Did Dragon Ball make energy blasts mainstream?

[DSB]

I don't really read other mangas .

Did the Kamehameha and Dodon Ray bring the Energy Blasts to mainstream ?


Also , what comic/manga first used energy blasts ?

[precita]

No, I'm pretty sure Street Fighter did. Street Fighter 1 came out in 1987, which was only a year after the Dragonball manga started.

[Cipher]

Run a search for the epically long "wuxia" thread, which lays out a bunch of Dragon Ball's media origins, including the longstanding trope (literally ancient, like dating back to Journey to the West) of having superpowered martial artists fire chi/ki as an attack.

It didn't invent nor popularize it outside of the West, though it did attach a certain iconic style to it, and probably got a generation or two practicing imaginary Kamehame-has who never would have found the concept very cool otherwise.

[Gog]

Many franchise made the energy blast's mainstream. Not just dragon ball.

[DSB]

Many franchise made the energy blast's mainstream. Not just dragon ball.

Whats the most prominent one to have so many iconic energy blasts , other than DB ?

[nickzambuto]

No, I'm pretty sure Street Fighter did. Street Fighter 1 came out in 1987, which was only a year after the Dragonball manga started.

But nobody cared about Street Fighter 1.

[Gog]

Many franchise made the energy blast's mainstream. Not just dragon ball.

Whats the most prominent one to have so many iconic energy blasts , other than DB ?

Tekken, Naruto, Yu Yu Hasko, and nearly every anime in existence

[SaiyanGod117]

A lot of comic book characters had energy blast.

[successoroffate]

I think Saint Seiya did it first..

[dbgtFO]

No, I'm pretty sure Street Fighter did. Street Fighter 1 came out in 1987, which was only a year after the Dragonball manga started.

DB manga started in late 84, so up to 3 years before SF.

[Big Green The Yoshi]

Yes. Before Goku first fired the Kamehameha, it was supposed to be invisible.

[VegettoEX]

Yes. Before Goku first fired the Kamehameha, it was supposed to be invisible.

Just to add a little bit onto the wuxia talk and this comment in particular, Toriyama stated the following in his second Extreme Battle Collection Q&A (bolded emphasis below my own):

Techniques that are plain but effective aren't suited for manga. Stuff like strangleholds and locking techniques are troublesome to draw and hard to make very flashy. Even the Kamehameha is a technique that expels "ki", which by nature is invisible, but I was able to make it flashy by hitting upon the idea of portraying it as something that could be seen with the naked eye. With that pose too, I tried out a lot of different ones. What's more, I had to think up special characteristics for each character's techniques, but I ran out of patterns really fast, so it was tough (laughs).

[Kunzait_83]

Yes. Before Goku first fired the Kamehameha, it was supposed to be invisible.

Just to add a little bit onto the wuxia talk and this comment in particular, Toriyama stated the following in his second Extreme Battle Collection Q&A (bolded emphasis below my own):

Techniques that are plain but effective aren't suited for manga. Stuff like strangleholds and locking techniques are troublesome to draw and hard to make very flashy. Even the Kamehameha is a technique that expels "ki", which by nature is invisible, but I was able to make it flashy by hitting upon the idea of portraying it as something that could be seen with the naked eye. With that pose too, I tried out a lot of different ones. What's more, I had to think up special characteristics for each character's techniques, but I ran out of patterns really fast, so it was tough (laughs).

And just so we're even MORE clear on this aspect of things, Toriyama hardly at all originated the idea of rendering Chi/Ki as a visible beam of light. Chi in Wuxia ORIGINATED in very early lore and folktales as being invisible, but the idea of taking that invisible energy and rendering it as visible for the benefit of the audience and for stylistic points started almost as SOON as the technology of film and special effects (namely rotoscoping) were first devised, going as far back as the silent film era in the 1920s.


A still showcasing rotocoped visual Chi beams being fired from the palms by a group of warriors in the 1928 early silent Wuxia film serial "The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple".

A very, VERY crucially important point I brought up in my great big wuxia write up is the fact that virtually every and I do mean EVERY single solitary supernatural martial arts ability you see depicted in Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z is ripped DIRECTLY from both ancient as well as contemporary Wuxia lore. A LOT of what Toriyama really brought to the table for Wuxia through Dragon Ball had a LOT less to do with the type of crazed, frantic, and destructive fighting you see, and more just the idiosyncratic creative filter of his signature, Dr. Slumpian style being married to classical and modern Wuxia ideas and concepts.

