Dragon Ball
Dragon Ball Z
dragon ball 1986–89. TV series. (153 X 30 min.) Martial arts adventure/comedy/science fiction. org Akira Toriyama (manga). dir Daisuke Nishio. des Yuji Ikeda.
dragon ball z 1989–96. TV series. (291 X 30 min.) org Akira Toriyama (manga). dir Daisuke Nishio. des Yuji Ikeda. -bc
One of the longest-running anime series in history, and one of the most popular worldwide, the combined Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z tell the mind-boggling saga of Goku, an alien who lands on Earth as a baby and grows up to become the planet’s greatest defender. The humor and whimsy of the early stages give way to violent, fight-oriented entertainment, all against a highly imaginative science fiction backdrop.
A space capsule carrying a humanoid baby adorned with huge tufts of black hair and a monkey’s tail crash-lands on Earth near the home of Gohan, an aging Chinese kung fu master. Gohan names the baby Goku (after Son Goku, the Monkey King of Chinese legend) and raises him as his own grandson, teaching him martial arts and watching as he develops super-strength. After Gohan dies, little Goku goes out into the larger world and finds it a strange and unpredictable place, offering many challenges for his fighting skills. When Bulma, a teenage girl who’s a scientific genius, wants him to give up his grandfather’s Dragon Ball, which she has tracked down with her dragon radar, Goku learns about the power of the seven Dragon Balls which, once collected, call up the Eternal Dragon (Shen Long), who grants the owner a single wish, after which the balls are separated and swept off to the far corners of the Earth, to remain useless for an entire year.
In the course of Dragon Ball, Goku meets a number of characters who join his growing circle of friends as he trains under Master Roshi (the “turtle hermit”) and becomes the world’s strongest fighter. In addition to Bulma and Roshi, Goku’s allies include Yamcha, a former desert bandit, and his little shape-shifting companion Puar; Oolong, a little pig who also shape-shifts; Krillin, a would-be Shaolin monk who becomes Goku’s training partner under Roshi; martial artist Tien and his child-sized partner, Chaotzu; the giant-sized Ox King and his petite little daughter, Chi-Chi; and, finally, Launch, a sweet, perky brunette who turns into a tough-talking, gun-toting buxom blond whenever she sneezes. The series follows Goku on a number of different story arcs as he goes off on quests, enters tournaments, or faces down various opponents, such as the bumbling Emperor Pilaf and his crew and the Red Ribbon Army, both of which seek to collect the Dragon Balls to ask the Dragon for unlimited power or immortality.
Dragon Ball Z starts off on a more serious note with the arrival on Earth of Raditz, a Saiyan warrior from the planet Vegeta, who happens to be the brother of Goku, whom he insistently refers to as “Kakarot,” the name given to Goku as a baby on Vegeta. Raditz demands to know why Kakarot hasn’t destroyed all life on Earth, the mission for which he was sent to Earth as a baby. Now married to Chi-Chi and the father of a boy, Gohan, Goku had no idea of his Saiyan origin and recalls only that he was knocked on the head as a baby, an accident that changed his personality. Goku defies Raditz and finds an ally in Piccolo, a Namekian warrior who had been his most vicious opponent in Dragon Ball. After the Raditz encounter and its tragic aftermath, Goku and his friends, now dubbed the Z-Warriors, face down an increasingly powerful group of opponents, starting with Raditz’s fellow Saiyans, Vegeta, the onetime prince of the now-destroyed planet Vegeta, and his companion, Nappa. Later opponents include Frieza, an intergalactic tyrant who once employed the Saiyans to destroy planets’ populations; Androids 17 and 18, superpowerful teens created by mad scientist Dr. Gero who come close to destroying the world; Cell, a creature made up of genetic material from much of the series’ cast and, hence, the most powerful among them; and Majin Buu, a hideous pink being who can absorb his opponents and transform into an unbeatable monster.
