Dragon Ball Z

• 1. Introduction

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  Dragon Ball Z premiered on Fuji Television on the 26th of April 1989, and from that first episode it was chasing something its predecessor never quite reached. The creative team behind it had been drafted from Saint Seiya, a different show entirely, brought in specifically because Dragon Ball's original producer carried a "cute and funny" image that no longer fit the direction Akira Toriyama's manga was heading. Toriyama himself chose the title. Z is the last letter of the alphabet, and he picked it because he wanted the series to end. He was running out of ideas. The irony is that the sequel would outlast the original in episode count, run for 291 episodes, and get dubbed into at least 81 countries. What began as a planned ending became a cultural institution. The questions worth asking are not just how that happened, but why the series looked and sounded so different depending on where in the world you watched it, and how a show that halted production in America in 1998 ended up as the top-rated program on Cartoon Network just one year later.

• 2. The Saiyan Blueprint

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  Tadayoshi Yamamuro, one of the character designers for Dragon Ball Z, turned to the martial artist Bruce Lee when he had to figure out what Goku should look like at the moment of his most famous transformation. Yamamuro said that when Goku first becomes a Super Saiyan, his slanting pose and scowling eyes are "all Bruce Lee." Toriyama had already drawn Goku's piercing eyes in that form with Bruce Lee's paralyzing glare in mind in the original manga, so the anime was continuing a reference that was already embedded in the source. That attention to specific physical archetypes extended to the voice cast as well. Masako Nozawa voiced Goku, Gohan, and Goten across the same recording sessions, switching between the three simply upon seeing each character's picture. She did acknowledge that when the production schedule included two films a year alongside television specials, there were times when she had only line art to work from, which made nuanced performance harder to achieve. The adaptation itself drew from the final 324 chapters of Toriyama's manga, which ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from 1988 to 1995. Because Toriyama was writing the manga while the anime was in production, the show frequently needed to fill time. Original material was added, scenes were extended, and new characters were created. Toriyama was asked to design an additional character for Goku's training with King Kai, which is how a cricket named Gregory came to exist in the anime but nowhere in the manga.

• 3. America's Fractured Dub

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  Funimation Productions licensed Dragon Ball Z for English-language release in North America in 1996, but the version that premiered in the United States on the 13th of September 1996 bore little resemblance to what Japanese audiences had watched. Saban Entertainment, which handled syndication, required edits. The first 67 episodes were compressed into 53. Death was referred to as being "sent to the next dimension." The character Mr. Satan was renamed Hercule, a change that held across Viz Media's manga releases and video games even after other properties reversed it. At one point, after what appeared to be a fatal helicopter explosion, a character was given the line, "I can see their parachutes; they're okay!" The show's ratings were strong despite all of this, but Funimation halted production in 1998 after two seasons. Saban had decided to concentrate on producing original content for the Fox Kids Network and its newly acquired Fox Family Channel and scaled back its syndication operations. Production stopped mid-series. Then, on the 31st of August 1998, reruns of the canceled dub began airing on Cartoon Network's Toonami block. The response was significant enough that Cartoon Network ordered more episodes. Funimation resumed production without Saban, replaced the Vancouver-based cast with an in-house Texas team, and replaced the Saban-produced soundtrack with a new score. The premiere of Dragon Ball Z's third season in 1999, now using the in-house dub, was the highest-rated program ever broadcast on Cartoon Network up to that point. In 2002, in the week ending the 22nd of September, Dragon Ball Z ranked as the number one program on all of television for tweens aged 9-14, boys aged 9-14, and men aged 12-24. The Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday telecasts that week were the top three programs on all of television for boys aged 9-14, across both broadcast and cable.

• 4. Music Across Borders

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  Shunsuke Kikuchi composed the score for Dragon Ball Z in Japan, and the show's first 199 episodes opened with "Cha-La Head-Cha-La" performed by Hironobu Kageyama. The second opening theme, "We Gotta Power," also sung by Kageyama, ran through to the series finale at episode 291. Neither theme survived into Funimation's remastered dub; licensing issues led to both being replaced with an original instrumental piece. The original Saban-produced English soundtrack had its own complicated authorship. Ron Wasserman and Jeremy Sweet, known for their work on the Power Rangers franchise, composed the guitar-driven music. Sweet sang the opening theme, nicknamed "Rock the Dragon," and Wasserman was subsequently hired for background music. For contractual reasons, the credits listed Saban founders Shuki Levy and Haim Saban, writing under the alias Kussa Mahehi, as the official composers. The actual extent of their involvement was never clarified. In total, Dragon Ball Z released 21 soundtracks as part of the Dragon Ball Z Hit Song Collection series in Japan, with dozens of additional releases across Japanese and foreign markets covering anime themes and video game music. A separate Westwood Media dub produced for broadcast in the UK, the Netherlands, and Ireland used an alternate soundtrack by Tom Keenlyside and John Mitchell, though most of that score consisted of pieces Ocean Studios had reused from other productions they had already scored.

