Anyone surprised the original run of Dragon Ball/DBZ/GT only lasted about 10 years?

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Anyone surprised the original run of Dragon Ball/DBZ/GT only lasted about 10 years?

Post by precita » Wed Dec 30, 2020 10:19 am

The original Dragon Ball debuted in Japan on February 26, 1986. GT's final episode aired on November 19, 1997.

That means the whole original run of the Dragon Ball anime through the end of GT only aired over the span of about 10 years in Japan from 1986 to 1997. While of course that's pretty "long" for an anime, it also feels comparably short for such a long lasting franchise that remained relevant for over 30+ years.

Obviously due to the dubs airing in the west in the early 2000's it "feels" like Dragon Ball was around longer, but if you just count the original run it really only lasted a decade. I just find it kind of interesting how looking back now the series pretty much ended when most people were either kids or not even born yet in some cases.

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Re: Anyone surprised the original run of Dragon Ball/DBZ/GT only lasted about 10 years?

Post by Matches Malone » Wed Dec 30, 2020 10:29 am

Only ? I think a decade is the perfect length for something like DB. In that decade it got 508 episodes, 17 movies, & 3 TV specials. Many argue that it went on too long, and that it should've ended around its 7th or 8th year with the Cell games. I don't agree with that as I love the Buu arc, but GT was definitely pushing it.

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Re: Anyone surprised the original run of Dragon Ball/DBZ/GT only lasted about 10 years?

Post by MasenkoHA » Wed Dec 30, 2020 10:38 am

11 years is long by any normal standards. Thank God it didn’t turn into One Piece or Pokemon.

Shoot as much as I enjoy the Cell and Boo saga and don’t outright hate GT or Super I’d argue the story was better off ending at the 23rd Tenkaichi Budokai or the Freeza saga.

Matches Malone wrote: Wed Dec 30, 2020 10:29 am Many argue that it went on too long, and that it should've ended around its 7th or 8th year with the Cell games. I don't agree with that as I love the Buu arc, but GT was definitely pushing it.
The Cell Games would have been a terrible way to end the series and I’ll never understand why the fandom thinks its a good ending point. 23rd Budokai, Freeza, Boo, and GT are all significantly better ending points

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Re: Anyone surprised the original run of Dragon Ball/DBZ/GT only lasted about 10 years?

Post by Matches Malone » Wed Dec 30, 2020 10:55 am

MasenkoHA wrote: Wed Dec 30, 2020 10:38 am11 years is long by any normal standards. Thank God it didn’t turn into One Piece or Pokemon.
I'm not against something being long if there's a story worth telling, the problem is that DB isn't fit to last as long as it has, as we saw with GT and currently Super.

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Re: Anyone surprised the original run of Dragon Ball/DBZ/GT only lasted about 10 years?

Post by MasenkoHA » Wed Dec 30, 2020 10:56 am

Matches Malone wrote: Wed Dec 30, 2020 10:55 am
MasenkoHA wrote: Wed Dec 30, 2020 10:38 am11 years is long by any normal standards. Thank God it didn’t turn into One Piece or Pokemon.
I'm not against something being long if there's a story worth telling, the problem is that DB isn't fit to last as long as it has, as we saw with GT and currently Super.
I guarantee you there is never a story worth telling that goes over into the 1000 episode range.

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Re: Anyone surprised the original run of Dragon Ball/DBZ/GT only lasted about 10 years?

Post by SuperSaiyaManZ94 » Wed Dec 30, 2020 11:16 am

11 years was a good run for the time as far as the original DB anime saga goes, especially seeing as the original manga itself ran just over a decade in serialization in Weekly Shonen Jump as well from November 1984 to May 1995.
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Re: Anyone surprised the original run of Dragon Ball/DBZ/GT only lasted about 10 years?

Post by dragonmagico » Wed Dec 30, 2020 11:30 am

It lasted 11 years my dude, thats very long enough. It doesnt need to be a drawn out slogfest turned borderline obsessive religion like one piece has become and that some of supers fans misguidedly want it to be

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Re: Anyone surprised the original run of Dragon Ball/DBZ/GT only lasted about 10 years?

