What I've always been wishing for is a Dragon Ball remake that starts at the beginning and gets us all the way to the beginning of Dragon Ball Kai, thus finally covering the entire Dragon Ball manga with modern animation/quality/canonness. However, that isn't what we got today. What we got instead is something almost equally as welcome -- a replacement for Dragon Ball GT.
GT was a great idea. What happens to everyone, especially the kids, after the series ends? It even had a good start, with Yuko Minaguchi playing a lovely young Pan. But then everything went horribly wrong. Instead of reasonable opponents like Frieza or Cell, all of the villains were stupid looking, stupid acting, and stupid rehashes of stuff we've already seen before. The heroes were strangely weaker than they used to be, instead of stronger like you would expect. The fights didn't feel epic at all. Worst of all, there were endless stupid eps like where Trunks crossdresses in order to trick a dinosaur into letting him into his cave, when Goku's the strongest being in the universe and should have just beaten the dinosaur up immediately. Just look at some sample episode descriptions from GT:
'Son Goku the Dentist'
'Trunks the Bride'
'Whisker Power'
'Dance Attack'
'The Resurrection of Cell and Frieza'
'Super 17'
Rehashes and lame joke episodes from start to finish. Baby taking over Z fighters and fighting with their strength is the exact same plot as Buu. It should never have existed. GT was just full of bad, weak ideas from start to finish.
This time, Dragon Ball Super is being supervised by Akira Toriyama. The overall script for the story is by Toriyama. The same nonsense mistakes won't happen again. We'll be getting genuine Dragon Ball from the genuine, high quality source. In fact, judging by how good the movies have been, Dragon Ball Super may be better than the average episode of Dragon Ball, instead of infinitely worse like GT managed.
A replacement for GT is probably worth even more than a remake of the original Dragon Ball. But I'm still leaving the Dragon Ball ranking at 8th, because until we get a remake of the original Dragon Ball, the story seriously makes no sense for those who start at the first episode of Kai. There are all these characters, none of whom have ever been introduced before, just flying around like old friends like it's totally natural. And if you start at the beginning of Dragon Ball, the art is so bad, the plot so dragged out with nonsense filler inclusions, that you'll end up hating yourself rather than liking the series. Perhaps the interest shown in Dragon Ball Super will be enough to convince them that a remake of Dragon Ball would be worthwhile, in which case there's still hope that this show can get better. But just replacing GT isn't enough to get this series to where it really belongs. Like Bleach, Dragon Ball will always fall short of its potential.
Dragon Ball Super starts this July, presumably right after the last episode of Kai. This just makes the summer anime season that much better, as if it needed any more hype than it already had.
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