This is the "Dragon Ball" teaser poster and any fan of "Dragon Ball" can tell you that it evokes more memories of "The Avengers" remake than "Dragon Ball." Allegedly, that's supposed to be Bulma. I guess her trademark blue hair didn't test well with the focus groups.
Believe it or not, I don't go into these things with an instantly negative attitude, but when the first details I get don't even come close to what the original was, it's hard to stay positive. When my first peek at Optimus Prime in "Transformers" only made me believe that a robot could have an eating disorder, I knew then that it wasn't going to end well. When the first word I heard about the script for "Alien vs. Predator" was that it would take place on present day Earth and focus on a bunch of humans, I knew that a disaster was about to take place. The only time I was ever fooled with when "The Hulk" came out. I should have known something was wrong when the producers talked about the movie being a psychological examination of the character, when all they needed to say was how much federal funding the movie's world would need to recover when they finally get the Hulk to change back into Bruce.
And now, with "Dragon Ball," the first look at the movie is a generic photo of a woman who I wouldn't have been able to identify if she hadn't already been labeled by the website i stole the photo from. I swear, it's like the first photos I saw of "Street Fighter" in that issue of GamePro back in 1994. It's like Jean-Claude Van Damme calling himself "Commander Guile" all over again, so I expect this movie to make Vegeta a wisdom dispensing, traveling photographer from the Australia. I'd rather they didn't make a "Dragon Ball" movie at all and they're not exactly striking while the iron's hot. They stopped showing new Dragon Ball Z episodes in, what? 2002? Really, Fox, you don't have to do this for our benefit. We're not looking forward to this at all.
I can only hope that the movie still manages to closely replicate the so-called storytelling method of having a character pose for an entire episode and have everyone stand around him and talk. Maybe I'm just not savvy enough to understand that this show blazed a new method of building tension or maybe it was a great sociological experiment that allowed the producers to see how little animation could be put into a cartoon and still have people continue to watch, much like "Cartoon Planet's" test pattern episode back in 1996. I've got so little faith in the movie now, that I expect them to keep this aspect of the show and discard the brutal fights that made the show famous to begin with.
"Dragon Ball" will be released in 2009, so they've got a little time left to try to make it stop looking like a sequel to "Double Dragon."
