Dragon Ball

• 1. Introduction

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  Dragon Ball began with a boy living far from civilization, alone in the wilderness, until a teenage girl named Bulma found him. She told him about seven orbs scattered across the world, the Dragon Balls, which summon a wish-granting dragon when gathered. That boy was Son Goku, and his search for those orbs grew into one of the highest-grossing media franchises of all time. Akira Toriyama created Dragon Ball, writing and illustrating a manga serialized in Weekly Shōnen Jump from 1984 to 1995. Its 519 chapters filled 42 collected volumes, and those volumes have sold over 260 million copies worldwide. Why did a story Toriyama only meant to last about a year keep going for over a decade? How did a tale loosely modeled on a 16th-century Chinese novel reshape what Japanese animation could mean in the rest of the world? What did a man who once said he was barely interested in his own art actually build? The answers run from a Bali island to a Texas senate bill, from Bruce Lee's glare to a Burger King promotion.

• 2. Borrowed From The Dragon

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  Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon, released in 1973, gave Toriyama both a love of Hong Kong martial arts films and, eventually, a title. He was an avid fan of the genre, including Jackie Chan films such as Drunken Master from 1978. The name Dragon Ball drew on Enter the Dragon and the later Bruceploitation knockoff films, which often put the word Dragon in their titles, while the fighting scenes took after Jackie Chan movies. Toriyama loosely modeled the plot and characters on Journey to the West, casting Goku as Sun Wukong, Bulma as Tang Sanzang, Oolong as Zhu Bajie, and Yamcha as Sha Wujing. He wanted that novel's basic theme but with, in his words, a little kung fu. The seven Dragon Balls themselves came from another book entirely. Toriyama drew on Nansō Satomi Hakkenden, an epic Japanese novel published between 1814 and 1842, in which heroes collect eight Buddhist prayer beads. He shrank that count to seven orbs and, since he was writing for a shōnen magazine, treated the gathering as a game without first deciding what anyone would wish for. He had also built the project up from a 1983 one-shot called Dragon Boy.

• 3. A World Built From Asia

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  Bali, in Indonesia, is the model for the island where the Tenkaichi Budōkai martial arts tournament is held. Toriyama visited it with his wife and assistant in mid-1985, part of a deliberate effort to set Dragon Ball in a fictional world largely based on Asia. He pulled from Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Central Asian, Arabic, and Indonesian cultures, and consulted photos of Africa for the area around Bobbidi's spaceship. He wanted to break from the Western influences that ran through his previous manga, Dr. Slump, so he leaned into Chinese scenery and buildings, referencing photographs of China his wife had bought. The genies of The Arabian Nights also shaped his imagination. Within the story, Earth carries the designation Planet 4032-877 in the celestial hierarchy, and Dragon Ball Super later frames the whole franchise as a multiverse of twelve numbered universes. Each universe answers to deities called Kaioshin and Gods of Destruction, all of them appointed by a higher being named Zeno, the watcher of the multiverse.

• 4. Inventing The Fights

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  Kazuhiko Torishima, Toriyama's editor, complained during the early chapters that Goku looked rather plain. In response Toriyama added characters like Kame-Sen'nin and Kuririn and built the Tenkaichi Budōkai to pull the storyline toward fighting. The series truly became popular once that first tournament began. Anticipating that readers would expect Goku to win, Toriyama had him lose the first two tournaments, planning a later victory and buying room for the character to grow. Muscle Tower, in the Red Ribbon Army storyline, came from the video game Spartan X, known in the West as Kung-Fu Master, where enemies appear in quick succession as the player climbs. Frieza, the alien tyrant who seizes planets to resell them, was conceived around the time of the Japanese economic bubble and modeled on real estate speculators, whom Toriyama called the worst kind of people. Goku's Super Saiyan transformation carried its own anxieties. Toriyama worried the scowling face made Goku look like a villain, but accepted it because anger triggered the change. The blonde hair was a practical choice, easier for his assistant, who had spent so long blacking in Goku's hair, and the piercing eyes came from Bruce Lee's paralyzing glare. Character designer Tadayoshi Yamamuro agreed, saying the first Super Saiyan pose with that scowling look in his eyes is all Bruce Lee.

