Doctor. wrote:Kunzait_83 wrote:snip
I'm curious, though Kunzait, what influences
has Dragon Ball had on media that followed it? You've been more than clear in your opinion that modern Shounen is nothing but garbage, and that they missed the point in everything they borrow from DB, so what do you think made Dragon Ball stand out amongst the other works of the time period following the same cultural tradition and what kind of positive impact did it have on media that succeeded it?
So there's two main parts to that question, one of which is fairly straightforward, and the other of which I have a very controversial stance on.
So I'll start with the straightforward one: what made Dragon Ball stand out among all the other Wuxia works of media that had been circulating throughout Asian territories during its day in the 80s and early 90s?
Easy. Akira Toriyama's particular, individual creative touch.
Understand something: Dragon Ball was NOT Toriyama's first rodeo as a superstar manga author. The dude was ALREADY a massively acclaimed, prolific artist thanks to Dr. Slump, which itself was a MASSIVE audience hit and pop culture phenomenon not just in Japan, but across territories over even in Hong Kong and other regions of that part of the world.
Toriyama's very distinctive art style and sense of aesthetic as well as his just as equally distinctive sense of humor had already propelled him into the limelight via a work like Slump which functions as its most purest distillation of his specific sensibilities: Slump is vastly more raw, unfiltered Toriyama than even Dragon Ball is, following 100% the author's own whimsy without almost any of the outside conventions of something like DB impacting it in any way.
With a deeply personalized, unfiltered work like Slump already under his belt and propelling his brand of visuals and humor into mainstream mega-success, the stage was already set for Toriyama to apply that same touch to a work falling more within a more broadly popular genre. It could've been almost ANYTHING else: a more general sci fi story, horror, mystery/detective, military/war, super robot/mecha, chanbara/jidaigeki,
actual superheroes perhaps... a pirate adventure or ninjas maybe, etc.
But Toriyama opted to go with a Journey to the West-inspired Wuxia for his post-Slump effort. This in itself is significant for several reasons.
First,
as I've already outlined in MUCH greater detail in the Wuxia thread, there's the much broader context behind the fact that Wuxia as a genre was going through a MASSIVE modernized transitional period as well as an equally massive surge in global popularity and recognition right smack during the 1980s, and extending all the way through to most of the 90s. After countless decades of being stuck in a "stuffy, traditional costume drama" rut, as the 70s were drawing to a close, younger and more adventurous/rebellious Wuxia filmmakers over in Hong Kong were starting to get wildly experimental with the genre and began to take to fusing it with modern/foreign elements. This served to give the genre as a whole a HUGE boost in popularity not just in its native land, but abroad as well.
Toriyama happened to enter into creating Dragon Ball right at the VERY CUSP of this particular wave of Wuxia taking off into the massive, ubiquitously popular trend that it has become throughout pretty much my entire formative years growing up and getting into this stuff (bulk of the 80s and 90s). This zeitgeist for the genre was defined by being: anarchic, irreverent, and very modernized in its spirit, with traditions of the past either cast to the wayside entirely or fused willy nilly with elements of the present. Thus instead of Wuxia that followed the same rigid traditions of storytelling within it laid down by ancient texts and authors from generations past, you had Wuxia stories where, if the writer/director/artist had felt like it, could turn on a dime into a police procedural, or a wacky Marx Brothers-style farce, or have zombies or space aliens suddenly wander into the story partway through for no real reason, etc.
"Just for shits and giggles" had become the mass market order of the day with regards to this VERY ancient and established genre of Chinese (and by extension of centuries' worth of mass cultural appropriation, Japanese and other Asian territories) kung fu fantasy fiction, and this brand of "lets let our collective hair down and just have off the wall wacky, surreal fun with this stuff" had built itself up from a tiny, but vibrant wave of rebellion against tradition from a few young Hong Kong filmmakers and artists in the late 70s into a full blown pop cultural phenomenon that could no longer just be contained into Asian territories,
but had even managed to seep its way Westward as well
as the 80s drew on into the 90s.
It was right smack at the cusp of THIS particular cultural zeitgeist surrounding this particular genre that Toriyama had happened into when he started work on Dragon Ball: a zeitgeist that was a PERFECT, flawless fit for his entire shtick as a wacky, non-sequitur-driven gag artist.
