The Perfect Cell theme kicks like a shotgun.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=jpkeAQG6kQw
I’m gonna sperg about this theme and this character, because I think it’s absolutely fucking amazing and is easily Falconer’s best work for DBZ. It has this slow and tense build up in the first 19-20 seconds followed by the whining of the synthetics mixed with the drum beats and guitar is still one of the coldest villain themes ever. The way Cell has been consistently charbroiled in terms of character is that he loves games, fun chemistry between others, challenges, and spectacle above all else. He got it from Frieza and Vegeta, and got the lust for a good fight from Goku.
While most villains fail to reach their goal, he meets his very quickly, and then afterwords is bored. He’s not here to conquer a planet. He’s not here to destroy a world exactly. He’s not even here to exact some plan to erase mortal kind.
He just wanted the smoke. He wanted to have fun in the most sadistic way imaginable, because he wanted to just. Try something new. If the Z fighters weren’t on earth, he would have blown up the planet ON A WHIM, and moved on, and that’s really cool to me. He has is own wants and needs, and if he doesn’t have any, he finds one, he makes arbitrary shit like the Cell Games for that reason. He’s a proactive nearly unstoppable force.
I think that this is a little bit of a stretch for some people, but I think Cell invokes such a cosmic horror aspect that people don’t tend to touch on and I find that really weird. He’s a bipedal monster vaguely human, only built and born by splicing the strongest beings in the universe from scratch, incubating and awakening in a world long dead, traveling back into time to hunt down and absorb the final pieces to make him whole, and reign over all of existence. He’s the absolute worse of everyone you ever knew, because he quite literally is everyone you ever did and didn’t. And he’s the only evidence anything ever lived at all, and that’s horrible.
There’s not really a reason besides his initial programming that started this thought process. Cell just. Is. He does things to do things, he has nothing to care for besides his own wants and needs. He invokes with terrible awful feeling, especially early on, that your existence before him is meaningless and your only use in this world is sustenance. And then later, he invokes hopelessness with his power. He appeared from nothing, revived from near nothing, and the only thing that beat him was the last hope and optimism of the world that was Gohan, and they weren’t even sure if it’d work. If 16 wasn’t there, they’d have all died. It’s by sheer chance they lived that day against him.
He invokes a more small scale version in my personal opinion of what Galactus and Unicron from Marvel and Transformers respectively do really well too. I think that making him more human looking was a mistake, but it’s iconic.
Maybe I’m reading too deep into cell. After all, the way he evolved is more of an effect of editor meddling then any long term planning, but I just find it intriguing and why Cell I find much more interesting then most other villains in the series.
