Did Piccolo Really Say “You'll Laugh at Your Fears When You Find Out Who You Really Are”?

Yes, if you watched Dragon Ball Z in English. Piccolo says "you'll laugh at your fears when you find out who you really are" to Gohan in the seventh episode, as he leaves the four-year-old alone in the wilderness to survive. If you watched it in Japanese, he said nothing of the kind. This is a dub line, and one of the best of them.

The verdict

Real, in the dub only. CBR's ranking of the best-written lines in the English dub puts it first, in episode 7, and states the comparison plainly: the Japanese version only has Piccolo tell Gohan not to leave the area, because outside is more dangerous. The English writers replaced a practical warning with a promise about the boy's nature, and the promise is the line people quote. Wikiquote's transcription of the episode, under its re-dub title "Day 1", does not include the line, which proves nothing either way; the editorial record is what places it.

What the dub changed, and why it worked

The Japanese Piccolo of this scene is a villain keeping a hostage alive: stay here, do not wander, the world beyond this rock will kill you. The English Piccolo is already the mentor he will become, telling a terrified child that his fear is temporary and his strength is real. The dub is, strictly, wrong about the character at this point in the story; Piccolo has not yet learned to care about Gohan, and the line gives him a warmth the script had not earned. But the dub is right about where the story is going, and the sentence became the thing English-speaking fans remember about the training because it is the first time Piccolo sounds like Gohan's father, which the Japanese version delays by many episodes. It is the same move as Goku's hope-of-the-universe speech: the English writers giving a character eloquence the original withheld, and the audience keeping it.

Which dub

CBR places the line in episode 7 under the title "Day 1", the title of Funimation's 2005 re-dub; the 1996 broadcast dub folded episodes 7 and 8 into one episode, "Gohan's Metamorphosis". Dragon Ball Z has several English scripts and they do not all agree, and this page has not confirmed which of them carry the line.

What this site does with it

Dub-only lines are their own verdict category in this database, because they are neither fabricated nor faithful: they were written by a licensed studio, performed by the official cast and broadcast as the show, and they do not exist in the work the show adapts. Piccolo's sourced lines are on his quote page, and the rest of the series is on the series hub.

How we checked

The verification process asks for a primary or editorial source. An editorial source prints the line, gives the episode and describes the Japanese original. The entry in the fact-check database is real, dub only.