Where did the "GT takes place 10 years later" myth start?

[dragonmagico]

In mistaire fusion's latest video he mentions that it was not a funi dub creation like a lot of people believe and he in fact found references to it dating back to the 90s which is long before funi dubbed gt.

So where did this come from

[JulieYBM]

If memory serves—and this is me digging back to 1998 here—I believe the first place it was stated was in the old Curtis Hoffman summaries. I'm not sure where Hoffman was getting that info from, though. I wonder if they're still around to be asked?

[Gaffer Tape]

If memory serves—and this is me digging back to 1998 here—I believe the first place it was stated was in the old Curtis Hoffman summaries. I'm not sure where Hoffman was getting that info from, though. I wonder if they're still around to be asked?

I actually uncovered it the other day, due to my work on these videos. Hoffmann's summary of the first episode states that "around 10 years" had passed. And he dates that summary April 1996, so two months after the episode aired. I sent him an email last week asking if he could recall if he was simply guessing or if there was some kind of promotional material he was working from to make that statement. I don't even know if the address is still active. I haven't heard back. Here's my link to the tweet where I shared the relevant scans of that summary.

https://twitter.com/MistareFusion/statu ... RY7dweodYQ

[JulieYBM]

If memory serves—and this is me digging back to 1998 here—I believe the first place it was stated was in the old Curtis Hoffman summaries. I'm not sure where Hoffman was getting that info from, though. I wonder if they're still around to be asked?

I actually uncovered it the other day, due to my work on these videos. Hoffmann's summary of the first episode states that "around 10 years" had passed. And he dates that summary April 1996, so two months after the episode aired. I sent him an email last week asking if he could recall if he was simply guessing or if there was some kind of promotional material he was working from to make that statement. I don't even know if the address is still active. I haven't heard back. Here's my link to the tweet where I shared the relevant scans of that summary.

https://twitter.com/MistareFusion/statu ... RY7dweodYQ

That's interesting. I suspect the email is defunct but perhaps he'll see this thread someday, somehow?

[Gaffer Tape]

It might be defunct, but I saw on The Dao of Dragon Ball that Derek Padula has managed to successfully reach out to him for his article on the name of Toriyama's robot avatar. So who knows?

[JulieYBM]

It might be defunct, but I saw on The Dao of Dragon Ball that Derek Padula has managed to successfully reach out to him for his article on the name of Toriyama's robot avatar. So who knows?

Oh wow, that's even more interesting, then. I suppose he could always simply be busy, which happens.

[TheGreatness25]

I'm curious what led people to realize that GT takes place five years after Z. Was it promotional material? Was it the Perfect Files? The Perfect Files came out after GT began and I don't think that the time skip was specified in the series itself. So, how would anyone really know how long the home skip would be in the beginning?

At first glance, it sure would make a lot of sense to assume that there was a ten-year time skip just looking at Pan and Bra's character models.

[theherodjl]

I thought it was because GT Pan & Bra appeared to look like they could be in their early teens, leading some people earlier on to assume that at least 10 years had passed? Bra is supposed to be a a year or two younger than Pan but the fact that she was also taller than Pan in GT might have created some confusion.

[Gaffer Tape]

Part of the confusion is that different sources said different things. Herms's History of Ever on this forum lists Bra's birth year as 778, a year before Pan. According to him that comes from her bio in Daizenshuu 7. However, the timeline within the same Daizenshuu, as well as the timeline in first GT Perfect File lists her birth year as 780, making her a year younger than Pan. Quite frankly, her GT appearance and even her appearance at the end of Dragon Ball both look older than Pan. But as we all know now, Super has firmly gone into the 780 camp, showing Pan born before Bra.

I'm curious what led people to realize that GT takes place five years after Z.

I don't know where it originated, but the 789 year is definitely in the timeline in the first GT Perfect File. And, yes, it came out well after the series had begun. And nowhere in the series itself is that ever stated.

[JulieYBM]

Y'know, it's occured to me that Matsui Aya—who was in charge of series composition for Dragon Ball GT—is on Twitter. I wonder if she has previously discussed how old she wrote Pan and Bra for? Or if she was writing the series as being five years after Uub? I wonder if she'd be willing to discuss that? Perhaps not the best idea to bother her, though.

