Dragon Ball uses Curb-Stomp Battles to underscore the Sorting Algorithm of Evil prominent in the manga. If a fighter is stronger than our protagonist, then their battle with the new enemy is displayed with them getting badly beaten by the said enemy, for example.
- Frieza's second appearance during Dragon Ball Z. After surviving Namek's destruction and having been put together again as a cyborg, he arrives to Earth with his equally badass father, and the good guys are trembling before his might. What happens next? A Super Saiyan from the future appears and obliterates them both.
- Said Kid from the Future eventually ends up returning to his own time after intense training, where he proceeds to kill Androids 17 and 18 and Cell in one episode without breaking a sweat. These androids had previously been completely unstoppable, killing all of the other heroes and nearly collapsing civilization. And Trunks basically paid them back by doing the same to them.
- Most of Goku's Big Damn Hero/Look What I Can Do Now! moments in the series are like this, most notably when he came back from the dead to pummel Nappa after he killed Piccolo and nearly killed Krillin and Gohan, and later when he showed up and beat Recoome in a single blow after Recoome had hammered Vegeta, Gohan, and Krillin for the last three episodes.
- Vegito (the fused form of Goku and Vegeta) versus Buu after having absorbed a powered-up Gohan, Piccolo, Trunks and Goten definitely counts. A fight between the two most powerful characters in the entire Dragon Ball canon...and the former makes the latter look like a total pansy even in his base form.
- Taken to ludicrous degrees in GT's Baby arc — where Kid Goku (untransformed and at a third his normal size and strength) takes down Gohan and Goten (both at SSJ, possessed by Baby and actively trying to kill him) without breaking a sweat.
- The Super 17 Saga was even WORSE. It featured nearly every villain the characters had ever faced, and all of them were killed in one hit. The story justifies this by showing that only heroic warriors are allowed to train in the afterlife, essentially going to Valhalla. The villains are stuck right where they were when they died. Every time a villain acts out in Hell, the guys upstairs send a more powerful hero down to defeat and imprison them.
- Vegeta also gets plenty of these:
- He mercilessly killed Cui, Dodoria, Zarbon and Jeice on Namek.
- He so horribly outclasses Pui Pui that he doesn't even bother playing around with him. Put this way: Pui Pui tries to get the advantage by magicking the fight to his homeworld which is 10 times Earth's normal gravity; Vegeta coolly reveals that he has been training in five hundred times Earth gravity and then kicks the clown into a boulder and blows him away, without even going Super Saiyan. This one is a firm candidate for the most one-sided fight in the whole show.
- His drawn-out humiliation of Semi-Perfect Cell after he had spent the entire year training in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber. Cell struggles to land a hit while Vegeta kicks him around like a harmless toy while delivering one epic verbal put-down after another, breaking Cell's spirit as well as his body. When Cell becomes Perfect later, he turns the tables on Vegeta and beats the shit out of him.
- Vegeta to Android 19: "Let me ask you: does a machine like yourself ever experience fear?" Then he puts fear in him by going to town on him and vaporizing him.
- When Frost is revealed to be a no-good-scumbag who used poison to beat Goku and Piccolo, Vegeta challenges him on his terms and then sends him flying with a single punch.
- When he fights Cabba, he teaches the kid how to go Super Saiyan, goes Super Saiyan God to show off the power he could have and then slugs the poor kid in the gut, putting him on the floor. Cabba couldn't even react.
- However, Vegeta's been on the receiving end of plenty, mostly due to his misplaced arrogance. He, along with Gohan and Krillin, are absolutely decimated by Recoome. His fight against Final Form Frieza isn't even a fight, as all of Vegeta's attacks don't even touch Frieza with his last blast effortlessly kicked into space by Frieza, while Frieza makes him cry like a little bitch. Then, there's his fight with Android #18, which ends with him on his back with two broken arms. And this is after he became Super Saiyan! Though in Vegeta's defense, he deserved it for his arrogance.