• 5. The Merchandise Machine

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  Dragon Ball Z merchandise generated $2.95 billion in worldwide sales in 1996 alone, the year Funimation's English dub launched. By January 2012, the cumulative worldwide merchandise total had reached $5 billion. The franchise's Asian earnings, covering both the anime and merchandise, had already hit $3 billion by 1999. In the United States, the series sold over 14 million videos by 2002. The toy market reflects how thoroughly Dragon Ball Z penetrated American children's retail. Irwin Toy released more than 72 figures in sizes of two inches and five inches, which became top-selling toys in a market then dominated by the Pokemon Trading Card Game. Irwin also produced a battery-powered Flying Nimbus Cloud toy that hovered without touching the ground, and a die-cast vehicle line with collector capsules. In June 2000, Burger King ran a promotion featuring 20 million figures, with Burger King absorbing the full cost. In December 2002, Jakks Pacific signed a three-year licensing deal after Irwin Toy went bankrupt. The Halloween Association, in a nationwide survey, found Dragon Ball Z costumes to be the fourth most popular costume choice. By 2001, the official Dragon Ball Z website was recording 4.7 million hits per day and had more than 500,000 registered fans. The search term "Dragonball" held the top position on Lycos for 2001 and ranked third most popular on that engine in 2002.

• 6. Serialization's Lasting Mark

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  Christopher J. Olson and CarrieLynn D. Reinhard observed that Western fans came to Dragon Ball Z because it offered action not available in other animated or live-action programming at the time. The structural reason for that difference was serialization. Dragon Ball Z told continuous story arcs that stretched across multiple episodes and seasons. American television in that era operated on an episodic model in which each installment told a self-contained story. Dragon Ball Z's format was the norm in Japan and largely unknown to American audiences. Media historian Hal Erickson, writing in 2005, called Dragon Ball "the closest thing on American television to an animated soap opera," situating it within a genre he described as "old, established and venerated" in Japan. That format has since become a defining characteristic of American streaming television during what critics call the Peak TV era. Dragon Ball Z was listed as the 50th greatest animated show in Wizard magazine's ranking of the top 100, and the series ranked sixth on Wizard's Anime Magazine list of the top 50 anime released in North America. In 2015, Ford Motor Company released two commercials featuring characters from the series, one for the Ford Fusion and one for the Ford Focus. On the 17th of July 2019, Dragon Ball fans set a Guinness World Record for the largest Kamehameha attack at San Diego Comic-Con.

• 7. Dragon Ball Z Kai and What Came After

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  In February 2009, Toei Animation announced a remastered version of Dragon Ball Z to mark the franchise's 20th anniversary. The project originated not from creative ambition but from a commercial request: Bandai had asked Toriyama whether a completely new Dragon Ball anime could be made to boost merchandise sales. Toriyama declined to write new material, so a refined version of Dragon Ball Z was produced instead. Dragon Ball Kai, with the suffix meaning "updated" or "altered," premiered on Fuji Television on the 5th of April 2009. The original footage was remastered into HD, with damaged or erroneous cel frames redrawn, and the majority of filler content removed to align the series more closely with the manga's pacing. The series initially concluded with its 97th episode on the 27th of March 2011. It had been scheduled for 98 episodes, but the final installment was withheld from broadcast due to news coverage of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami and was instead released as a direct-to-video exclusive in Japan on the 2nd of August 2011. In November 2012, voice actor Mayumi Tanaka announced that the cast was recording additional episodes. The continued run, covering the Buu Saga under the international title Dragon Ball Z Kai: The Final Chapters, began airing on the 6th of April 2014 and concluded on the 28th of June 2015. Dragon Ball Super, the midquel series that followed, premiered on the 5th of July 2015, taking over the timeslot that Kai had vacated.