Thread by @Herms98

May 8th, 750: Goku is looking for the dragon balls (well, one particular dragon ball). So is the Red Ribbon Army. Result: trouble. After taking down Silver Platoon, Goku moves on to Muscle Tower, where he meets Gero’s eighth foray into the field of androidry. #HistoryofEver

Sno’s prayers apparently do the trick, because Goku Prime lucks out of fighting No.8. Over in anniversary movie world though, a young Goku Xeno gets his ass handed to him before 8’s gentle nature kicks in:

Just as Newton and Leibniz are both credited with the invention of calculus, so too are there competing claims over Eighter’s origins:

While Toriyama did supply certain ideas for the anime filler, it’s unknown if Dr. Frappe was one of his ideas, or if it’s purely the anime staff’s fault. No.8’s bio in Daizenshuu 7 suggests that perhaps No.8 was a Gero/Frappe coproduction.

Obviously Gero himself is a no-show during the Red Ribbon arc, not yet a gleam in Toriyama’s eye. But the official parody manga DB SD shows White complain to Gero about his failed creation. Gero vows to make some sexy androids next time, but White thinks he’ll screw those up too

No.8 of course bears a striking resemblance to the Bride of Frankenstein’s husband, and in the anime General White claims the RR resurrected him after he died, in a very Frankenstein-y way.

In keeping with this, Daizenshuu 4 (and 7 above) describe him as human-based ala 17 and 18, placing them all into the “biotechnological type” category of androids

In the film Path to Power though, No.8 gets torn apart, and looks fully mechanical so far as can be seen.

Later in his Full Color manga Q&A, Toriyama stated that androids 1-8 were all purely artificial like 19, as were 9-12 for that matter. kanzenshuu.com/translations/d…

I suppose I’ve got to stop putting this off: in the manga, after Oolong’s wish Bulma says the dragon balls will stay inactive for “at least a year”. Then Goku goes to Roshi’s, trains 8 months, goes to the tournament, then goes DB-hunting again. Are we missing 4 months, or what?

According to Pilaf in DB ep.30 (during the filler that starts the RR arc), it’s been 1 year and 15 days since his last attempt with the dragon balls. So going by that, there has been an extra 4 months somewhere, either before or after Goku starts his training.

Either one is an awkward fit. The series doesn’t specify how long it takes Goku to reach Roshi’s after leaving Bulma and co., but 4 months seems like a real stretch. After all, it took him and Chi-Chi no time at all to get there via magic cloud.

Maybe Goku wandered aimlessly offscreen for 4 months between the end of the tournament and the start of the RR arc, just waiting for the balls to show up on his Dragon Radar, but in that case you’d think he’d just go straight to Bulma for help, as he does after Jingle Village

Complicating things even more: Silver’s men say they’ve already been searching for the dragon ball for 20 days, meaning presumably the balls have been registering on the RR’s radar for at least that long.

The Daizenshuu 7 timeline just goes with a plain and simple 8 months gap, from September 749 to May 750. Maybe the balls revive when the calendar year turns over? Maybe their batteries recharge faster after so simple a wish as producing panties? Who knows?

(If you do want to go with a full year gap, then if the tournament’s in May, obviously that would put the original DB hunt back in May of the previous year, which also probably fits Bulma’s talk of being on summer vacation better than a September date)

I don’t even have time to delve into the massive amount of filler that starts off the RR arc in the anime, which probably makes hay of the timeline. As far as the Daizenshuu is concerned, Goku takes out Muscle Tower the day after the TB, and I’ll stick to that for convenience.

Tomorrow: when worlds collide!

Thanks as usual to @Terez27 for the clips and additional screenshots