What makes Dragon Ball uniquely Dragon Ball has NOTHING to do with the character types - NONE of which are "Shonen" because as I always insist even in the Wuxia write up, Shonen is NOT a genre and therefore there does not exist such a thing as "Shonen tropes". Dragon Ball's tropes are virtually ALL Wuxia tropes both anciently old and very much new at the time of the 1980s and 90s, a period where Wuxia media throughout all of Asia was going through a radical modernized reinvention of sorts. - nor does DB's uniqueness come from its style of fighting or its general plot ideas, the vast majority of which are bog-standard Wuxia cliches. Rather its all of these classic Wuxia ideas being delivered to you through the unique prism and creative filter of one of Japan's all time greatest modern illustrators and stylists.

Toriyama was a known film junkie, including that of Wuxia films, and alongside the animators at Toei (who had been lifting ideas from across Wuxia media for much longer than Toriyama in other anime) had a more than ready-made and beyond dense template/foundation from which to craft not just Dragon Ball's character-types and plotlines, but moreover its classical Wuxia depiction of folkloric, supernaturally fanciful and mythical displays of inhuman martial arts abilities and skills. Believe it or not, the following gifs (taken mostly from the Wuxia thread, since I''m a lazy bastard) are an INCREDIBLY mild and very small smattering of examples across a few decades worth of Wuxia films that both predate and were released concurrently with DB's serialization. Most of them are also based heavily on literature as well as truly ancient myths and poetry that well long predate most modern day media.

Spoiler:

Within there, as you can see, we have everything from devastating and over the top Chi/Ki blasts, flying, teleporting, telekinesis, super speed, super strength, body splitting, afterimages, homing/guided Chi/Ki blasts, as well hand and finger gestures (and even camera angles, framing, and directorial choices) that match up perfectly with what's found throughout DB/Z.

lets not even get into the exact and direct musical similarities with the original Kikuchi score.

Furthermore the following gifs showcasing things like firing visible Chi beams that blowup chunks of the landscape, as well as teleporting, visible Chi barriers/forcefields, the transferring of Chi from one fighter to another, and even a couple of Chi beam struggle, I made myself from the original Buddha's Palm film serials, just to give you an idea of how in most respects boilerplate and not remotely original or innovative DB's depiction of supernatural martial arts really is.









So yes, for more than half a century before Dragon Ball existed, the idea of rendering supernatural Chi attacks as visible beams of light not only existed, but had long since become a VERY commonplace stylistic choice utilized in countless, countless Wuxia films, comic books, TV shows, and so on and on and on.

I'm also a bit hazy on VERY early Wuxia comics (such as newspaper comic strips and other drawn visual anthologies that predate the invention of silent films) but I'm at least fairly sure that the idea of DRAWING characters in a wuxia story using Chi attacks as visible manifestations of energy predates even that of the invention of film.

Even across anime and manga, its not like plenty of other examples of Wuxia being cross polinated into Japanese media didn't exist well long before DB. Just for one notable example, First of the North Star predates Dragon Ball by almost five years and featured all the kinds of over the top superhuman martial arts abilities you'd expect from DBZ.



Whew. Honestly I'm just gonna lay this out there: I think for a very long time now the single worst, most dysfunctional and crippling issue in fandom that hobbles properly informed discussion about Dragon Ball online (up to and including this very forum here) the most - more so than the FUNimation dub and its differences with the Japanese version - has been the general and far too egregious ignorance about the Wuxia genre and how IMMENSELY central and important it is to everything that matters most to Dragon Ball that makes it what it is.

I made the Wuxia thread partly as an attempt to address that, but I think ultimately that I was far too ambitious with its scope, and I certainly agree that its length and depth of visual media ultimately turned out to be hindrances to its accessibility among many. I've considered everything from a heavily, heavily image/gif reduced version, or a generally shortened/condensed version, and also a few friends of mine within the youtube community have approached me a few times about taking my entire Wuxia film library and combining that footage with the information in the thread to create a small video series that tackles the subject. The latter may yet still happen at some point down the road. We'll see.

Or, as a few people have asked, Mike could always just stickie the damned thing, but that's entirely on him ultimately.

[VegettoEX]

Hey, I'm not the only admin! I can't say I saw those requests (or if I did, sorry, lulzforgetfulmikejustliketoriyamalulz). I'm not necessarily opposed to it. Maybe a more appropriate course of action, though, would to have a sticky thread that itself is a collection of important/historical threads of note (kinda like Jake's own "Guide Guide" thread in the "In-Universe" section).

In fact, yeah, I'll make that right now. Good point, Mike!

[Kunzait_83]

In fact, yeah, I'll make that right now. Good point, Mike!