[supersaiyamangod]

What is with the designs of gt pan and bra I’m confused. Pan looks like a young early teen or pre teen or extreme close too that age and bra 100 percent looks like a teenager. did the people making gt not understand the difference between their actual ages and teenagers. Gt is beyond weird when it comes to this.

[JulieYBM]

What is with the designs of gt pan and bra I’m confused. Pan looks like a young early teen or pre teen or extreme close too that age and bra 100 percent looks like a teenager. did the people making gt not understand the difference between their actual ages and teenagers. Gt is beyond weird when it comes to this.

You're under the impression that the GT Perfect Files' timeline is accurate to the intentions of the staff of the cartoon series. We should first and foremost consider the experiences of the people that actually made the cartoon over a supplementary databook. The problem is we don't know what the cartoon staff was aiming for because nobody really asks them (that or any interviews have yet to be discovered and translated by the English-speaking community).

[theherodjl]

Anime as a whole is just beyond weird when it comes to the physical depiction of minors. Look at Pokemon, Ash & several of his companions are all ten or have just turned ten but they look & act more like teenagers. Dawn & Serena in-particular even wear a few outfits that clearly look like a lolicon was in charge of their designs.

[dragonmagico]

What is with the designs of gt pan and bra I’m confused. Pan looks like a young early teen or pre teen or extreme close too that age and bra 100 percent looks like a teenager. did the people making gt not understand the difference between their actual ages and teenagers. Gt is beyond weird when it comes to this.

Goku was smol af until he hit 18. Character designs taking precedence over age and being finalized before age isn't exactly new in dragon ball.

[TheGreatness25]

What is with the designs of gt pan and bra I’m confused. Pan looks like a young early teen or pre teen or extreme close too that age and bra 100 percent looks like a teenager. did the people making gt not understand the difference between their actual ages and teenagers. Gt is beyond weird when it comes to this.

Goku was smol af until he hit 18. Character designs taking precedence over age and being finalized before age isn't exactly new in dragon ball.

But that was the other way around. Pan and Bra don't look like they should be pre-teens in GT. Especially with Pan on a date in the very first episode and Bra's interactions with the group of guys when they're in the car.

It feels right that GT is 10 years later. I know that the Perfect Files says it's five years, but if those books never came out and all we had to go by was the anime, I would've definitely said that GT is about 10 years after Z.

[Gaffer Tape]

UPDATE!

So I received a very kind email this morning from Curtis Hoffmann. He admitted, quite fairly, that it wasn't terribly easy to remember his exact mind state of something he wrote 26 years ago. However, he does attribute it to a line of dialogue that Pilaf says within the episode itself. He found what appears to be an official YouTube upload of the first episode of GT, which I can't see because I'm not in Japan. He gave me a timestamp, though, which I checked on my own GT collection. He paraphrased the line in question as "nan-juu nen ni uubu to Gokuu wa mada kenka suru," which he translated as "I don't believe it, still after all these decades, those two are still fighting/training."

I found the reference to "nan-juu nen," but I couldn't pick out any references to Goku or Oob in that sentence. The official subtitles translate it as "After this many decades of research, effort, persistence, blood, sweat and tears, and just a little bit of good fortune, I've finally discovered that the ultimate Dragon Balls are up here in the Heavenly Realm!" So unless the subtitles are very, very off; or my ear is completely missing a reference to Goku and Oob; or that that video I can't access says something very different; I feel like Hoffmann might have conflated certain bits of dialogue together. And that's understandable. He's just answering an email to some Internet rando decades after he stopped archiving Dragon Ball material. I'm honestly impressed and grateful he looked up the episode to check! Plus, I think it does provide some helpful context as to where the initial mistake almost certainly came from.

I'd been scrambling trying to find any reference in dub or sub that might support or deny the ten year claim. I never even considered that line. It just completely washed over me. But, yeah, I think it's easy to hear "nan-juu nen" and think it's a reference to ten years having passed in one context or another, even though, as he admits in his email, it would have been more accurate to render it as "decades."

