When Dragon Ball began its grand revival in Japan in the early 2000s — with a “Perfect Edition” release of the manga and the TV series’ availability on home video for the first time ever via the Dragon Boxes — Shueisha began releasing new companion guide books to compliment this sudden surge of interest in the franchise once again. The first of these guides was Dragon Ball Z Son Goku Densetsu, an anime guide book covering the Dragon Ball Z TV series. It may be some years later now, but we’re happy to announce that an information page for the guide book is now available in our “Databook Guide”!
While there’s plenty of great information in the guide, its true highlight is a lengthy interview with Akira Toriyama and Katsuyoshi Nakatsuru, one of the main illustrators and character designers for the anime who is known for being able to closely match Toriyama’s art style. So in addition to simply creating an information page for the guide, we’ve also translated this amazing interview for your reading pleasure and added it to the “Translations” section!
8 Comments
The out-of-universe back-story behind Goku having a tail (a joke by the editor) is fantastic. Also Toriyama bringing back Chi-Chi who he said he doesn’t like–as a kind of punishment to himself was interesting. I enjoy out-of-universe explanations for things.
Awesome page! I really enjoy the guide books! I remember before the sites were revamped and ported into one, the information pages for the guide books had really neat full scans of select pages from each section/chapter. I was just curious the reason for the change? The few pages were really nice for getting a look and feel for how the printed books that I didn’t own were laid out and formatted.
Just curious!
Awesome and very interesting interview!
In all honesty, I dropped those page scans because they were the main reason we were so slow at getting guide book pages done. They’re a pain in the butt, and I’m just too anal about those things. Maybe at some point in the future, when we have all the pages done, we can go back and add page scans.
Question, are the old translations of guidebooks from Kanzentai going to return, and are you going to translate more guidebooks?
Bardock’s armor being based off of Kikuchiyo’s, Dragon Ball’s name coming from Enter the Dragon and the Bruceploitation craze, and the Kame School color coming from the Shaolin uniform. Really cool stuff and I love Toriyama’s unwillingness.
Alright, makes sense. If such a day of returning miniature page scans does come in the future, I will be a happy fan! Keep up the great work!
It’s official. Freeza was naked in his final form! 😯 Other than that, that was an awesome interview. Keep up the good work!