Oh shit, and there it is. Awesome stuff, thanks!

[PelicanDynasty]

[spoiler]

Yes. Before Goku first fired the Kamehameha, it was supposed to be invisible.

Just to add a little bit onto the wuxia talk and this comment in particular, Toriyama stated the following in his second Extreme Battle Collection Q&A (bolded emphasis below my own):

Techniques that are plain but effective aren't suited for manga. Stuff like strangleholds and locking techniques are troublesome to draw and hard to make very flashy. Even the Kamehameha is a technique that expels "ki", which by nature is invisible, but I was able to make it flashy by hitting upon the idea of portraying it as something that could be seen with the naked eye. With that pose too, I tried out a lot of different ones. What's more, I had to think up special characteristics for each character's techniques, but I ran out of patterns really fast, so it was tough (laughs).

And just so we're even MORE clear on this aspect of things, Toriyama hardly at all originated the idea of rendering Chi/Ki as a visible beam of light. Chi in Wuxia ORIGINATED in very early lore and folktales as being invisible, but the idea of taking that invisible energy and rendering it as visible for the benefit of the audience and for stylistic points started almost as SOON as the technology of film and special effects (namely rotoscoping) were first devised, going as far back as the silent film era in the 1920s.


A still showcasing rotocoped visual Chi beams being fired from the palms by a group of warriors in the 1928 early silent Wuxia film serial "The Burning of the Red Lotus Temple".

A very, VERY crucially important point I brought up in my great big wuxia write up is the fact that virtually every and I do mean EVERY single solitary supernatural martial arts ability you see depicted in Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z is ripped DIRECTLY from both ancient as well as contemporary Wuxia lore. A LOT of what Toriyama really brought to the table for Wuxia through Dragon Ball had a LOT less to do with the type of crazed, frantic, and destructive fighting you see, and more just the idiosyncratic creative filter of his signature, Dr. Slumpian style being married to classical and modern Wuxia ideas and concepts.

What makes Dragon Ball uniquely Dragon Ball has NOTHING to do with the character types - NONE of which are "Shonen" because as I always insist even in the Wuxia write up, Shonen is NOT a genre and therefore there does not exist such a thing as "Shonen tropes". Dragon Ball's tropes are virtually ALL Wuxia tropes both anciently old and very much new at the time of the 1980s and 90s, a period where Wuxia media throughout all of Asia was going through a radical modernized reinvention of sorts. - nor does DB's uniqueness come from its style of fighting or its general plot ideas, the vast majority of which are bog-standard Wuxia cliches. Rather its all of these classic Wuxia ideas being delivered to you through the unique prism and creative filter of one of Japan's all time greatest modern illustrators and stylists.

Toriyama was a known film junkie, including that of Wuxia films, and alongside the animators at Toei (who had been lifting ideas from across Wuxia media for much longer than Toriyama in other anime) had a more than ready-made and beyond dense template/foundation from which to craft not just Dragon Ball's character-types and plotlines, but moreover its classical Wuxia depiction of folkloric, supernaturally fanciful and mythical displays of inhuman martial arts abilities and skills. Believe it or not, the following gifs (taken mostly from the Wuxia thread, since I''m a lazy bastard) are an INCREDIBLY mild and very small smattering of examples across a few decades worth of Wuxia films that both predate and were released concurrently with DB's serialization. Most of them are also based heavily on literature as well as truly ancient myths and poetry that well long predate most modern day media.

Spoiler:

Within there, as you can see, we have everything from devastating and over the top Chi/Ki blasts, flying, teleporting, telekinesis, super speed, super strength, body splitting, afterimages, homing/guided Chi/Ki blasts, as well hand and finger gestures (and even camera angles, framing, and directorial choices) that match up perfectly with what's found throughout DB/Z.

lets not even get into the exact and direct musical similarities with the original Kikuchi score.

Furthermore the following gifs showcasing things like firing visible Chi beams that blowup chunks of the landscape, as well as teleporting, visible Chi barriers/forcefields, the transferring of Chi from one fighter to another, and even a couple of Chi beam struggle, I made myself from the original Buddha's Palm film serials, just to give you an idea of how in most respects boilerplate and not remotely original or innovative DB's depiction of supernatural martial arts really is.









So yes, for more than half a century before Dragon Ball existed, the idea of rendering supernatural Chi attacks as visible beams of light not only existed, but had long since become a VERY commonplace stylistic choice utilized in countless, countless Wuxia films, comic books, TV shows, and so on and on and on.

