a pun about what is up your nose, while Funimation's English version turned it into the famous "you can tune a piano, but you can't tuna fish."