So just to quickly recap: you take the guy who was ALREADY a massively successful household name of a celebrity artist thanks to his immediately recognizable, uniquely distinct, and polished aesthetic and his zany, deranged little comic about an innocent robot girl and poop jokes that acted as a 100% unfiltered window into his psyche... then you have him for his follow-up effort take all of that - his unique and marketable visual style and his whimsically demented sense of random humor - and have him next tackle a mainstream fantasy genre that is not only already as much of a recognizable and popular cultural standard in his native territories as Cowboy Westerns, swords and sandals epics, and Hollywood action movies are over on U.S. shores, but was also going through a massive renaissance of a modernized re-invention right smack directly throughout the mainstream pop culture of his particular time and region into something that just happened to PERFECTLY fall in line with his entire brand of wacky, nonsensical humor that had made him so famous and successful in the first place.
What do you get when those stars happen to align themselves THAT spot the fuck on perfectly?
THAT'S why Dragon Ball stood out so much and grew as big as it did amidst the already over-stuffed Wuxia landscape of its day. That and Toriyama had overall largely managed to make it REALLY well executed and hang itself together as well as he did: so you add genuine QUALITY on top of a work that had managed to time its arrival with the cultural zeitgeist so perfectly, and you get something that actually stands the test of time to boot.
It is also within that very same framework that Yu Yu Hakusho has also come into existence: the prevalence of genre-mashing and mixing in martial arts fantasy during that time also meant that paranormal/horror-infused Wuxia was ALSO going through a HUGE surge in popularity during that time. As I mentioned in my last post, Yu Yu Hakusho wasn't the first manga to capitalize on that, and it certainly would've likely done so had Dragon Ball never come into the picture.
Indeed, the fact that YYH displaces its setting from an ancient fantasy Jianghu world of traditional Wuxia in favor of the modern day 1990s of its present time is a MASSIVE give away to this, as there were tons and tons of other martial arts fantasy titles that were experimenting identically with their setting, transporting their Wuxia narratives into the modern present as well as far off sci fi future worlds (which Dragon Ball had also partly done itself by mixing its setting with equal parts traditional ancient fantasy Jianghu with modern and futuristic trappings: something that is very much unique and original to DB).
By the way, as a fun side note: the very same wave of modernized, genre-mashing, anarchic martial arts fantasy that Dragon Ball had rode to success in the 80s and early 90s?
As I also detailed in the Wuxia thread, it had largely run out of steam and had fallen out of fashion by the late 90s and early 2000s, whereupon Wuxia of a MUCH more rigidly traditionalist nature had begun to make a MASSIVE comeback into prominence that lasted all throughout the 2000s.
Pop culture being the pendulum that it is however, that by the early 2010's and after more than a decade of reconstructive, highly reverent and respectful tributes to Wuxia in its purest & most classically traditional form having utterly dominated the genre's landscape, suddenly nostalgia for the 80s and early 90s wave of wacky, batshit irreverent, genre-blending martial arts fantasy began to set in across Asian markets; and thus a whole smorgasbord of remakes, re-imaginings, and revivals of long dead and dormant big name titles from the 80s/90s golden age of that particular style (and of... wildly varying quality) also began to crop up throughout China and other martial arts fantasy-friendly territories. Hell, the 2010s have even seen a revival of Wuxia puppet theater shows (both in China AND Japan), which had also fallen out of fashion and disappeared from Asian TVs since the 90s had ended.
So after more than 10 years of being very much decidedly out of fashion throughout the 2000s, the Asian pop culture/Wuxia landscape of the 2010s have clearly ordained that the 80s and 90s brand of demented, genre-blurring martial arts fantasy is back in style and vogue again: but rather than simply make brand NEW titles that fall within that particular style (there've been some stabs at that to be sure, but not as many as there probably should be), many studios and creators are more often simply opting instead to reviving and remaking classic old titles with built-in name recognition that people remember fondly from that era (and with spotty, inconsistent results, at best).
Hmmmm....
So that's the first, more straightforward part of the question. The second part, and the part where my particular opinions would be seen as controversial, at least among fellow Dragon Ball fans: do I think that Dragon Ball has had ANY positive impact on the media that succeeded it and followed in its wake?
To be honest? Not... really, no. Overall, I don't.
There's two different particular sides to that question: the Japanese end of it, and the Western/U.S. end of it. Both are largely unconnected overall, but nonetheless end up at much a similar end result, and one that I personally don't see and never have seen as a positive one at all.
Over on Japan's end, I think that the net effect that Dragon Ball has had on Shonen manga has been MASSIVELY detrimental overall. Whereas prior to Dragon Ball, Shonen manga had room for a surprisingly varied and mature breadth of stories that in the post-Dragon Ball market of the late 90s and onward would simply NEVER be allowed into a Shonen publication and instead would be gated off to Seinen.