Through it all, the characters age and develop relationships. Vegeta becomes an ally of the Z-Warriors and eventually mates with Bulma, fathering a son, Trunks, who becomes instrumental in saving the world from the Androids. Goku and Chi-Chi have another son, Goten, who grows up with Trunks. Gohan grows into a man and goes on to find a girlfriend, Videl, and father a daughter, Pan. The characters also die pretty regularly, but are either brought back to life by the collection of the Dragon Balls and a wish to the Eternal Dragon or forced to watch from the afterlife, where they are adorned with halos and can participate in Earthly activities only under very strict conditions. Earth’s population is wiped out on more than one occasion and the Earth itself is destroyed at one point.
Dragon Ball is easily distinguishable from Dragon Ball Z by virtue of its more cartoonish style of character design. The characters are smaller, rounder, and simpler, with bigger eyes and more exaggerated features. The world they inhabit is also more surreal, with towns surrounded by jungles and desert landscapes populated by all manner of wildlife, including free-roaming dinosaurs. The populations of the towns Goku visits tend to include talking animal characters dressed just like the humans they coexist with. Audiences at the various fighting tournaments are multiracial, multiethnic, and multispecies.
What’s also noteworthy about Dragon Ball is the attention paid to the settings and landscapes. There are often beautiful nature scenes and backgrounds that resemble traditional charcoal paintings. The villages are often picturesque, representing a wide range of global settings, from traditional Chinese, Middle Eastern, and Latin American to American frontier towns and medieval-style castles. Modern touches are found in the taller, rounder structures, including mushroom shaped towers arising from the bigger urban settings that are sometimes featured.
A clever form of technology in Dragon Ball is found in the capsules devised and mass marketed by the Capsule Corporation, run by Bulma’s father. These capsules contain anything from a weapon or a supply of food to housing, automotive transport or airplanes. When the group needs a place to stay at night in the middle of nowhere, Oolong produces a capsule that pops open into a two-story, multi-bedroom residence, complete with bathroom and kitchen.
After episode 133 of Dragon Ball, in which we see the grown-up Goku and Chi-Chi for the first time, the visuals and design strategy begin to look forward to Dragon Ball Z, which is more serious than DB and more consciously placed in the science fiction superhero genre. The bright colors, simple forms, and light-filled spaces of DB give way to darker shades and settings and to greater detail. The characters are less cartoonlike and the battles fiercer and more violent, with far greater destruction of the surrounding environment. The towns the characters pass through are more detailed urban landscapes with rounded, streamlined skylines befitting the Capsule Corp. aesthetic, and the populations look more modern (and Western) than the peasants and global ethnic types (and talking animals) we saw in Dragon Ball. In the later episodes, cities have flying cars, transportation tubes, and other high-tech gimmicks, à la The Jetsons.
The monstrous opponents in Dragon Ball Z are often imaginatively designed and usually go through assorted transformations as they acquire more power. Cell, in particular, is quite formidable, and with his reptilian appearance and his long, scaly, pointed tail, makes a visually interesting villain. He is also given a most expressive set of features. Majin Buu, on the other hand, is a hideous and repellent creature in his later stages, although his childlike stage—big, fat, and pink, with a high-pitched babyish voice—borders on cute in some scenes. Androids 17 and 18 are a boy-girl team noted for being incredibly vain, stylishly dressed and strikingly attractive.In fact, 18 later turns human, becomes good and marries Krillin, giving birth to a baby girl.
The single most interesting aspect of the character design in the entire series is that the characters age and change over the course of time. Granted, most don’t change all that much, but the fact that they change at all is quite unusual for an anime series. Gohan, son of Goku, grows up from a cute, cuddly four-year-old boy to a strong young man and is seen at various stages in between. Bulma, the brassy, boy-crazy teen girl in the earliest episodes of DB, goes through the greatest number of changes, experimenting with hairstyles and different fashions along the way, and winds up as one of the matriarchs of the group. While Goku is the heart and soul of the group, Bulma is its body, the one who gives it structure and cohesion.
Dragon Ball Z was followed by a third TV series, Dragon Ball GT (1996–97, TV, 64 eps).
There were a total of seventeen movies, from 1986 to 1995, three TV specials (1990, 1993, 1997), and two ten-minute public safety videos.