Post by Matches Malone » Wed Dec 30, 2020 12:09 pm

dragonmagico wrote: Wed Dec 30, 2020 11:30 am It lasted 11 years my dude, thats very long enough. It doesnt need to be a drawn out slogfest turned borderline obsessive religion like one piece has become and that some of supers fans misguidedly want it to be
As much as I like One Piece, it could've easily been cut down by at least a third.

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Re: Anyone surprised the original run of Dragon Ball/DBZ/GT only lasted about 10 years?

Post by Hellspawn28 » Wed Dec 30, 2020 3:29 pm

The series had a nice run at the time and you did had people that felt like the series was overstaying its welcome by the Buu saga. I'm happy how things turn out in the end for the franchise.
MasenkoHA wrote: Wed Dec 30, 2020 10:38 am 11 years is long by any normal standards. Thank God it didn’t turn into One Piece or Pokemon.

Shoot as much as I enjoy the Cell and Boo saga and don’t outright hate GT or Super I’d argue the story was better off ending at the 23rd Tenkaichi Budokai or the Freeza saga.
The longer an anime & manga franchise goes, the worse it becomes in my opinion. I'm surprise that so many people watch Detective Conan because I hear the main character is still a kid. A show like that should have been at least 3 seasons long at max.
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Re: Anyone surprised the original run of Dragon Ball/DBZ/GT only lasted about 10 years?

Post by MasenkoHA » Wed Dec 30, 2020 3:33 pm

Hellspawn28 wrote: Wed Dec 30, 2020 3:29 pm

The longer an anime & manga franchise goes, the worse it becomes in my opinion. I'm surprise that so many people watch Detective Conan because I hear the main character is still a kid. A show like that should have been at least 3 seasons long at max.

Oof, I remember enjoying that one on Adult Swim when I was like 12 and was surprised that it was like One Piece level in length. Especially for a show that I seem to recall being fairly episodic

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Re: Anyone surprised the original run of Dragon Ball/DBZ/GT only lasted about 10 years?

Post by Chuquita » Wed Dec 30, 2020 4:26 pm

11 will take you all the way from birth to middle school. I think it's a respectable length of time for a series. Most series usually peak at year 3 or 4 anyway.

I'd definitely argue DB wasn't built to last a long time anyway--not like One Piece where they constantly go to new islands that function almost like setting resets that allow Oda to refresh the surroundings and rules of the story.
Plus it feels DB keeps trying to walk it back on places to explore and new things to see. They limit the number of planets with life, they spend time on tournaments and keep many battles to Earth instead of going somewhere new. Rarely are the main characters out of their element. That can only take you so far. Not to even get started on the power levels escalating so quickly and characters being so strong that it becomes more difficult to introduce believable antagonists.
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Re: Anyone surprised the original run of Dragon Ball/DBZ/GT only lasted about 10 years?

Post by ABED » Wed Dec 30, 2020 6:04 pm

Chuquita wrote: Wed Dec 30, 2020 4:26 pm 11 will take you all the way from birth to middle school. I think it's a respectable length of time for a series. Most series usually peak at year 3 or 4 anyway.

I'd definitely argue DB wasn't built to last a long time anyway--not like One Piece where they constantly go to new islands that function almost like setting resets that allow Oda to refresh the surroundings and rules of the story.
Plus it feels DB keeps trying to walk it back on places to explore and new things to see. They limit the number of planets with life, they spend time on tournaments and keep many battles to Earth instead of going somewhere new. Rarely are the main characters out of their element. That can only take you so far. Not to even get started on the power levels escalating so quickly and characters being so strong that it becomes more difficult to introduce believable antagonists.
Even without watching OP after a few islands, it's same song different verse. Every story has a shelf life, and 10 years for DB was a hell of a run. Everything afterwards is just bonus.