I've talked about some of those titles a little bit
over in this thread recently. But simply put: Dragon Ball's impact on Shonen has seemed to lend itself largely to further commercializing and infantilizing it into primarily revolving itself around "me too" wannabe successors to its particular crown. Not that Shonen wasn't a very commercial product before then obviously: but the degrees to which it has become further corporatized, sterilized, and resistant to creative risk have MASSIVELY increased in the wake of Dragon Ball, and certainly at least in SOME part in response to DB's massive success. This stark shift was very much apparent within Shonen overall from the late 90s onward.
I don't 100% blame Dragon Ball for this change obviously: there are indeed a lot of other factors, both cultural and economic, that play into it. But Dragon Ball definitely did more than its own part to help in this changeover, one which I simply don't really see the net benefit of insofar as the type of dumbed down audience it encourages & builds as well as the kinds of emotionally stunted and intellectually vapid end products it most often results in.
At the end of the day, while the pre-Dragon Ball world of mainstream Shonen manga was hardly utopian and had plenty of problems of its own, it was nonetheless still a place where titles as diverse, eclectic, and rich in their subject matter, genre sensibilities, and visual styles as the aforementioned Rokudenashi Blues (which is indeed an INCREDIBLE manga that everyone here who is even slightly interested in manga should seek out and read ASAP), and others such as Area 88, Barefoot Gen, City Hunter, Ashita no Joe, Mermaid Saga, Space Adventure Cobra, the wide ranging works of Osamu Tezuka, Kazuo Umezu, and Leiji Matsumoto, etc. could all find a massive audience and achieve mainstream success among a strikingly young audience given their styles, tones, and overall themes and subject matter. In a post-DB world, such titles would NEVER be allowed within spitting distance of most Shonen outlets, and would instead be shunted off into the Seinen end of the pool, where the market for such works is a LOT more crowded and they stand even LESS of a chance at standing out and getting noticed.
Plus I've always been personally of the view that children are often generally as smart as you treat them: when you present kids with something that is somewhat different and challenging, you'll often be surprised at how often they'll rise to meet the material and grow from it. When you present kids with something that is specifically meant to "talk down to their level" though, that generally just tends to stifle down and discourage their own natural intellectual curiosity and leave them content to sit where they are, rather than strive to learn more and to grow.
Hence, I've never been someone who has seen the wisdom in constantly lowering the bar of that which we consider to be "appropriate" for kids to consume. Honestly, the higher you raise it, the more that plenty of kids will completely surprise you in how well they're able to meet it. And I see a MUCH bigger overall benefit to having mass market children's media that more often ENCOURAGES intellectual growth rather than setting the bar so low that kids will be left content to just coast and wallow in largely vapid nonsense (and mistake even the SMALLEST, bare-minimum drops of creative ambition present in a lot of the popular Shonen today for being unparalleled artistic achievements).
The Shonen landscape of the pre-Dragon Ball world was one that overall had enough room to present kids with at least
some works with some staggeringly mature and challenging themes and ideas (that under most people's criteria would be seen as more suitable for an adult audience) whereas with the Shonen landscape of the post-Dragon Ball world, the overall range of titles are a LOT more narrower and are MUCH more apt to simply wallow in dumb escapism and fruitlessly chasing the dragon (no pun intended) of the specific high brought on by Dragon Ball initially back in the day rather than exploring and experimenting in new and markedly different horizons.
And don't misunderstand: its not like the Shonen landscape of the 70s, 80s, and early 90s didn't have its fair share of utterly vapid stupidity (
it certainly did), and its not like there isn't the occasional worthwhile gem to come out of the modern day Shonen landscape: I'm ultimately talking about the overall net effect here and the broader degrees at play. I think that overall, things like the relentless commercial pursuit of Dragon Ball's success, the wild misunderstanding of why it worked so well and resonated so strongly among the authors its influenced, and the overall narrowing of Shonen's broader focus and scope around heavily DB-esque ventures has done a LOT to overall dumb down and infantilize the Shonen market and landscape as a whole.
That DOESN'T mean that I still don't like Dragon Ball in and of itself for what it is unto itself: within a vacuum, Dragon Ball is still a marvelously well realized and well told martial arts fantasy epic that has masterful control of its tone oscillating between irreverent whimsy and impactful drama and back again at the drop of a hat in a way that most of its "successors" desperately fumble over trying (and oftentimes miserably failing) to recapture.
