Dragon Ball Z: Super Android 13! (1992)

The seventh Dragon Ball Z feature arrives from the summer of 1992 with the serenity of a franchise that long ago stopped asking questions of itself. Dr. Gero, murdered by his own creations, has copied his consciousness into an underground supercomputer, which activates three new androids and points them at a shopping mall. Goku is eating lunch. The androids want him dead. That is the plot, complete and sufficient, and the film treats it with a straight face.

For those of us who tabulate cultural instruction, the ledger here is startlingly clean. Chi-Chi appears, occupies a domestic frame, and vanishes without complaint. Master Roshi leers and receives no lecture. The single scrap of moral guidance comes when Goku asks his attackers to move the fight out of the city so that bystanders are not crushed, which is less a sermon than a matter of urban planning. Nobody in the film is corrected, educated, or improved by the narrative. The villain is a revenge-driven machine, not a system, and the resolution is a fist through the abdomen.

The craft is workmanlike. The animation does what a mid-tier Toei production of the era did, and the dubbing history (three English versions, one produced in Malaysia with a cast no one can name) suggests a long afterlife in living rooms. What lingers is the closing image: Piccolo and Vegeta on an iceberg, apart from the celebration, two proud men declining the group hug. It is the only moment of real interiority in the picture, and it lasts perhaps eight seconds. A clean specimen. Nothing to flag, nothing to confiscate.