I haven't been super enthused by DB's output after BoG, but streaming is cheap and it's there so I might as well watch it, but I won't go out of my way.
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Re: Anyone surprised the original run of Dragon Ball/DBZ/GT only lasted about 10 years?

Post by Chuquita » Wed Dec 30, 2020 7:27 pm

ABED wrote: Wed Dec 30, 2020 6:04 pm
Chuquita wrote: Wed Dec 30, 2020 4:26 pm 11 will take you all the way from birth to middle school. I think it's a respectable length of time for a series. Most series usually peak at year 3 or 4 anyway.

I'd definitely argue DB wasn't built to last a long time anyway--not like One Piece where they constantly go to new islands that function almost like setting resets that allow Oda to refresh the surroundings and rules of the story.
Plus it feels DB keeps trying to walk it back on places to explore and new things to see. They limit the number of planets with life, they spend time on tournaments and keep many battles to Earth instead of going somewhere new. Rarely are the main characters out of their element. That can only take you so far. Not to even get started on the power levels escalating so quickly and characters being so strong that it becomes more difficult to introduce believable antagonists.
Even without watching OP after a few islands, it's same song different verse. Every story has a shelf life, and 10 years for DB was a hell of a run. Everything afterwards is just bonus.

I haven't been super enthused by DB's output after BoG, but streaming is cheap and it's there so I might as well watch it, but I won't go out of my way.

OP does have a set of tropes it follows, but I enjoy seeing each of the themed islands and there are a set of long standing mysteries left to be revealed (D, the moon, the void century, the titular treasure). My main current complaint with OP is Oda tries to cram too many panels into each chapter making the art too small. There was one chapter recently though where he used fewer panels and it made a smoother read.

I've stopped going out of my way for DBH. I was watching it at 2x speed, but having to do that was a red flag anyway regarding my interest in it and I dropped it completely earlier this year.

I actually wasn't paying much attention to the manga while it was doing its ToP, but once they became the only canon game in town I kept reading it. Like the ToP I didn't read it too deeply (I could not tell you the names of any of Moro's minions outside of Raspberry.) but I'm cautiously optimistic about Granola.
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Re: Anyone surprised the original run of Dragon Ball/DBZ/GT only lasted about 10 years?

Post by sunsetshimmer » Wed Dec 30, 2020 7:40 pm

I don't see how 10 years is "only", especially considering there was (mostly) one episode per week.
4th generation of My Little Pony lasted 9 years having over 200 episodes which isn't even half of original DB/Z/GT run episodes count and yet it felt like a really long adventure, especially if you actually watched it in its original run just like a lot of people in Japan did with DB. Perhaps it's a bit subjective, but imagine starting to watch DB as a 10yo kid and being adult when last episode of GT aired. That's a lot of time.
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Re: Anyone surprised the original run of Dragon Ball/DBZ/GT only lasted about 10 years?

Post by Thanos » Thu Dec 31, 2020 5:30 am

It isn’t quite the duration of the series, but just how old it is, that always manages to catch me off guard even after all this time. I do remember the year 1997, but of course I was a young kid and it’s strange to think of some of my early childhood memories lining up with the end of a very long run of the series which had been around for 13 years at that point. Buu had already been defeated by the time I hit kindergarten. That will always be strange to me. I’n sure the cultural ubiquity of the series isn’t as strange to younger fans, but I myself didn’t get into the series until 2000, a full three years after the end of GT which actually sounds like nothing compared to now. I guess that’s par for the course for American fans as the series took almost a decade to find its footing which coincided with around the end of Z in Japan.

As for the length itself, it does seem about right. As I said, when America picked up on Dragon Ball, it’s popularity, or at least it’s relevance, had largely dwindled in Japan by the time it got here. Globally it managed to have double the lifespan based on different territories picking it up at different times for whatever reason... which ultimately resulted in its revival. I wonder if that would have happened had the timeframes been closer? Let’s say DB, Z and GT had been simulcast around the world—presumably Hollywood would’ve had no reason to wait until 2009 to make a bad film to inspire Toriyama to revive it. In fact, I hadn’t considered the cultural implications of that until now—a whole generation would’ve missed out on the series due to it being ahead of their time.
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Re: Anyone surprised the original run of Dragon Ball/DBZ/GT only lasted about 10 years?