I'm also a bit hazy on VERY early Wuxia comics (such as newspaper comic strips and other drawn visual anthologies that predate the invention of silent films) but I'm at least fairly sure that the idea of DRAWING characters in a wuxia story using Chi attacks as visible manifestations of energy predates even that of the invention of film.

Even across anime and manga, its not like plenty of other examples of Wuxia being cross polinated into Japanese media didn't exist well long before DB. Just for one notable example, First of the North Star predates Dragon Ball by almost five years and featured all the kinds of over the top superhuman martial arts abilities you'd expect from DBZ.



Whew. Honestly I'm just gonna lay this out there: I think for a very long time now the single worst, most dysfunctional and crippling issue in fandom that hobbles properly informed discussion about Dragon Ball online (up to and including this very forum here) the most - more so than the FUNimation dub and its differences with the Japanese version - has been the general and far too egregious ignorance about the Wuxia genre and how IMMENSELY central and important it is to everything that matters most to Dragon Ball that makes it what it is.

I made the Wuxia thread partly as an attempt to address that, but I think ultimately that I was far too ambitious with its scope, and I certainly agree that its length and depth of visual media ultimately turned out to be hindrances to its accessibility among many. I've considered everything from a heavily, heavily image/gif reduced version, or a generally shortened/condensed version, and also a few friends of mine within the youtube community have approached me a few times about taking my entire Wuxia film library and combining that footage with the information in the thread to create a small video series that tackles the subject. The latter may yet still happen at some point down the road. We'll see.

Or, as a few people have asked, Mike could always just stickie the damned thing, but that's entirely on him ultimately.

[/spoiler]

Just want to say, Kunzait, these Wuxia posts are always awesome. Probably my favorite thing to read on this website actually.

[kinisking]

The question isn't if it was the first to make it, but rather if it was the one that made it mainstream guys.

[Kunzait_83]

The question isn't if it was the first to make it, but rather if it was the one that made it mainstream guys.

What's our criteria of mainstream then? I know there are a lot of people who seem to, by default, strongly infer and only count what's popular in North America (and sometimes in more extreme cases only strictly within middle America/their general homestate area rather than more populated/worldly urban areas with deeper niches of media) as their sole barometer of "mainstream"; but that of course is an idea that I in no way, shape, or form agree with. The United States, big and influential as it is, does not in nay respect represent the entirety of global popular culture or anywhere close to it. Certainly not just the midwestern territories.

If the question is "Did Dragon Ball make Chi blasts mainstream" within its proper context and origin point, which is clearly Asian/Eastern media as a whole, then the answer is a flat out and unquestionable NO, ABSOLUTELY NOT.

Wuxia, mystical Chi techniques, warriors capable of mastery of superhuman feats of martial arts (up to and including firing Chi beams) etc, ALL of these things were not just mainstream, but VERY EXCEEDINGLY mainstream for countless, COUNTLESS decades, centuries even, all across southeast Asian media and popular culture (China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, even Korea). Be it in literature, ancient folklore, and more modern mediums like TV and film and comic books, Wuxia and its tropes had infected every square corner of Asian media and staked its territory in each form of media dating back to their earliest periods.

Don't forget, Wuxia is one of THE single oldest genres of fiction in all of recorded human history, with its earliest prototypes dating back a few thousand years B.C. The word Wuxia itself is strictly Chinese and only came into use around the mid-1800s; before then and in other Asian territories where its big, the genre isn't all known under that one umbrella term; but its existence and persistent popularity and influence are impossible to deny. Some myths predate that of written word and were originally preserved and passed down through oral tellings.

Its popularity in Asian media and culture has stayed fairly consistent and ever present across the last 3,000 or so years. In more ancient times it was within the form of poetry, books, stage plays, and puppet shows; in more recent years (i.e. since at least the 1920s and onward) some of the earliest mega successful films, comics, TV and radio shows, video games, etc. in Asian territories have tended to be Wuxia.

Its not at all a stretch to consider Wuxia the Asian martial arts equivalent of Westerns or Sword and Sorcery Fantasy Epics (they are in most respects the direct Asian martial arts counterpart to Arthurian myths). So to ask whether or not this stuff was mainstream before Dragon Ball is like asking if stuff like Lord of the Rings was popular before the creation of Dungeons & Dragons. The answer is "Uh... yeah. Just a tad bit." Hell it was popular enough to have made its mark outside of Asia LONG since before DB ever came about, most notably through a little oddball obscurity of a film known as Star Wars (The Force = Chi, and The Jedi are a hodgepodge of not only Japanese Samurai and European Wizards, but also Chinese Wulin Kung Fu masters from Wuxia lore).