• 5. The Reluctant Master

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  In 2013 Toriyama said that because Dragon Ball is an action manga, the most important thing is the sense of speed, and he went so far as to suggest one could say he was not interested in the art. He admitted he did not plan the story's details, which produced strange occurrences and discrepancies, including changing characters' colors mid-story. He found screentone hard to use, so few characters have it. Going against the convention that the strongest fighters should be the biggest, he gave many of his most powerful characters, Goku among them, small statures. He aged Goku up mainly to make fight scenes easier to draw, over the early objection of Torishima, who thought it rare and risky for a lead to change so drastically. Toriyama set fights in uninhabited places to avoid drawing crowds and wrecked buildings. He once said his goal was to tell an unconventional and contradictory story. Reflecting on the global success in 2013, he confessed, Frankly, I don't quite understand why it happened. While the manga was being serialized, the only thing I wanted as I kept drawing was to make Japanese boys happy. He added that he didn't care if his works left nothing behind, as long as they had entertained their readers. His final work would be Dragon Ball Daima, which aired from October 2024 to February 2025.

• 6. From Page To Screen

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  Toei Animation split Toriyama's manga into two series. The first, Dragon Ball, premiered on Fuji TV on the 26th of February 1986, ran 153 episodes, and adapted the first 194 chapters. Rather than continue under the same name, Toei asked Toriyama for a new title and launched Dragon Ball Z, which picked up five years later and adapted the final 325 chapters across 291 episodes until January 1996. Two television specials filled in gaps. One centered on Goku's father Bardock, the other on the warriors Gohan and Trunks. A sequel called Dragon Ball GT ran from 1996 to 1997 across 64 episodes, and unlike its predecessors it was not based on Toriyama's manga. He called it a grand side story of the original Dragon Ball, though he designed the main cast, the spaceship, three planets, and the title and logo, and oversaw production. In 2009, marking the 20th anniversary of Dragon Ball Z, Toei released Dragon Ball Z Kai, a recut that followed the manga more closely by stripping out filler. It trimmed the original 291 episodes down to 159, with damaged frames removed and some shots remade from scratch. Two midquel series followed, Dragon Ball Super from 2015 to 2018 and the final Dragon Ball Daima. Masako Nozawa returned to voice Goku, Gohan, and Goten in Super, joined by most of the original cast.

• 7. Reaching The West

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  Dragon Ball Z outperformed shows like Friends and The X-Files in some parts of the United States during its first season's sweeps ratings. Anime News Network observed that few series have mainstreamed anime the way Dragon Ball Z has, calling its characters as well known as any in the animated realm and, for many viewers, the first step into anime fandom. The 1999 premiere of season three, dubbed in-house by Funimation, was the highest-rated program ever at that point on Cartoon Network. In 2002, during the week ending September 22, Dragon Ball Z was the number one program of the week across all television among tweens and boys aged 9-14 and males 12-24. By 2001 its official website logged 4.7 million hits per day with more than 500,000 registered fans, and it topped the Lycos 50 list of most-searched items for a second straight year. The reception was not all praise. Jeffrey Harris of IGN faulted the voices, noting that Frieza's appearance combined with a feminine English voice left fans confused about the character's gender. The fights themselves drew steady criticism for being long and repetitive, with one critic remarking that the show practically turned drawing out fights into an art form. In Latin America, public screenings of the Dragon Ball Super finale in 2018 filled stadiums holding tens of thousands of spectators.

• 8. Banned, Bought, And Built On

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  Toys R Us pulled Viz's Dragon Ball from its stores nationwide in November 1999, after a Dallas parent who had bought the books for his four-year-old son complained they contained borderline soft porn. Viz reluctantly began censoring the series, but in 2001, after three censored volumes, it announced an uncensored, reprinted return in response to fan reactions. In October 2009, Wicomico County Public Schools in Maryland banned the manga from its district. In 2025, a writer at Screen Rant warned that the vague wording of Texas Senate Bill 20 made things dangerous for manga and anime such as Dragon Ball. The franchise also became a merchandising machine. Burger King sponsored a promotion in 2000 to distribute 20 million Dragon Ball Z figures across North America, and Bandai sold over 2 billion Dragon Ball Carddass cards in Japan by 1998. A 2009 American live-action film, Dragonball Evolution, directed by James Wong and produced by Stephen Chow, flopped and was widely heralded as one of the worst adaptations of all time. Toriyama, left out of the creative process, said the result was a movie he couldn't even call Dragon Ball. Its writer, Ben Ramsey, later issued a public apology, admitting he had written it chasing a payday rather than as a fan. Manga artists kept finding the opposite path forward. One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda and Naruto creator Masashi Kishimoto have both said Goku inspired their own protagonists, and in 2006 Oda and Toriyama joined forces for a crossover chapter titled Cross Epoch.