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The Dragonballs
You might think that these might be the focus of the series, seeing as how it bears their name, but it turns out they're just a cheap plot device. It's really about people randomly flying around and beating the crap out of each other.
Dragonballs, in case you don't know, are these little orange things with stars on them. They look sort of like those cheap, air-filled rubber balls they keep in big wire containers at drug stores. There are seven of them, each with a name no self respecting westerner knows or cares about. When all seven are gathered, the eternal dragon is summoned. (By "eternal" they mean "alive as long as that terminally ill old guy." Japanese is weird like that.) The dragon can grant anywhere from one to three wishes, depending on how many the plot demands at that point in time. Sometimes there's a password, but usually it's just the name of the family pet, so it's not much of a problem. ("Porunga." Yeah, great job, Guru.)
Also, dragonballs are created by a race of asexual green people called Nameks. But that's a whole nother story.
Usually, you can tell a characters relative moral worth on what the wish for. Evil characters invariably wish for immortality, omnipotence, or something else along those lines. The good characters wish for something useless.
Example:
Vegeta: Freeza is coming! Quick, tell the dragon to grant me immortality so I can kill him before he destroys us all.
Krillin: No, wait, why don't we wish back that dude you killed really easily? That ought to do it.
Dende: It's on.
I'm surprised Vegeta didn't go Super Saiyan sooner. But back to the subject. You can tell Vegeta is evil because he tries to make a wish that would prevent Freeza from killing him. Had he been more evil, he would have just asked the dragon to lay the smackdown and kill the bastard. (Apparently that's against the rules, though. Yes, there are rules. But none of them make sense, so I'm not even going to try to list them. Which means this whole article is pretty much a waste of space, and anyone not already familiar with the series is about as lost as Jimmy Hoffa by now.)
Anyway, those're the dragon balls. A few quick facts to justify the existence of this:
1. When the creator of the dbs dies, the balls become useless.
2. Any number of people may be wished back to earth on the dragonballs created by Commie. But Namek has lower immigration quotas for the land of the dead, so the Namek dragonballs can only bring back one person per wish. (However, you get three wishes, which sounds suspiciously like some sort of half-ass compromise.)
3. There's about twenty other rules that I can't remember.
4. See #3.
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