I remember the Red Ribbon army early on. Android 8 was the goat. Early Dragonball is a really light series and it’s a series that gets better with time. The farther you get into the series, the more interesting it’ll become. It builds in a very one piece type of way without the world coming together in the same way one piece does. It’s a world of relationships instead of connections. As it evolves into Dragonball Z the tone changes quite a bit and it becomes less “light” with much higher stakes. What’s cool about this arc is that it gives context to something big that happens way down the line, but you don’t necessarily need to read this to understand the story way down the line. That kind of information would almost be necessary in a story like One Piece, but not so much in Dragonball.