All other baggage aside, in its un-tampered with form at least (i.e. non-FUNimation and honestly non-Kai too) Dragon Ball is still a fantastic representative of that whole "throw any craziness at the wall and see what sticks" era of 80s and 90s martial arts fantasy media, and one that is perfectly illustrative of why many of the weird, bizarre concoctions and brews of strange, experimentally wild and high energy Wuxia blendings from that time were as potent and vital as they were. And of all the potential examples of those kinds of works of that particular era to still have lasting relevance, notoriety, and audience fondness decades down the line, DB is certainly a perfectly fine and fitting enough title that warrants it making the grade.
But just because I can still enjoy Dragon Ball for what it is on its own, doesn't mean that I don't still very much dislike the overall influence and impact on much of what came after it in its wake that's attempted to emulate it. I have similar feelings with regards to Neon Genesis Evangelion: on its own terms by itself, Eva is still an excellent and incredibly well realized and thoughtful mecha anime with a lot of fascinating themes and ideas. But despite being very well executed on its own, the overall impact its had on the anime industry at large is one that I feel has been overall a disastrous one, a legacy that's in large part helped lead to certain key aspects of the hopeless rut that many parts of the anime industry have been stuck in for the better part of the last 15+ years solid now.
Like with Eva, Dragon Ball is a case of being a still very good, and solid classic title that stand the test of time because it succeeds marvelously at exactly what it sets out to do... that happens to also contain a lot of awful baggage with regards to its legacy and future impact on the medium going forward: a legacy which no one, least of all the creators involved, obviously could've in NO way foreseen, so I certainly don't blame them or hold any bitterness or ill will towards them for it.
All that's in regards to Dragon Ball's impact on the Japanese end of manga/anime. On the U.S. end of things, I also feel strongly that DB has had an overall disastrously negative impact: only for a totally different set of wholly unrelated reasons that nonetheless have ultimately lead to very similar end results when all's said and done.
In this case of course I'm referring to the Cartoon Network/Toonami anime boom that serves as the very reason that most folks on this forum (with some exceptions of course) are even here at all in the first place. Dragon Ball of course, along with Pokemon, was the tip of that particular spear, one which helped see the U.S. industry for anime go from a largely semi-underground art house popularity among adult audiences to that of a mass market phenomenon for elementary school kids.
The issue here is that the U.S., comics and animation are is NOT in anywhere NEAR the same cultural situation as they are over in Japan. Over in Japan, the animation industry is such that there is plenty of room for a more broadly diverse range of films and TV shows for a wide variety of age ranges and audience-types and tastes. In America, animation is VERY rigidly gated off to either being strictly for children only, or if its something for adults then it oftentimes MUST be some specific form of comedy (generally in the Simpsons, South Park, and Family Guy-esque range). Animated adult dramas and "serious" action, horror, sci fi/fantasy, and other genre works are simply NOT a thing that has ANY kind of a foothold here like they do in Japan. There are some VERY rare exceptions that squeeze themselves out from time to time, but overall they're an EXTREME rarity.
For a long time prior to the Cartoon Network era, anime served as an antidote to all that for U.S. audiences who were hungry to see animation that challenged those norms. The specific why's and how's of what ended up happening is a very long story unto itself (and my post here has already fairly dense enough as it is), but to make a long story short: one of the big end results of the Cartoon Network/Toonami anime boom (that was again in large part spearheaded by FUNimation's DBZ) was the near complete displacement and decimation of any kind of a serious adult market for genuinely mature, challenging anime that was once a thriving and growing home video sub-market of its own in years prior.
There were a LOT of other economic and business factors at play here - including the insane early/mid 2000s excesses and subsequent collapse of the U.S. anime DVD market: which was itself something that was partly spurred on and stoked by the Cartoon Network phenomenon anyways, not to mention the whole piracy angle of it as well - but what I'm ultimately talking about is something that is more on a level of raw fandom awareness and innate audience appeal: that which initially draws in and hooks audiences to begin with.
The under-discussed reality of the cultural/fandom-wide changeover that occurred among U.S. anime fandom during the early 2000s was the complete and total displacement and overriding of any kind of a, for lack of a better way of phrasing it, "pulp and art house" audience of adult anime fans - people with more of a tangible root connection to independent and home video/cinematic media rather than network televised media - that used to exist before (and indeed was anime's primary U.S. audience and fanbase at one point) in favor of catering to an audience that was largely made up of either ill-informed elementary school kids, or slightly older teens and early 20-somethings with under-developed and stunted media habits and tastes of their own that remained firmly stuck at much the same level as the aforementioned elementary school kids.
