Dragon Ball Z-3.9: Imperfect Cell-Discovery (1989)

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General		Extras
Category	Anime	Main Menu Audio & Animation Theatrical Trailer Biographies-Character Trailer-History Of Trunks; Bardock Featurette-Web Promo DVD Credits
Rating
Year Of Production	1989
Running Time	60:59
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Daisuke Nishio
Studio Distributor	Toei Animation Madman Entertainment	Starring	Christopher Sabat Sean Schemmel
Case	DV-4
RPI	$24.95	Music	Shuusuke Kikuchi Chiho Kikuchi Takeshi Ike

    His Name Is Cell (Episode 128): After a brief recap of the previous episode we jump straight back into the battle between Cell and Piccolo. With Cell gaining the upper hand and preparing to drain Piccolo, the army makes a timely arrival. Unfortunately, their puny efforts are thwarted easily by Cell who after dealing with the army sucks one arm of Piccolo dry. Mustering all his strength, Piccolo manages to escape Cell's clutches and draws him into conversation. Cell reveals that he is an android created by Dr. Gero and has come from the future to gain the cells of androids 18 and 19 so he may achieve his perfect state. The episode ends with Piccolo using the conversation time to regenerate his arm.

   Piccolo's Folly (Episode 129): With Piccolo regenerating his arm and the arrival of Krillin and Trunks, Cell decides it is time for a tactical retreat. Searching for androids 17 and 18, Cell is distracted by a bus of footballers. While stopping to suck the footballers dry he is interrupted by the sight of Vegeta flying towards Piccolo. After finishing his meal, Cell leaves for the nearest city in search of the androids. Vegeta is astonished at the amount of power Piccolo has. When he discovers that Piccolo is now a Super Namek and more powerful than him as a Super Saiyan he becomes jealous. The episode ends with Cell continuing his search for androids 17 and 18.

    Laboratory Basement (Episode 130): Piccolo continues to explain about Cell and his current weakness. Vegeta claims he can defeat Cell by himself and flies off to train in an attempt to surpass his current level as a Super Saiyan. Trunks and Krillin leave to destroy Dr Gero's laboratory while Piccolo, accompanied by Tien, is left to deal with Cell. Meanwhile, Goku (who has been absent from this disc apart from a few scenes where he is bed-ridden) is starting to recover. Trunks and Krillin have entered Dr Gero's lab and Krillin is keen to destroy it. Trunks tells him to wait and has a quick look around, discovering the plans for android 17. Trunks and Krillin then proceed to destroy the lab. Trunks leaves the plans to Krillin and departs to train with Vegeta. Piccolo and Tien come across the remains of the football players. While they are investigating, they detect Cell's power and leave for his location. Unfortunately, by the time they arrive Cell has left. The episode ends with androids 17 and 18 descending on Goku and the Kame house.

Video

    The overall transfer was very satisfactory considering the age and damage to the animation cells. Playing the DVD back in slow motion or viewing individual frames reveals lots of scratches on the animation cells. Fortunately these are mostly transparent and not at all noticeable when viewing at normal speed. There are, however, numerous black scratches throughout the disc.

    The sharpness was generally good with only occasional soft or grainy shots. One noticeable example occurs at 28:43.

    Aliasing was a problem, occurring on numerous pans throughout the disc. This was generally not a distraction except when occurring on large objects such as the car at 1:34 and the bus at 33:17.

    Edge Enhancement was unfortunately present in varying degrees from mild to quite distracting on a 68cm display device. In my opinion this is unforgivable on animation as the black borders around objects generally  negate any need to sharpen the image.

    The colours were good if a little subdued. Shadow detail is not an issue with animation. However, I would have liked more definition in the darker areas of the animation and the colours to have been a little more vivid. Note this is not a problem with the DVD but how the original cells were animated.

    There was no telecine wobble but the image shook in the vertical direction at 30:43. I do not know what caused this. Perhaps the original animation cells didn't quite match up between successive frames. In any case, it was quite distracting.

    The disc was MPEG artefact free.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    There is only one soundtrack on this disc, that being an English Dolby Digital 2.0 effort.

    The English dialogue was recorded much more recently than the original animation cells and is easily understandable. The dialogue appears to be exclusively mono, emanating from the centre of the front sound stage except for one instance at 17:06 where the dialogue was panned. Unfortunately, this pan across the front soundstage did not coincide with the movement of the character.

    The sound effects were also mono and emanated from the centre of the front sound stage. This was disappointing as there were numerous fight scenes that would have benefited from some directional effects. Furthermore, bass presence was pretty much non-existent for any explosions.

    The music soundtrack on the other hand was definitely stereo and the synthesisers generated some deepish bass notes. My only complaint about the music is that it becomes repetitive fairly quickly. However, in a TV series that is now over 500 episodes in length, we can't expect a new music soundtrack for each episode.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

Trailer-Imperfect Cell (0:50)

Biographies-Character (4)

Trailer-History Of Trunks (1:07)

Trailer-Bardock: The Father Of Goku (1:21)

Featurette-Web Promo (:14)

    As always the R1 disc is blessed with the original language track, making it the version of choice. I can only hope that some day these discs will be re-released with Japanese audio.

    Dragonball Z 3.9 is a pretty bare bones DVD. You get 60 minutes of story time in which a reasonable amount is done to develop the story. However, with such a short feature run time a few more extras than are offered would make the disc more desirable.

    Given the age and quality of the animation cells the video transfer is very good except for the unforgivable use of edge enhancement.

    The audio does its job adequately, however the lack of stereo sound effects is disappointing.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall