Dragon Ball
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First tankÅbon volume, released in Japan on November 10, 1985
(Doragon BÅru)
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Modernine TV MCOTDragon Ball (ドラゴンボール, Doragon BÅru?) is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Akira Toriyama. Inspired by the Chinese folk novel Journey to the West, the series follows the adventures of Son Goku from his childhood through old age as he goes through several trainings and the research for seven mystical objects known as the Dragon Balls, which are supposed to grant any wish.
The manga was serialized in the Weekly ShÅnen Jump magazine from 1984 through 1995, and its 519 individual chapters were published into 42 tankÅbon volumes by Shueisha. It is licensed for an English language release in North America by Viz Media, in the United Kingdom by Gollancz Manga, and in Australia and New Zealand by Chuang Yi. Dragon Ball was adapted into three anime series, seventeen animated feature films, three television specials, a collectible trading card game, and a large number of video games. An American live-action film began production in 2002 and is slated for release on April 10, 2009.
Dragon Ball is one of the most popular manga series of its time, and continues to enjoy high readership today. By 2000, more than 126 million copies of the manga series had been sold in Japan and by 2007, this number had grown to pass 150 million. The initial Dragon Ball anime was ranked number twelve in a list of the top one-hundred series in Japan. Other manga artists have acknowledged that Dragon Ball was an inspiration for their own works.
Contents
Plot
- See also: List of Dragon Ball characters
A monkey-tailed boy named Goku is found by an old martial arts expert who raises him as his grandson. One day Goku meets a girl called Bulma and together they go on a quest to retrieve the seven Dragon Balls, mythical objects that can summon a dragon who will grant any wish. Along the way, they meet and befriend many other martial artists. They also undergo rigorous training regimes and educational programs in order to fight in the Tenka-ichi BudÅkai, a tournament in which the most powerful fighters in the world compete. Outside the tournaments, Goku faces several villains such as the Red Ribbon Army, a demon known as Piccolo Daimao and his offspring of the same name.
As a young adult, Goku meets his older brother, Raditz, who tells him that they come from a fictional race of extraterrestrials called Saiyans. The Saiyans had sent Goku to Earth to destroy it, but Goku had amnesia. Goku refuses to help him continue the mission, after which he begins to encounter other Saiyans who want to battle him, such as the Saiyan prince Vegeta and Frieza, who is considered to be one of the strongest beings in the universe. After his encounter with Frieza, Goku begins training his first child, Son Gohan, to be his successor. Years later, a group of soldiers from the Red Ribbon army known as androids appear to kill Goku. Another android, Cell, absorbs the Red Ribbon army to increase his power, then fights Goku and Gohan, resulting in the former's death. Goku is capable of returning to life, but decides to stay dead for seven years to train in the Other World. When he returns, he is drawn into a battle for the universe against an extraterrestrial named Majin Buu. Joined by Vegeta and Gohan, Buu is destroyed and Goku dies again. He is later revived by one of the gods from the Other World. Ten years later at a martial arts tournament, Goku meets Buu's human reincarnation, Uub. At the end of the manga, Goku takes Uub away on a journey to train him as another successor.
Anime sequel
In the anime Dragon Ball GT, which is not directly based on the manga, Goku is turned back into a child by the Black-Star Dragon Balls and is forced to travel across the universe to retrieve them. While in space, he encounters the evil artificial Tuffle, Baby, who wants to destroy the Saiyan race. Goku fights him, but is defeated and his tail destroyed. After his tail is regenerated, he achieves the level of Super Saiyan 4 and destroys Baby, propelling him into the sun with a Kamehameha. After Baby's defeat, Dr. Myuu, a combination of machine and human, creates a replica of Android 17, fuses it with the original Android 17, creating Super 17. Super 17 seems impervious to Goku's attacks, but when Android 18 attacks him for killing Krillin, Goku is able to take advantage of the distraction to find a way to penetrate Super 17 and destroy it.
Due to overuse of the Dragon Balls, seven Evil Dragons were created. All but the most powerful, Syn Shenron, are defeated. When Shenron appears to be losing, he absorbs the Dragon Balls and gains enough power to become Omega Shenron and overwhelm Goku. Eventually, using the energy of every living being in the universe, Goku makes a Spirit Bomb powerful enough to destroy Omega Shenron.
