Dragon Ball Z is infamous for long fights, to the extent that it's one of the primary reasons people claim not to like the series. Indeed, it's hard to dispute that, at least in anime form, Dragon Ball Z fights can be extremely long. One fight in particular, however, stands above the rest. Goku's battle with the ruthless tyrant Frieza spans from Episodes 87 to 105, for a whopping total of 18 episodes. This confrontation immediately follows another 10 episodes of Frieza fighting Gohan, Krillin, Piccolo, and Vegeta.
The way Goku and Frieza's fight drags on is contrasted directly by the oft-repeated implication that a significant chunk of it takes place over the course of minutes, not hours. After firing a massive energy blast into the core of Planet Namek, Frieza repeatedly asserts to Goku that the planet will explode in 5 minutes. That blast is fired in Episode 97, but it takes another 9 episodes for the planet to explode in Episode 106. Obviously 9 episodes covers a lot more than 5 minutes, so Frieza's measurements of time seem flawed. This has led to both jokes and speculation from the fanbase about why the fight seems to take so long if it's only been 5 minutes. One user on Reddit called Newgrewshew has a particularly interesting theory.
Dragon Ball and Time Dilation
Newgrewshew's theory is actually quite simple. They come to the conclusion that Goku and Frieza's fight was so fast that it is deliberately slowed down for the audience. Newgrewshew cited Goku's older brother Raditz, a relatively weak Saiyan with a power level of around 1100, as being able to catch a bullet. Goku and Frieza's power levels at the point of their confrontation are solidly in the millions. If someone with a tiny fraction of their power is fast enough to catch a bullet, the theory seems to be that Goku and Frieza are actually moving much faster than that.
The idea that battles are being slowed down is further expanded on in other moments throughout the series. When Krillin fought a disguised Master Roshi in the 21st World Martial Arts Tournament, the announcer asked them to explain a series of attacks which had occurred so quickly that it seemed as if Krillin had been knocked down by nothing. Later on, Gohan struggles to adjust his eyes to the speed of Yamcha's fight with a Saibaman. At this point it is revealed that a fighter must train their sense of perception to see fights which otherwise occur faster than the human eye can follow. At the end of the day, this is a neat theory which fits nicely into Dragon Ball's lore, but there are also more practical reasons as to why Goku and Frieza's fight is as long as it is.
Why Dragon Ball Z Fights Seem So Long
Dragon Ball Z's reputation for long fights is more a problem for the anime than the manga. Goku and Frieza's fight in the manga starts about halfway Volume 10 and ends early Volume 12. To be fair, that's still over 200 pages, but a quick reader could easily get past the fight in about an hour. By contrast, it takes over 6 hours to watch the fight in anime form. There are multiple reasons for this, some having to do with production and others relating to the inherent differences in anime and manga. The fact that anime is, well, animated, and that dialogue is spoken rather than read automatically makes it longer. But even that doesn't fully explain the sheer amount of padding that occurs in Dragon Ball Z's fights.
Akira Toriyama was still writing and drawing the series in manga form when most of Dragon Ball Z aired in Japan, and he wasn't very far ahead. For example, episode 87, when Goku and Frieza's fight begins, aired on April 24th, 1991 in Japan. Three days later, Chapter 323 of Dragon Ball was released in Weekly Shonen Jump (Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z were a single manga in Japan while they were separated in their western release). Goku has not yet defeated Frieza in same chapter, though the fight is nearing its conclusion. In simpler terms, Goku and Frieza's fight in the anime began airing before Toriyama had even finished drawing it in the manga.
When an anime bites on the heels of its source material like that, studios face two choices: pad the hell out of the anime with filler and dialogue, or take a hiatus until the manga is comfortably ahead. Almost no studio took the latter route in the 1990s, and thus Goku and Frieza's anime fight is slowed by long speeches and two anime-exclusive diversions from the fight. These include Tien, Chiaotzu and Yamcha fighting the Ginyu Force on King Kai's planet, and Captain Ginyu, who is alive but trapped in a frog's body, temporarily switching bodies with Bulma. While the problems with filler and length are most apparent in Goku's fight against Frieza due to it being the longest in the series (and in anime until Luffy fought Charlotte Katakuri in One Piece), these problems never really went away for Dragon Ball Z. Part of this is because of its closeness in time to the manga, but there's another important reason, and it's perhaps the simplest one of all: money.
Fights are by far the most expensive and time-consuming part of an anime to produce, and thus nearly all shonen anime have a similar-if-diminished problem with fights seeming longer than they need to be. In order to meet production times, fighting is often accompanied by excessive dialogue, which requires much less effort to animate. Overall, this is a lesson in the difficult process of converting a manga into an anime, and perhaps a subtle degree of vindication for manga purists. Dragon Ball Z's fights seem long and drawn out not because Akira Toriyama wrote it that way, but because Toei Animation chose to adapt it as such.
Source: Reddit