Dragon Ball Z Stats!

Shocked Reactions

Dragon Ball Z is known for reaction shot cutaways. Some of the episodes are downright ridiculous due to the fact that there are as many as a dozen main characters watching the action and each one responds with surprise when something happens.

My initial goal was to count all the cutaways, but it turns out there are a lot of surprised reactions that are not cut aways, so I counted all shocked reactions. There were a number of challenges I had to work out:

What's the difference between a shocked reaction and being terrified?

Mainly context and characters involved. People with less facial expressions got counted less.

How do I count large crowds?

Very slowly.

What happens if someone's shocked reaction is cut to multiple times?

Depends on if it felt like he should be shocked again or not.

What happens if halfway through an episode I realize I'm continuing my count from the last episode?

I realize there's more to life that this silly project and I move on. :)

Energy Attacks

There's a lot of energy attacks that take place in the show, and I did my best to count each one. It was a little more difficult to be consistent with the energy attacks because it was hard to know if you were seeing the same attacks when you cut back and forth between camera angles.

Did you count every individual energy blasts?

No. For rapid fire attacks I often counted it as one attack, partly because it was easier, and partly because it was basically a single stream of energy at time.

You should really go back and fix that.

Be my guest. :)

Craters Created

With all the fighting and explosions there are a lot of man-made craters. I counted as many as I could. I counted explicit craters, as opposed to implied craters. I also only counted craters that were seen being made. If a crater was made, but not shown until a later episode, it usually didn't get counted.

What qualified as a crater?

Any indentation in the ground, usually in a circle pattern. Occasionally a track made by feet or a sliding body were counted as craters.

Celestial Bodies Destroyed

I didn't realize so many moons and planets were destroyed in this children's comedy show. Although, I suppose it could have been worse.

Civilians Killed

A lot of people die in this show. A lot. Ultimately, it dosen't really matter because they just wish everyone back to life, but still. There's a lot of innocent people getting slaughtered. I only counted any deaths I saw on screen, unless I was given an actual number to work with. One city was listed as having a population of 15,000. For the people Buu kills, I counted as well as I could, and calculated 1/5th of the world's population to be ~1 billion, since the estimated world population in 1996 was 5 billion people.

Cities Demolished

Since counting the number of dead individuals was not as feasible as I had originally hoped, I settled for cities that got destroyed. Again, only cities that I saw destroyed were counted. Similarly, if the military got involved I usually tallied up their losses as a single city.

Shots of Feet Landing

The DBZ team had a number of "go to" shots, one of which was seeing a character's feet landing on the ground. I decided to see how over used this was, though it turned out not to be that bad. This one was hard to remember to track at time.

Pan Up Character Reveal

It seems like a new character enters the show they are revealed with pan up shot, starting at their feed. Again, this wasn't as impressive as I originally anticipated, but I did my best to track the number of times this happened.

"Impossible!"

I didn't start tracking this until Episode 115, but the characters in this show have a hard time believing things, which is odd, seeing how much crazy stuff happens. I only tracked the word "impossible" but if I were to do it again I would probably include variations of "That's not possible!", "This can't be!", and "I don't believe it!".