Which 'Dragon Ball' Wishes Are The Dumbest?

The characters of the Dragon Ball franchise aren't exactly known for deep thinking. It's a show about a series of super-powered fighters smashing their muscles against other super-powered fighters, and that's what makes it beautiful. The good guys are mostly good. The bad guys crave the destruction of planets like it's Ambien after a 38-hour trucking route. They fight. We love it.

However, there's an ancillary premise to this show - that the collection of various, mystical orbs known as Dragon Balls can summon a dragon which will grant the summoner any wish they desire - and, even for characters who don't normally have to think past "I punch your head now," what they wish for is impressively stupid. Seriously, for all the time these characters, both good and evil, spend searching for the Dragon Balls, you'd think they'd have taken at least a moment to game-plan the most effective way to use those wishes. Instead, they just blurt out whatever percolates to the top of their powered up hairdos. Here are 5 of the dumbest wishes made with the Dragon Balls:

Oolong wishes for panties:

True, Oolong, a literal and figurative pig, had to wish on the fly as he was performing a drive-by wish in an attempt to prevent Pilaf from wishing himself as ruler of the world. (Another stupid wish. Rulers can be overthrown. Also, think about all anxiety.) But it's difficult to ignore the fact that Oolong had infinite power at his fingertips and he managed to trade it in for something that could be bought at an H&M checkout aisle. Even if you were going to stick to the pervert lane, surely his fetish runs deeper than a pair of clean underwear, right? At least ask for them used or better yet, a personality that could land you a girlfriend.

Mai Wishes For Ice Cream:

Again we have another instance of wish-as-wish-prevention in the Dragon Ball Super movie Resurrection F as Mai wishes for world-class ice cream in an attempt to stop Sorbet (the character's name. No dessert relation) from using more wishes to do evil stuff. Perhaps, instead of spending so much time looking for Dragon Balls or training their ki, the characters in the Dragon Ball universe would be better served taking improv classes, because if at that moment Mai were quick-thinking enough to wish for "Sorbet to die" or for "world peace" or for "a gun" or just about anything else useful, then she could have prevented a lot of stress for everyone involved.

Garlic Jr. Wishes For Immortality:

The boilerplate wish in Dragon Ball Z is for immortality and considering fights break out in this universe like it's one big parking lot at an Eagles game, it's definitely a useful wish to make. However, in the DBZ film The Dead Zone, Garlic Jr. manages to make himself immortal, only to get his never-dying-ass hauled into "The Dead Zone." He basically stuck in a world of purgatory which makes you question the whole immortality thing altogether. Maybe the bad guys should instead be wishing for infinite power as that is actually what they really seem to be after anyway. Better yet, just wish to be happy or for a damn therapist.

At Least One Of Krillin's Revivals:

The Z fighters are revived throughout the series by the Dragon Balls so often you'd think they were running a life-insurance scam. Krillin, however, dies and is revived a whopping four times. You'd think after the third time he'd say to himself, "you know what, I'm good. How about you guys handle the intergalactic super-being this go-around, and save the wish reviving me on maybe some type of automated defense system for all the times we have to fight intergalactic super-beings."

What makes Krillin's revivals even more egregious is that during the Namekian saga, they need to use two wishes to bring him back the life. The first wish is to bring his soul back to Earth because his soul currently resided on the blown-up planet Namek. Only then could they use the second wish to bring the world's most killable person back into existence.

He's single-handedly keeping funeral services in business in this universe.

Krillin Wishes For Android 18 And 17's Internal Explosives To Be Removed:

Poor Krillin. Not only does he constantly find himself on the wrong end of oblivion, but he also fell in love with a robot. Krillin loves Android 18 but is denied by the wish-granting dragon when he wishes for her to be a real human. (In the wish-granting world this is known as a Pinocchioh-no.) So instead he wishes to remove the kill switch that might cause her to explode and calls it good enough. It is stupid on so many levels, the first being that the androids didn't really face an imminent threat of explosion as their master, with the kill switch, was already dead. Krillin also could have wished to just acquire the ability to diffuse them, effectively saving his robot girlfriend from an accidental detonation and picking up a cool technical skill along the way.

But really what makes this stupid is that this guy's wish essentially goes from "make my girlfriend human" to "screw it, I'm going to bang this robot, provided she doesn't blow up my dick." Dammit, man, I get that sentience is an abstract concept, but at least try one more rewording before resigning yourself to boning a ki-blasting flesh-light for the rest of your life. Ask that Android 18 be given a soul, or, at the very least, that all your friends and family who just witnessed you make this wish think that you successfully made her a human. Because Krillin, even though everyone is telling you that it's not weird, trust me, everyone thinks it's weird.

Conclusion:

There are plenty of other dumb ones. An evil genius named Dr. Kochin wishes to melt the polar ice caps to free his frozen superior (an eviler genius) instead of just wishing that his boss was free or that he himself was as smart and capable as his boss. Characters frequently wish for things like "bring everyone who died today back to life, except for all of the really, really bad ones," which actually isn't too bad a wish, but probably puts a lot of moral calculus in the hands of a mythical dragon deity that spends most of eternity trapped in some balls. You're taking a big gamble on whether Shenron feels good enough about Goku's shitty parenting to not count him among the really, really bad ones. Really any wish in the Dragon Ball canon could be considered a whiff when compared to someone just asking Shenron to keep Earth and all of its inhabitants safe forever. Or, I don't know, two pairs of panties.

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Top Image: Toei Animation