Before Dragon Ball. Before Goku. There was Bardock, and he could see the future, and it did not help him at all.
Alyx, Jon, and Sam cover Dragon Ball Z: Bardock – The Father of Goku (1990), the first DBZ TV special and the prequel that fills in the origin of the entire franchise.
Bardock is a low-class Saiyan soldier, scrappy, ruthless, not particularly sentimental about anything, including the newborn son he dismisses as weak before shipping him off to Earth. After his squad destroys the last survivors of a planet called Kanassa, one surviving alien ambushes Bardock and gifts him the power of foresight as a curse. Bardock starts seeing Planet Vegeta explode. He sees Frieza. He sees his own death. He tries to warn the other Saiyans, who laugh at him. He charges Frieza's fleet alone. Frieza uses his Supernova. Everyone already knows how this ends, and the special earns its tragedy entirely from watching Bardock catch up with the audience and accept his place in the Dragon Ball Z timeline, in some of anime’s most impactful dramatic irony as he sees his son as a grown man, facing Frieza on Namek.
We get into why Bardock works so well as a protagonist despite being the opposite of Goku in almost every way, what the special adds to the franchise's mythology, and how the various dubs hold up.
","author_name":"Toonami Absolution"}