Themes
At its core, Dragon Ball maintains the central tenets of the Weekly ShÅnen Jump core philosophy of "friendship, struggle, and victory." As the series shifts from a "heart warming" story into a more action oriented piece, the protagonists go through an unending cycle of fighting, winning, losing, learning important lessons, then returning to the fight. As the series progresses, the heroes continue this cycle by using miraculous devices to achieve life after death while continuing their on-going battles with the dead heroes who continue to learn lessons as they defeat their challengers.[1]
Production
Wanting to break from the Western influences common in his other series, when Akira Toriyama began work on Dragon Ball he decided to loosely model it on the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West.[2][3] He also redeveloped one of his earlier one shot manga series, Dragon Boy, which was initially serialized in Fresh Jump and released in a single tankÅbon volume in 1983.[3] This short work combined the comedic style of Toriyama's successful six-year series Dr. Slump with a more action-oriented plot and paid homage to famous martial art actor Jackie Chan.[4][3] Toriyama notes that his goal for the series was to tell an "unconventional and contradictory" story.[5]
In the early concept of the series, Goku and Piccolo were from Earth. With the introduction of Kami-sama, the idea of having fights from other planets was established and Goku and Piccolo were changed to alien species.[6] For the female characters, Toriyama felt it wasn't fun to draw "weak females" so he created women that he felt were not only "beautiful and sexy", but also "strong."[5] Going against the normal convention that the strongest characters should be the largest in terms of physical size, he designed many of Dragon Ball's most powerful characters with small statures, including the protagonist, Goku.[5]
The fighting techniques were initially unnamed, but the series editor felt it would be better to name them all. Toriyama proceeded to create names for all of the techniques, except for the "KameHame Ha" which his wife named when Toriyama was indecisive about what it should be called.[6] When creating the ficitional world of the series, Toriyama decided to create basing it from his own imagination to avoid referencing some popular stuffs. However the island where the Tenkaichi Tournament is held is modeled after Bali. When having fights in the manga, Toriyama had the characters go to a place where nobody lived to avoid difficulties in drawing destroyed buildings. In order to advance the story quickly, he also gave most fighters the ability to fly so they could travel to other parts of the world without inconvenience. This was also the reasoning behind Goku learning to teletransport (thus allowing characters to move to any planet in a second).[6]
After the first chapters were released, readers commented that Goku seemed rather plain, so his appearance was changed. Several other characters (such as Master Roshi and Krillin) and martial arts tournaments were added to give the manga a greater emphasis on fighting. Knowing readers would expect Goku to win the tournaments, Toriyama had him lose the first two while continuing his initial goal of having Goku be the champion and hero. At the end of the Cell arc, he intended for Gohan to replace Goku as the series protagonist, but then felt the character was not suited for the role and changed his mind.[7]
Toriyama based the Red Ribbon Army from a video game he'd played named Spartan X in which enemies tended to appear very fast. After the second tournament concluded, Toriyama wanted to have a villain who would be a true "bad guy." After creating Piccolo as the new villain, he noted that it was one of the most interesting parts of the stories and that he, and his son, became one of the favorite characters of the series. With Goku established as the strongest fighter on Earth, Toriyama decided to increase the number of villains that came from outer space. Finding the escalating enemies to be a pain to work with, he created the Ginyu squad to add more balance to the series.[7] During this period of the series, Toriyama placed less emphasis on the series art work, simplifying the lines and sometimes making things "too square." He found himself having problems determining the colors for characters and sometimes ended up changing them unintentionally mid-story.[4]
Media
Manga
Written and illustrated by Akira Toriyama, Dragon Ball was initially serialized in the manga anthology Weekly ShÅnen Jump starting in 1984.[8][3] The series ended in 1995 when Toriyama grew exhausted and felt he needed a break from drawing.[3] The 519 individual chapters were published into 42 tankÅbon volumes by Shueisha from November 10, 1985 through August 4, 1995.[9][10][11] In 2004, the chapters were re-released in a collection of 34 kanzenban volumes, which included a slightly rewritten ending, new covers, and color artwork from its Weekly ShÅnen Jump run.[8] Toriyama also created a short series, Neko Majin, that became a self-parody of Dragon Ball. First appearing in Weekly ShÅnen Jump in August 1999, the eight chapter series was released sporadically until it was completed in 2005.[12] These chapters were compiled into a "kanzenban"-style package for release in Japan on April 4, 2005.[13]
The Dragon Ball manga was licensed for release in English in North America by Viz Media which has released all 42 volume in both censored and uncensored forms.[14] Viz released volumes 17 through 42 under the title Dragon Ball Z to mimic the name of the anime series adaptated from those volumes, feeling it would reduce the potential for confusion by its readers.[8] The first volumes of both series were released in March 2003, with Dragon Ball being completed on August 3, 2004 and Dragon Ball Z finishing on June 6, 2006.[15][16] In June 2008, Viz began re-releasing the two series in a wideban format called "VIZBIG Edition", which collects three individual volumes into a single large volume.[17][18]
In 2006, Toriyama and One Piece author Eiichiro Oda teamed up to create a single chapter crossover of their individual hit series. Entitled Cross Epoch, the chapter was published in the December 25, 2006 issue of Weekly ShÅnen Jump.[19]
Anime series
- See also: List of Dragon Ball episodes
Dragon Ball
With the high popularity of the Dragon Ball manga, Toei Animation produced two anime television series based on the manga chapters, and a third based on the series characters. The first series, also titled Dragon Ball, premiered in Japan on Fuji Television on February 26, 1986 and ran until April 12, 1989.[3][20] Spanning 153 episodes, it covered the first 16 volumes of the 42 volume manga series.[20]
Harmony Gold USA licensed the series for an English language release in North America in the late 1980s. In the their voice dub of the series, Harmony renamed almost all of the characters, with some names appearing very odd, such as the central character Goku being renamed "Zero" and the character Korin's name changed to "Whiskers the Wonder Cat". This dub version was quickly canceled.[citation needed]
In 1995, Funimation Entertainment acquired the license for the series for broadcast and home video distribution in North America. Funimation contracted with BLT Productions to create an English voice track for the series, and the dubbed episodes were edited for content.[21] Thirteen episodes aired in syndication before Funimation canceled the project due to low ratings, switching to working on the second anime series Dragon Ball Z.[3] In March 2001, Funimation announced the return of Dragon Ball to American television, featuring a new English audio track produced in house and with less editing.[21][22] The redubbed episodes aired on