Dragon Ball Z Fans Return to Series' Strangest Censorship

Anime fans live in something of a golden age at the moment in comparison to viewers in the past. Anime is now easily available via multiple streaming services and for the most part, the majority of franchises won't be censored for audiences. However, when anime was first making its way to North America, many series found themselves having some downright bizarre edits. While series such as One Piece and Sailor Moon ran into their fair share of edits, there was perhaps no bigger example of anime that was censored than Dragon Ball Z.

Dragon Ball Z, when it first was brought to North America by Funimation, was presented to a Saturday morning audience, with some strange edits to make it more presentable to younger viewers. Not only were things like blood and nudity censored, but the very concept of death was stricken from the series. Characters wouldn't meet the grim reaper but would instead be transported to "another dimension", "Hell" was changed to "HFIL" which stood for "Home For Infinite Losers", and various other unique edits. One of the strangest was in the third film in Dragon Ball Z history, Tree of Might, in which a change was made when it came to Turles prying open the eyes of Son Gohan.

Tree of What?

For whatever reason, censors decided that Turles using his fingers to keep Gohan's eyes open to look at an artificial moon would be too extreme for audiences, removing his fingers from the scene. What viewers received originally was an image of Gohan holding quite the strange face as he peered at the moon and was transformed into an Oozaru. Needless to say, edits like this are a thing of the past thanks in part to the Dragon Ball franchise hitting Toonami and Crunchyroll.

Wtf is this 💀 gohan be looking like the actual villain here.
by u/yomoshissg in dbz

Turles, for those who need a refresher, never made an appearance in the main Dragon Ball storyline, subjugated to his original appearance as well as ancillary material such as Super Dragon Ball Heroes. Despite being the spitting image of Son Goku, anime fans were never given more details on his origin and why he was a dark double to the shonen hero. With Broly making the leap from the movies to the main storyline, perhaps we might see Turles do the same.

What do you think the most bizarre Dragon Ball censorship is to this day? Do you want to see Turles be introduced in the main canon? Feel free to let us know in the comments or hit me up directly on Twitter @EVComedy to talk all things comics, anime, and the world of the Z-Fighters.