DB movies:
Curse of the Blood Rubies (1986)
Sleeping Princess in Devil’s Castle (1987)
Mystical Adventure (1988)
The Path to Power (1996)
DBZ movies:
Dead Zone (1989)
The World’s Strongest (1990)
The Tree of Might (1990)
Lord Slug (1991)
Cooler’s Revenge (1991)
Return of Cooler (1992)
Super Android 13 (1992)
Broly—The Legendary Super Saiyan (1993)
Bojack Unbound (1993)
Broly–Second Coming (1994)
Bio-Broly (1994)
Fusion Reborn (1995)
Wrath of the Dragon (1995)
TV specials:
Dragon Ball Z: Bardock—Father of Goku (1990)
Dragon Ball Z: The History of Trunks (1993)
Dragon Ball GT: A Hero’s Legacy (1997)
Many otherwise tolerant anime fans consider the Dragon Ball franchise, especially Dragon Ball Z, simply one nonstop series of long, pitched battles which often stretch out over many, many episodes. Certainly that’s borne out by the battles with Piccolo in DB and Frieza and Majin Buu in DBZ each taking up what would be entire TV seasons in any other series. The main fighters in the cast obsess endlessly over power levels and reaching different stages (e.g., Super Saiyan and its ascendant phases). All this no doubt accounts for the series’ appeal to an overwhelmingly preadolescent male audience—a group notably obsessed with issues of power and strength—but it can get tiresome for everyone else. However, there are many reasons for the series’ phenomenal worldwide popularity, and reasons for serious anime fans to watch at least portions of the whole series.
For one thing, it’s an epic saga of a type rarely, if ever, attempted in anime. Produced over a ten-year span and taking place over several decades, it follows its central character, Goku, from cuddly little boy to grandfatherhood. Viewers are able to follow the same group of highly eccentric characters from beginning to end through a host of literally earth-shattering changes. The final episodes of DBZ even make pointed reference to events and characters from the early stages of DB, going as far as cutting to people Goku hasn’t seen in four hundred episodes. And finally, when we see all the main protagonists together at the end, happily reunited in peaceful times, with new children added to the clan, we can shed a tear of hard-earned joy.
At the heart of the Dragon Ball universe is Goku, who starts out as a simple, unschooled mountain boy when we first meet him, but who develops an ironbound sense of right and wrong. He is strong enough to stand up to bad guys when innocent people are defenseless and he quickly learns what a good thing this is and how much he is needed in a sprawling, seemingly lawless universe. Much of the charm of the first few dozen episodes is found in Goku’s collisions with unwitting gargantuan villains who think the little kid will be a pushover and are greeted by Goku’s knowing, boyish laugh, followed by a series of crushing, often lethal lightning-quick kung fu blows and kicks.
As Goku grows up, he learns to fight only when necessary and avoids killing whenever possible. He has seen enemies become allies, most notably Tien, Piccolo, Vegeta, and Android 18, and he seeks the good in even the worst of them, including the purely evil Majin Buu. He overcomes the bloodthirsty legacy of the Saiyan race and takes on the best qualities of his adopted human race. He’s the moral and spiritual leader of his circle, from Master Roshi and Bulma on down to the newest additions, Trunks, Goten, and Pan. Ignored at birth by his own biological father (as seen in a flashback TV special, Bardock, Father of Goku), he breaks the cycle and becomes a loving patriarch to his own sons and the others in his circle.
Of the two series, Dragon Ball offers more in the way of whimsy and humor, all supplied by the endlessly inventive freewheeling imagination of series creator Akira Toriyama, who based his story largely on Journey to the West, the ancient Chinese tale of the Monkey King, and partly on Superman. Like the Monkey King, Goku travels through a bizarre and incongruous landscape armed only, as was the original Goku, with an extending “power pole” (nyoi-bo) and a yellow nimbus cloud (kinto’un) that flies him around wherever he wishes. Characters based on counterparts in Journey include the shape-shifting pig, Oolong, a horny little devil (like Pigsy, his literary counterpart), who manages to get Bulma into a Playboy Bunny outfit in one of the early episodes.
