10 Dragon Ball Z Movies Good Enough To Be Canon
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Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball Z has amassed an impressive legacy that’s still going strong through countless video games and its successful follow-up series, Dragon Ball Super. Feature films have been a running trend throughout the Dragon Ball franchise and Super’s cinematic installments have broken away from the series’ established formula by telling canonical adventures that are set after the anime series’ events. Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z’s many movies, while captivating, are all non-canonical spectacles that introduce exciting characters and powerful obstacles that exist outside the manga’s main narrative.
Dragon Ball Z’s movies work hard to justify their placement in the series’ timeline and there are even characters and villains who return in filler installments of the anime. It’s easy for fans to just write off filler and non-canon content as uneventful and a waste of time. However, there’s still a lot to appreciate in Dragon Ball Z’s movies, many of which may not technically be canon, but are good enough to hold their own against any official Dragon Ball story.
Dead Zone is Dragon Ball Z’s first movie and it’s technically set before Dragon Ball Z’s first episode because Goku and Piccolo are still supposed to be at odds during the movie’s events. Dead Zone is hardly groundbreaking storytelling, but it’s a successful start to Dragon Ball Z movies that go in a very different direction than what was previously explored in Dragon Ball’s movies. Dead Zone features a satisfying cabal of enemies and Garlic Jr., while initially underwhelming, goes on to surpass expectations with his burlier Super Garlic Jr. transformation and his successful acquisition of immortality.
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