Basically summed up: in the wake of DB's success on Cartoon Network, anime in the U.S. as an overall whole went from something that was largely thriving within a home video-dominant market catering to a more art and media-savvy audience of adults with more robust and mature sensibilities overall (be they on the pulp sleazy B movie end of the spectrum or the more art house experimental filmgoing end of the spectrum: usually often existing somewhere as a waypoint between the two), and was transmuted into largely pandering instead to much the same type of audience as a Power Rangers, Transformers, or 80s Fred Wolf TMNT-crazed audience of kids looking for the next mass market, toy commercial-esque kiddie fad to glom onto.
The entire innate TYPE of audience being predominantly sought out, attracted, and served by Western licensors had WILDLY and fundamentally changed: it went from being largely people who were sick of and had no interest whatsoever in animation as a commercialized kiddie juggernaut and wanted to see the medium of animation elevated to the same level of artistic diversity and depth as regular live action film, into an audience of kids (and man-kids) who LOVED animation specifically AS a commercialized kiddie juggernaut already, and simply wanted to see that particular form of "kids' action cartoon" SLIGHTLY more elevated by just a tad (and got a taste for that beforehand via titles like Bruce Timm's DCAU and Disney's Gargoyles and such), and had largely gotten exactly that with the anime played on Toonami thanks to the fact that Japanese culture doesn't treat its children with QUITE as much intellectual disdain as American culture had for so long, even within its own mass market merchandise-moving kid phenomenons.
There's a LOT of other nuance at play in there as well: like yes, obviously there existed heavily edited and overly-localized anime on U.S. mainstream kids TV before DBZ on Toonami (Sailor Moon, Ronin Warriors, Voltron, Robotech, and so forth): but no, contrary to what people in communities like this believe, they WEREN'T anywhere even close to the be-all, end-all of anime's foothold in North America during that pre-Cartoon Network time period: far, FAR from it and quite the contrary in fact.
But that's one of the overall biggest effects that DBZ's U.S. Toonami success helped wreak on the anime fanbase in North America that goes very much under discussed in many corners of fandom (including this one). And no, I do not now nor have I ever viewed it as an overall net positive of any sort, despite all of the new fans that it helped bring in.
Yes, because of DBZ's U.S. success in the late 90s/early 2000s, there are now - and have been since throughout the 2000s - a LOT more people overall who are aware of and into anime than there were back in the 80s and early 90s. No however, that massive audience surge
isn't of very much use to someone like me - someone from an era for whom the entire POINT of getting into anime
at all in the first place was in large part for its adult-focused, experimental end of the market, with stuff like DB being interesting and memorably noteworthy little side-attractions and diversions along the way - when by and large the only types of anime that most of those people are largely aware of and are interested in exploring and discussing is Dragon Ball/Pokemon-derived kiddie swill along the lines of Naruto, One Piece, Fairy Tale, My Hero Academia, Yu Gi Oh, Digimon, and whatever the next Shonen Jump flavor of the moment happens to be.
This is furthermore not helped by the fact that such a vast swath of the post-CN wave of Western anime fans are often under the false impression that such Shonen kiddie slop is somehow the "mature, adult" end of the anime spectrum (for incredibly dumb, shallow reasons that effectively boils down to the fact that Japanese children's media is SLIGHTLY more liberal and willing to lend its audience a sliver more of the intellectual benefit of the doubt than most U.S. kids' media traditionally has), and the very existence of what is ACTUALLY supposed to be the "mature, adult" end of the anime spectrum (Seinen) is either almost totally 100% unknown to them at best, or tremendously intimidating and viscerally offputting enough to send them running away from it in terror at worst.
So in short (i.e. TLDR):
1) I think that the reasons for why DB managed to stand out and become successful in its day had a LOT to do with a massively distinctive mega-talent like Toriyama putting his own auteur spin on an already popular and prevalent fantasy genre that had the fortunate timing of coinciding with a massively popular wave of that genre that happened to line itself up perfectly with Toriyama's particular brand of style and humor.
And 2) no, I'm of the contentious view that while DB still remains a perfectly fine children's kung fu fairy tale, its legacy and impact on anime and manga (on both the Eastern and Western shores) hasn't been a very positive one overall, thanks largely to corporate greed seeking to endlessly repeat it (at the expense of allowing for other kinds of creative voices to flourish) as well as thanks to stubbornly clung to nostalgia getting in the way of people moving on to other things.