- While they weren't beaten by him per se, Tien and Chaiotzu both sacrificed their lives against Nappa, giving the greatest amount of energy they had in their lives so far. Neither could they so much as cause any visible damage to him.
- There's also the very beginning of Super Saiyan 2 Gohan fighting Cell — Gohan only landed two punches (and a kamehameha) on Cell, but they were so insanely damaging that they forced him out of his final form. For that matter, even though Cell was much stronger after he blew himself up and killed Goku, essentially becoming Super Saiyan 2 himself, he would likely still have had no chance of defeating Gohan if ONLY Vegeta's actions didn't result in getting Gohan severely damaged before the final showdown.
- The role is reversed on the main cast when they fight Broly in the 8th movie. Throughout their entire fight, none of the heroes are able to even scratch Broly, literally. He is only injured with the last punch of the movie. Broly even remained unscathed to a pointblank Kame-hame-ha. Vegeta, for a good portion of the fight, remains on the sidelines, knowing that anything they did to Broly would be pointless.Vegeta: We're mere grunts fighting an entire army.
- Super Saiyan 2 Gohan vs Bojack in Dragon Ball Z: Bojack Unbound also qualifies to the point where it's even more of one than the one against Cell. Bojack dies in just two hits and his gang is killed quicker than the Cell Juniors (with the beautiful Zangaya getting herself killed accidentally by her own boss during his Last Stand Beam-O-War with SSJ2 Gohan, in a failed attempt to convince Bojack to stand down). The entire fight between Gohan as a Super Saiyan 2 lasts 2 minutes. However, this is non-canon.
- Beerus vs everyone in the canon movie Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods. Beerus is the God of Destruction, and effortlessly beats the Z warriors, including Good Buu and Ultimate Gohan, using only chopsticks and basic attacks. That's after he nearly killed SSJ3 Goku in 1 blow. The only fighter who gives him any challenge at all is "Super Saiyan God" Goku. And even then he doesn't get defeated... indeed, he was still holding back an insane amount of his full power.
- While not a battle per say, Whis knocking out Beerus in one hit to stop his wasabi-fueled rampage carries the same sentiment.
- From Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection 'F' the Z-Fighters and Jaco vs. Frieza's army of thousand men. The army never stood a chance and to add further insult to injury, the Z-Fighters beat back Frieza's troops without killing anyone. There is also Frieza vs. Goku. Base form Goku wipes the floor with Frieza's true form and while Frieza's new Golden form is able to match and even get the better of Goku's Super Saiyan Blue, once Frieza's energy starts to bleed out due to the form's massive energy burn, Goku knocks him around with ease. The final fight, Vegeta vs. Frieza, was a utter curb stomping in Vegeta's favor.
- The Dragon Ball Super retelling of the above movie instead depicts Base Goku and 4th form Frieza as more evenly matched, while Golden Frieza is the one who outright stomps Super Saiyan Blue Goku until he gets exhausted.
- In the non-canon spin-off Episode of Bardock, Freeza's ancestor Chilled taunts, beats, and pushes Bardock so far that the latter transforms into a Super Saiyan. He then, completely without effort, proceeds to wipe the face of the planet with Chilled's ragdolled form before blasting him into orbit.
- Don't think the original Dragon Ball was devoid of these either. Kid Goku took down an overconfident competitor with three quick elbows to the stomach (done so quickly the spectators and announcers thought it was one strike). The scene played out almost exactly the same way he later trounced Recoome.
- Most of Goku's fights as a kid were a curb stomp. Only Jackie Chun, Mercenary Tao, Tien, King Piccolo and his children truly gave Goku the fights of his life, while a few semifinal World Tournament opponents and General Blue managed to avoid being outright humiliated by Goku.
- Goku effectively wiped out the entire Red Ribbon Army all by himself as a child. They were powerless against him.
- For that matter, Mercenary Tao killed General Blue with his tongue.
