Pretty sure its explained inhere somewhere, but I'll give a go at trying to explain the process.jpranevich wrote:Thanks for everyone that adds information to this thread. I suppose that now that Toriyama is sharing writing duties (even to a small extent) with Toyotaro, I am much more interested in the other non-Toriyama writers that have contributed to the series.
I'm just re-watching the journey-to-Namek filler now (for the first time uncut; last time I watched this was in Toonami's original English run): two episodes featuring space-orphans (seriously, what is up with Gohan wandering into orphans?) followed by four on Fake Namek.
The space orphans were actually better than I remembered, in large part because the mini-arc was short and because the writers used that as a backdoor introduction to Freeza's empire, effectively adding tension as our heroes realize that space isn't as friendly as they believed. The Kanzenshuu guide says they were scripted by Takao Koyama (39) & Katsuyuki Sumisawa (40). That still makes me wonder who came up with the scenario for it. Keiji Terui did the previous orphans episode (ep14) so at least he can't be blamed for repeating himself.
I'm still making it through Fake Namek, but I'm not at all sure why the writers decided that was the best way to use up four episodes. I suppose the idea of a DB-style dragon ball hunt isn't a terrible one (and there are echos of the second DB hunt during the Red Ribbon arc except with Gohan instead of Goku), but given that Toriyama's about to give us the absolutely brilliant subversion with the Namek ball hunt, it seems redundant. I am not a brilliant anime writer so I don't have any particularly good ideas as to what they could have done better, but there must have been something. Scripting for these were Keiji Terui (41 & 44) and Aya Matsui/Takao Koyama (42 & 43). Interesting that there are no crossover with the previous mini-arc; I suppose that it must have taken some time to come up with these out of whole cloth. Other than DB's wedding dress arc, these four episodes make up the longest all filler mini-arc of the series so far as the majority of the filler in both series are one-off standalones instead of arcs.
In some future amazingly brilliant version of Kanzenshuu, can you please make the staff names clickable so we can see which episodes they contributed to?
Though it is a pretty extensive process, here's the meat and bones from my understanding.
In order to come up with a filler arc, Toei gets the okay from all stakeholders involved in the airing of the anime. The series directors and composer, and other higher ups come together to plan out the events of the filler arc, and how its going to be distributed among the episodes they have been alloted to have the filler arc take place by the other stakeholders. After the storyline has been created, the series composer then breaks it up and hands it down to individual episode script writers to expand upon into 20 minute episodes. Episode script writers have very little power usually over the actual main points of an episode(unless the series composer decides to step in to handle an episode), as their job for the most part is merely to expand on the points they are given to be adapted by the storyboard artist and director into a full episode. Once the scripts are completed they are handed over to the storyboard artists and directors to adapt, and they can also make variations and changes in the script to suit their vision.
That's relatively the meat and bones of the creation of filler to my understanding. Someone with a better understanding can feel free to correct me.