While DB boasted enough charm to sustain its entire run, DBZ tended to rely on its most compelling story arcs to keep things interesting for post-adolescents. The trip to Namek, the planet of Piccolo’s race, gives the crew an outer space voyage and adventures on other planets, as well as offering up a whole new set of Dragon Balls with which to wish their fallen comrades back to life. Highly recommended is the Android Saga, which offers abundant twists and turns and enough significant breaks from the fighting to turn out what would be, in any other format, a powerful science fiction story of man-made creations turning against their creator and lashing out at humanity. The Androids go on a road trip of their own, a malevolent version of Goku’s journey in DB, and go through their own set of changes. The Android arc blends smoothly into and overlaps with the Cell Saga, in which another android creation of Dr. Gero sets out to absorb the original Androids and become the most powerful creature on Earth.
The movies tend to be condensed versions of conflicts that might have been treated as full-fledged story arcs in the series, but are compressed into running times between forty-five minutes and an hour. Some fans prefer the movies because the battles are over and done with in that time span and not stretched out to thirty or forty episodes. The movies usually feature Goku and the others facing up to some new super-powerful enemy arrived on Earth to issue a challenge. One of the better movies is The Tree of Might in which Turles, yet another surviving Saiyan, arrives on Earth and wreaks havoc with the title tree, whose roots suck up the planet’s life energy. Unlike so many of the movies, which specialize in nonstop fighting from beginning to end, this one first establishes the characters and basic premise, building gradually to the final, devastating battle. The animation is a lot better than in the series and offers impressive scenes of urban destruction as the massive roots of the Tree erupt from the ground and knock over buildings in major cities. There are beautifully painted scenes of green fields and fertile landscapes turning brown and drying up as the Tree soaks up the Earth’s life force.
Two of the highlights of the entire series are the TV specials, Bardock, Father of Goku and The History of Trunks. The first tells Goku’s origin story and takes viewers back to the planet Vegeta, home of the Saiyans, where Bardock and his brethren live harsh, violent lives and their offspring are produced in labs and sent out in rockets as babies to other worlds with weak populations, where they are to destroy all life as soon as they’re big enough. In a clever twist, Bardock is cursed with the gift of foresight by one of his enemies and sees maddening glimpses of the future, including the destruction of his home planet and flashes of his son on Earth behaving in a most un-Saiyan-like fashion. Infant Goku, an unusual crybaby for a Saiyan, is sent off in a rocket for Earth just before the tyrant Frieza destroys the planet Vegeta in a fit of jealousy at the Saiyans’ growing power. This last bit is a deliciously perverse variation on the Superman origin story, where Kal-El was sent in a rocket to Earth to keep one last native of Krypton alive before the planet was destroyed (by natural forces). Of course, despite his initial mission, Goku becomes, like Superman before him, Earth’s greatest champion.
The History of Trunks shows us the future that awaits the Earth if Androids 17 or 18 aren’t stopped. In it, Gohan and Trunks are all that’s left of the Z-Warriors and must battle alone against the Androids who are indulging in acts of extraordinary mass death and destruction around the world as it fits their mood. Of course, in the series’ actual timeline, Trunks had gone back into the past to warn the Z-Warriors and help prepare them for the battles with the Androids, thus averting the bleak and hopeless future posed here. Both of the TV specials are extremely dark and violent and boast the appropriate hard-edged animation style.
Dragon Ball GT was a follow-up cash-in series, without any basis in the manga and without the input of Akira Toriyama, which continued the adventures of Goku and his circle, taking up vaguely where they’d left off at the end of Dragon Ball Z. The character design was cruder and different enough to raise alarms among fans, and the animation and overall design of much lower quality. Story lines were sometimes rushed and seemed more like mini-rehashes of similar arcs from DBZ. Much of it follows the exploits of the unlikely trio of Trunks (Vegeta’s son), Pan (Gohan’s daughter), and a diminished Goku, who has been wished by Emperor Pilaf with the Dragon Balls back to the little boy form he had in the original Dragon Ball (or, rather, a charmless approximation of it). It was, of course, nice to visit with some of these characters again, especially the matrons of the clan, Chi Chi and Bulma, the now-grown Gohan, and the teenaged Goten, as well as meet a new character in Bulla, the daughter of Vegeta and Bulma, seen only briefly at the very end of DBZ, who is now a teen and the spitting image of the young Bulma from the early stages of DB, oh so many years ago. However, it simply wasn’t good enough to be viewed on the same level as the two earlier series.