Post by KBABZ » Thu Dec 31, 2020 7:22 am

As said before, "only"?? C'mon man, many TV shows struggle to get past three years on eight episodes a season! Dragon Ball lasted 11 years with one episode a week, landing at 508 episodes, a truly astronomical total. This gets even more nuts if you count both the original and the reboot Dr. Slump animes that bookend Dragon Ball, for a ridiculous "Toriyama Block" that lasted from 1981 til 1999, an astounding 18 years. 18 years of Toriyama-based animation, every Wednesday, in the exact same timeslot, for a grand total of 825 episodes.

Pokémon hit 508 episodes until halfway into Diamond and Pearl in 2008, ten years in, and wouldn't hit 825 total until 19 and a half years into its run, about halfway into the Sun and Moon series. One Piece doesn't hit these numbers until 12 and 19 years in.

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Re: Anyone surprised the original run of Dragon Ball/DBZ/GT only lasted about 10 years?

Post by Dragon Ball Ireland » Thu Dec 31, 2020 8:00 am

I'm not surprised. Toriyama worked like a Dog (albeit a very well paid one) for over a decade. TOEI wanted to keep the money train going with GT, which, like Z's Buu arc ended up relatively underperforming when it comes to ratings, so that was cancelled in 1997, although by that point Dragon Ball was beginning to gain popularity in international territories, particularly the US where the original Funimation-produced Ocean dub was picked up by Toonami the following year, and the rest is history. It's not too dissimilar from today where we have no new Super, as of yet, because the franchise is making so much money elsewhere.
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Re: Anyone surprised the original run of Dragon Ball/DBZ/GT only lasted about 10 years?

Post by Lord Beerus » Thu Dec 31, 2020 5:06 pm

A story should only last as long as the creator feels motivated to tell more stories. By the time the Majin Boo arc went in full swing, Toriyama was burned out as you could tell from the increasingly haphazard storytelling and rough looking art. He was done with Dragon Ball and ended it at the right time before he turned it into a franchise zombie. And as seen with GT and Super, you can't get good milk from a dead cow.

10 years is an insanely long time for any singular story to last, and we got a hell of a lot of content out of those 10 years. So it kind of mystifies me when some fans think that hundreds of 20 minutes episodes of anime, over a dozen animated movies and several TV specials and OVA's aren't enough for me.

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Re: Anyone surprised the original run of Dragon Ball/DBZ/GT only lasted about 10 years?

Post by Anonymous Friend » Thu Dec 31, 2020 5:43 pm

I think the only real problem with Dragonball was that the only real solution to any threat was to throw more power at it. I think this start at the Piccolo Arc in DB. Both Piccolo's defeat did come down to using a crazy technique but only after using some new higher power to whittle them down. I think this is a problem with most shonen of that era and slightly later. The best parts of The Namek and Andriod stuff was having to play Cat and Mouse between the heroes and villains. I just really wished things could have been mixed up by just having enemies with weird powers that had to be countered differently.
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Re: Anyone surprised the original run of Dragon Ball/DBZ/GT only lasted about 10 years?

Post by ABED » Thu Dec 31, 2020 11:43 pm

Anonymous Friend wrote: Thu Dec 31, 2020 5:43 pm I think the only real problem with Dragonball was that the only real solution to any threat was to throw more power at it. I think this start at the Piccolo Arc in DB. Both Piccolo's defeat did come down to using a crazy technique but only after using some new higher power to whittle them down. I think this is a problem with most shonen of that era and slightly later. The best parts of The Namek and Andriod stuff was having to play Cat and Mouse between the heroes and villains. I just really wished things could have been mixed up by just having enemies with weird powers that had to be countered differently.
I'm fine with escalating powers but what I think is missing is the physical exhaustion of the characters. I want them to look and feel like they've been through the ringer. I'll take that most times over clever strategy.
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