Have you ever had a favorite restaurant that made it big, and you regretted it? That pizza place you loved that decided to franchise, but the secret ingredients got lost in translation. The fried chicken place that showed up everywhere, but they couldn’t keep up the quality. You know what gets you? All the people who never knew the original restaurant that thought the knockoff was amazing. You feel sorry for all those people.

I think every preteen boy in the late 90s and early 2000s were like those people who only knew the knockoff, because every preteen boy would come home, park himself in front of the television, and watch Dragon Ball Z. I know because I was one of them. We thought it was amazing. The never ending fights. The storytelling. The long, awkward yelling and so-so animation.

And to think, we were getting the knockoff version. Before Dragon Ball Z, there was the original series we never saw until years later. I didn’t watch the original Dragon Balls until I was an adult in my 30s. The original Dragon Ball was a better show, and I would argue it’s for one reason: power levels.

Power levels were introduced in the first episode of the first season of Dragon Ball Z. An alien named Raditz crash lands on Earth with a device that rates the fighting ability of various fighters. It finds that Goku, our hero, and Piccolo, his old rival, both have power levels in the 300s, while Raditz has a power level 1500. However, Goku’s and Piccolo’s power increases when they concentrate it. Instant tension. As a kid, I thought that was amazing.

This was before I started writing and someone quoted me the phrase “Show don’t, tell.” Yes, we dumb kids felt instant tension, because they told us to. The original series had to show us Goku struggling against the Red Ribbon Army or King Piccolo. This successor show could just have a character read off some numbers to tell us “this is how much more powerful the villain is compared to the hero.” And what that did to the series was just absurd.

It begins with Raditz. with a power level of 1500. The next big baddie is Nappa with a power level of 4000 (I’m getting these from a web site, it may not be completely accurate.) So Nappa must be exactly 2 and 2/3rds as powerful as Raditz. Then comes Vegeta with a power level of 18,000. So Vegeta is 4 and 1/2 as powerful as Nappa. Each fight downgrades the last one.

Then it gets really absurd. Frieza, in his final form (because he has four, you know), has a power level of over one million. So, basically, the fight that Goku and Vegeta had last season was basically nothing you know. Then Cell has a power level of 20 million. And none of these fights really get more impressive than the last when you look at it. Trust us, say the writers, it’s more epic. We just have no visual way to prove that.

Side note. One of the problems with this is that at a relatively low level, Vegeta destroys a planet without really trying. It was a planet with bug people, and after overthrowing the emperor, Vegeta just blows it up witout even having to break a sweat. Frieza does the same at the one million power level by just throwing some energy down into the ground. This begs the question: how the hell do the Z fighters and their nemeses not destroy the planet accidentally, while fighting? No, really, if Vegeta can casually destroy a planet at power level 18,000 by just pointing a laser beam at the planet from afar, doesn’t Goku or even Krillin or Gohan have to worry about blowing up the Earth whenever they shoot a laser beam of moderate power and miss?

But back to the subject at hand, I just find the fights in the original series to be better without the power levels. I don’t need to know that King Piccolo has a power level 200 compared to Goku’s power level of 180. I need you to show me Goku getting his ass handed to him, which in the original series is exactly what they did.

What I really don’t need you to do is tell me that King Piccolo is really kind of a pushover compared to this Raditz guy who is seven times as strong, and then further dilute that by introducing people who are twelve times, 100 times, 500 times as strong, etc. to the point where the comparisons get silly. By the time the show gets to Namek, the world Piccolo was originally from (or that his double was from, it’s complicated), you get the idea King Piccolo actually wasn’t that much stronger than the average Namekian, and even might have been pretty weak. The series never gives a power level to King Piccolo during the show, but given how much more powerful Frieza’s gang must be by pure power level, there’s really no other conclusion you can draw because some Namekians appear to put up a little resistance.

The writers start having to make ridiculous leaps to keep our characters up with these ludicrous numbers. Gohan becomes a Super Saiyan at, what, age 10? Humans practically have no role in the defense of their own planet as even the strongest humans like Tien, Krillin, and Yamcha, have no way to keep up the absurd power levels of the alien and android characters. When Garlic Jr. comes back after the Frieza saga, his minions have received a bump in power levels with literally no explanation as to how they could have increased enough to keep up with the Z Fighters while Garlic is locked away in the Dead Zone. Objectively, the power levels just make Dragon Ball Z absurd.

You might argue that humans flying and throwing power beams at each other was absurd to begin with. Yes, but within its own world, the original Dragon Balls at least made sense. Z, however, has to really stretch things to create internal consistency. All because they decided to add this strange plot device to add momentary tension in the first episode. It would have been better if those stupid little visors never existed.