Oh dear god no. DO NOT WANT.

You know, the first time I caught a whiff of news concerning a Hollywood production based on Dragonball - yes, the anime that molded a big part of our childhood - I automatically dismissed it as a joke of sorts, without even trying to verify the news. It's nothing. Pigs will fly, et al. Right? Right?

Right?

A few weeks later - right now - I realized that ignoring it was a big mistake, leaving me very much open to the painful fact that yes, Hollywood will rape our childhood.

Mine, at least, the childhood when I bought sheets and sheets of Dragonball Z teks and carefully cut them along the perforations, then stacking them reverently into my stash, the cards waiting to be showed off and traded with most of my classmates. The naive era when I made wallpapers out of several Dragonball posters, with some of them stuck to my ceiling simply because there wasn't any room left on the walls. When it became a religious habit of mine to tune in to Channel 9 every Sunday (6 pm, I think?) to watch the damn show even though I knew that it was yet ANOTHER re-run.

A Hollywood adaptation of Godzilla is okay - that's pretty much a given, since you can just remove the huge retarded ape and put a man in a huge dino suit in its place and the movie will still turn out to be fine. Hollywood ripoffs adaptations of Asian horror movies are also fine, since we all know how most US horror flicks turn out to be uninspired or stale, and the studios need to make some money off some Asian writers and movie makers.

But Dragonball? Jesus. It didn't even register in my head, not even once, that Hollywood has the gall to take something sacred, throw it onto the ground, and let a dozen or so crazed fanboys to splash it with their collective semen. They didn't even have the decency to cast a Japanese or an Asian actor for the main protagonist, who happens to be...yes, Goku. Justin Chatwin? But who am I kidding? We're talking about a Hollywood movie. It just has to be all about a white guy, like Forbidden Kingdom, yeah?

I'm looking at the IMDb entry for the Dragonball movie right now, and my mind is still rejecting the fact that yes, the Dragonball flick is real, dammit, and will be as real as the fact that my neighbor loves to clip his fingernails every morning outside their house, the annoying clip-clip-clip sound his way of greeting me "Good Morning" as I go out to work.

But you say, it's IMD-frigging-b! That's the same stupid website that also lists the Metal Gear Solid movie as an actual project that's currently in production! I know, and I'm taking refuge in that thought. But with the moderate amount of hype surrounding this abomination, I'd say that there will be at least one thing that's going to make me dread the coming of year 2009.