Dragon Ball episodes 54–57 take place in Penguin Village, the home of the characters from Akira Toriyama’s other popular, long-running manga, Dr. Slump, which itself was adapted into an animated series that predated Dragon Ball. As villainous General Blue and Goku compete in their quest to find a Dragon Ball, they meet Arale-chan, the chubby, bespectacled, cheery little robot girl, who was earlier seen in a cameo appearance in the third DB movie, Mystical Adventure, and all the crazy denizens of Penguin Village, seen for the first and only time by U.S. audiences in these episodes.
In DB episode 133, “Changes,” we see Goku for the first time as a mature, buff teenager, several years after the previous episode, where he’d still been a cute, cuddly boy. We also see Chi Chi as a teenager for the first time, although Goku doesn’t recognize her. In fact, he doesn’t learn who she is until episode 137, “Anonymous Proposal,” and even then has completely forgotten his childhood plan to marry her, setting off one of her famous rages. However, they kiss and make up by the final DB episodes, where they have a series of adventures together before their touching wedding in the very last episode.
In the final stage of the last battle of Dragon Ball Z, Goku and his friends call on all the people of Earth to help supply energy toward the creation of a massive “spirit bomb” that will end the threat of Majin Buu once and for all. It takes three episodes (269–71) to rally the necessary help.
Daisuke Nishio directed all three Dragon Ball series, the first two Dragon Ball movies; four Dragon Ball Z movies; and two TV specials, Bardock, Father of Goku and The History of Trunks. He also directed Crying Freeman 1: Portrait of a Killer, 3x3 Eyes, Gegege no Kitaro (1986), and Kindaichi Shonen no Jikenbo (aka Kindaichi Case Files).
Creator and manga artist Akira Toriyama also created Dr. Slump, the basis for another long-running anime series, and the artwork for the Chrono Trigger video game.
American TV viewers first experienced Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z mostly out of order. The first episodes of DB began showing up in syndication in June 1996, followed by the first episodes of DBZ in September of that year. However, the syndicated run of DB lasted only thirteen episodes, while the run of DBZ lasted only forty episodes, a paltry fraction of the whole. It wouldn’t be until March of 2000 that American viewers got any more episodes, when the Cartoon Network began its run of DBZ, which went on for several years and included a run of 276 episodes, a shorter number than the original because earlier episodes had been cut down and combined, or eliminated entirely, by the original syndicator. Cartoon Network didn’t start running Dragon Ball until August 2001, and for a couple of years viewers were seeing the later episodes of DB and DBZ for the first time on a simultaneous basis, with CN often running an episode of one back-to-back with an episode of the other. Complicated behind-the-scenes wrangling, along with redubbing and reediting, was partly to blame for the failure to simply start with DB episode 1 and progress from there. It should also be pointed out that the pre–Cartoon Network syndicated episodes were heavily edited for violence, nudity, earthy humor, and mass deaths. Whenever a character blew up a city, for instance, a “news” voice-over would soften things by declaring it “abandoned” or “evacuated.” The series was basically turned into an American-style kiddie show, rather than a Japanese one. Later on, the editing got less drastic. And, still later (in 2005), CN began rerunning DBZ in unedited form.
Entirely new music in a completely different style was created for the English dub of the series, often lathered over whole sections that had no music in the original. For the video release of the English dub of The History of Trunks, various name rock bands were featured rather indiscriminately on the soundtrack.
An unofficially produced Taiwanese live-action film was released on video in the U.S. as Dragon Ball: The Magic Begins.
violence Lots of violence for a series aimed at kids. Furious hand-to-hand, feet-to-head, knees-to-torso combat. All the main characters get battered pretty badly many times each in the course of 444 episodes and twenty movies and specials. Blood is visible frequently in the uncut episodes of DBZ. nudity Little Goku in DB is the one most often seen nude. Mildly naughty sexual references abound as well, e.g., Goku’s curiosity about Bulma’s private area. (This was edited out of the syndicated version.)