This stuff was exceedingly mainstream in its native territories since INFINITELY long before Dragon Ball or Toriyama himself were ever born, and would have more than easily continued right on along being just as mainstream across Asian markets even had Dragon Ball never existed or been written. Even just solely within the realm of 1980s Japanese Shonen manga, Fist of the North Star had this territory long since staked out and covered; and that manga/anime was hardly any slouch as a pop cultural juggernaut across Japan and the rest of the world over. Fans who attach these obscene levels of importance to Dragon Ball's influence are coming not only from a place of narrow-minded ignorance, but also over-inflated hubris regarding the object of their affection.

Yes of course Dragon Ball was a MASSIVE titan of popular culture throughout Japan as well as across Asian markets. But to assign it as single-handedly popularizing most of the core important tropes of Wuxia as late as the latter half of the 1980s, more than 40/50 years after most Asian markets had been inundated to the gills with a nonstop onslaught of TV, film, radio, and comic adaptations of the literary works of Louis Cha, Gu Long, and Wang Dulu, after King Hu singlehandedly defined the genre artistically in the modern day through his incredibly important films, after literally THOUSANDS of Shaw Bros and Golden Harvest films, after Ma Wing Shing and Wong Yuk-long codified forevermore THE definitive comic book style that the genre would largely take, after Tsui Hark and the Hong Kong New Wave's fusing of classical Wuxia with modern day narrative ideas and stylistic tics that would shape the genre for most of my own lifetime...

...never mind ALL of that. "It was the Dr. Slump guy's wacky little manga that rendered ALL that dense and important contemporary history as utterly moot and was the FIRST one to actually matter, because its what I heard of first, and all global culture doesn't matter and solely exists within a vacuum and has no impact anywhere on anything until I first come across it."

Just within film alone (not TV, books, comics, games, etc), to use myself and my own fandom history as an example (since I'm a fairly unremarkable, typical fanboy of the genre): I must own on DVD/Blu/VHS some roughly 200/300 or so Wuxia films (spanning as broadly as the 1920s to to present, but with a large fixture on the 1960s through 1990s/early 2000s). In my whole lifetime I've seen probably almost if not over a thousand. I've used as my image/gif examples on this site probably around the ballpark of 40/50 or so movies (including at least a dozen or so right here in my post up top in this very thread here), spanning the same number of years. All ballpark figures/rough estimates of course, so I'm hardly going by concrete solid numbers here. But that's a decent rough off the cuff estimate thinking back (I've been a Wuxia fan for about... shit just about almost 30 years now. Fuck.).

What do you think the odds are that EVERY SINGLE ONE of these films across the board, ALL of them were unknown and unremarked upon obscurities with zero cultural impact anywhere? What do you think the odds are that NONE OF THEM were massive mainstream successes in their home territories? That ALL of them were total whisps of nothing with no impact on anything, not until Dragon Ball first came about? I mean really, think for just one second about how spectacularly stupid that idea is.

I know it isn't fair to say that that's what goes on in the heads of EVERY SINGLE fan who comes at this stuff from a place of unwitting ignorance, but that IS ultimately and unfortunately what a lot of these kinds of discussions end up boiling down to: "I want to have my lack of cultural exposure validated by being told/shown that all the stuff that I was first exposed to things through as a child was ground zero for everything else that would follow. I never missed out on anything important, I was part of the audience who first REALLY mattered for any of this. Therefore I never have to ever be in danger of being exposed to anything that's new to me or might challenge me and my preconceptions and can just mindlessly wallow in what I've been comfortable and familiar with since I was little without shame."

That's not only the subtext at the heart of a lot of these "Dragon Ball invented Ki blasts and superhuman martial arts, didn't it?" discussions, but even more egregiously they're what's at the heart of another common and inaccuracy-laden discussion that has often and for many years repeatedly come up on here: the history of anime and anime fandom in the United States, particularly as it pertains to Cartoon Network/Toonami and its original airings of DBZ. But that's a topic for another time and thread.

Really though, this is what a LOT of my irritation and disgust with later anime/DB fans boils down to: this almost laughably narcissistic idea of "Well it can't be THAT big of a deal because I'VE never heard of it. Me, whose whole entirety of culture, worldliness, and artistic expanse centers more or less firmly and entirely around nothing but television action cartoons for small children, video games for Nintendo devices, and gaudy summer blockbuster film adaptations of such cartoons and superhero comics. Surely if I'VE never heard of or come across something, or if I've never been made aware of it through those barometers for all things artistically important Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, the Disney Channel, and the Nintendo E-Shop, then how culturally vital can it really be?"

That's the mindset, above and beyond anything else in fandom, that needs to die immediately.