- Kid Goku vs the Demon King Piccolo. At first Goku floors the Namek-back-then-Satan-surrogate, but the latter stands up, goes The Coats Are Off, and then simply DESTROYS Goku, beating him to a brink of death, even doing a No-Sell to Goku's Kamehameha in the process.
- Tienshenhan vs. Tao Pai Pai is an utterly embarrassing curb stomp battle. They knew each other well since Tien was the Crane Hermit's star pupil and Tao was the Hermit's brother. However, in the intervening years, Tien had had a Heel–Face Turn after barely winning the last tournament versus Goku and realizing there was more to life than just Curb Stomping and humiliating your opponents. He trained more honestly, and it showed. He effortlessly dodges all of Tao's attacks and requests that he just stand down and not humiliate himself. When Tao refuses, Tien just takes his arm, bends it behind his back and, since this was during the last Tenkaichi Budokai of Dragon Ball, attempts to basically escort him into a Ring Out. When Tao decides to cheat and use weapons, Tien makes a mockery of him, breaking his arm blade, No Selling a cybernetically-enhanced Dodonpa, then dropping him with one punch to the gut.
- His next match (the rematch against Goku) eventually reverses the curb stomp. At first it seems another pretty even affair until Goku reveals he'd been fighting with weights on. Suddenly Tien can't keep up with him, resorting to using his trump card, but Goku manages to beat that move as well and basically stack Tien's multiple forms outside the ring like so much firewood.
- Dragon Ball Super continues the trend. The most spectacular example is Beerus "vs." Present Zamasu.Beerus: Hakai. [Zamasu screams in agony as he is effortlessly disintegrated]
- Krillin vs. Gohan ends in about a minute. Surprisingly, Krillin is the stomper, not the stompee — his 15+ years of experience are more than enough to knock Gohan flat on his face, even with his innate Saiyan biology.
- Jiren has the habit of doing this to pretty much everyone who ever tried to fight him; Kale rampaging throughout the arena and shrugging off even a Super Saiyan Blue Kamehameha? Jiren one-shots her. Maji=Kayo? One punch and he is out of the arena. Goku? Jiren easily shrug off whatever he deals out up to a Spirit Bomb from a 20x Super Saiyan Blue Kaioken. Ultra Instinct Goku? They do seem evenly matched but then Jiren reveals that he is holding back and quickly defeats him when Goku loses the form. Hit? Jiren just flexes his muscle and overcomes whatever time-skips or restraints that Hit attempts to do. Vegeta? A full power Final Flash doesn't put a single dent on him and Jiren knocks him out. Heck, even a transformation that caused Goku and Vegeta to break their limit does little to even put a dent in him with Jiren even commenting whether this is all they got. It was only when Goku attained Ultra Instinct for the third time that Goku was able to do serious damage, to say nothing of when he masters it
- Speaking of Complete Ultra Instinct, it was at this point that JIREN was on the receiving end of a stomp, being unable to land a single hit. Even after the gap was narrowed due to Jiren unlocking his hidden power (being able to keep up with and even overwhelm Goku), he, due to his Trauma and Berserk Buttons being pressed, made the incredibly stupid decision to attack the stands to prove a point, enraging Goku. After that, the fight was over in about a minute with Jiren once again being unable to land a hit. The only reason he wasn't knocked off right there was because of Ultra Instinct taking its toll on Goku, incapacitating him.
- Gogeta is a master of dishing this out to everyone he ever fought. He manhandles Janemba in a few hits before obliterating him without wasting even a minute of his time. He made Omega a complete fool, redirecting his Negative Energy Ball before nearly obliterating him with a Big Bang Kamehameha. And lastly, he is in complete control of the fight against Broly even in his base form as well as Super Saiyan and once he turns into Super Saiyan Blue, the poor Saiyan got a beating so bad that he can only writhe and fear as Gogeta's Kamehameha is approaching him.