It's certainly possible this is a post-hoc rationalization. Like he said and like I totally understand, this was 26 years ago. There could be any number of forgotten reasons as to why he wrote it as "around 10 years since Dragon Ball Z" way back then. However, it does seem extremely plausible that it came from the line he presented.

[JulieYBM]

Well, that's interesting. I'm glad to see we got an update. I think it's an understandable mistake and fits the likelihood of what happened back then.

[dragonmagico]

I'll have to get on my VPN and see if I can find this Japanese video

[Gaffer Tape]

Here is the YouTube link he sent me, so you don't have to search for it. The timestamp he gave me is 4:07.

[VegettoEX]

Was gonna say, why would you even need to get on a VPN to check it? It was already described as just being the regular old normal first episode of GT. Just... pop in the DVD, or whatever.

Anyway, I'd like to add some tidbits here:

Hopefully folks are somewhat familiar with the "Press Archive" we have here on Kanzenshuu. If not, definitely check it out! Consider it a cousin of the "Translations" archive: it's not text original to Japanese, but rather text from print publications from other languages (primarily English for the time being) covering the Dragon Ball franchise. This stuff formed the basis of a lot of general, broad understanding for fandom back in the day, and a lot of it has stuck around. One massive shoutout I have to give is for the various Daizenshuu interview summaries in the one introductory column from Animerica, which really shaped a lot of what we knew prior to Jake and Julian doing full-on translations of that material!

I say all that as context because there was TONS of coverage of GT contemporary with its original broadcast. The May 1996 issue of Animerica gives four quick reviews of the first batch of episodes. That's awesome!

...and, of course, there were also tons of references to "when" this series supposedly took place (let me know if this image doesn't embed properly):



That's three separate reports, with only one of the three getting it correct.

We've already discussed to death how there's no date given within the actual dialog of the show itself, so anything anyone knows would have to have been (1) an assumption, probably based on general observation of what's shown to them, and/or (2) regurgitated information from ancillary material.

OK, but what material??? is the ultimate question here!

I've been trying to do my part and collect V-Jump issues from 1996 to see if anything's dished out there, but I don't have them all. I say V-Jump because it's an actual realistic goal: I know GT is covered in there regularly, there are a known number of those issues, there aren't a million of them, and I already have part of that collection.

Another approach would be contemporary Weekly Shonen Jump issues, which likely also have splashes about the then-upcoming (and then-contemporary) series. Problem here is that... well, DB wasn't running in the magazine anymore, so we haven't bothered to collect any of those issues (unless there happen to be other Toriyama one-shots, which we do have). We don't know what we don't know about what's inside each of these issues. I've never seen anyone randomly cite one even after all this time (like we regularly had for, say, Coola's henchmen background info), so I'm assuming that there's nothing groundbreaking here.

Another thing to check out would be issues of Animage and Animedia, which would occasionally have coverage of upcoming/important Dragon Ball debuts (I'm looking over at one right now that covers the Trunks TV special)... but it's the same thing with WJ here, where we don't know what we don't know about what's inside. If anyone happens to know a collector of these magazines from this specific era, that's a route we could take / ask for.

What we DO know at this point:

- There's no dialog within the actual Dragon Ball GT show itself that says when it takes place
- The first citation of it taking place five years later that we as a fandom generally seem to know about is the first Dragon Ball GT Perfect File guide book, which came out May 24, 1997... which was over a year into the series' broadcast
- This specific Age 789 citation is consistently and repeatedly used in all subsequent official publications
- Both Lance and I have found citations for English-speaking fandom referring to it as taking place "ten years later" as early as 1996 (a combination of Curtis Hoffmann's summaries and Usenet discussion, one likely driving the other), which pre-dates the Perfect File's publication by a year
- Independent from anything associated with the original Japanese version, FUNimation's English dub of the series itself likewise does not actually specify in dialog within the actual show itself when it takes place, though they as a company seemingly shared information about it being "ten years later" to partners for things like show/box descriptions