What really happened to GT?

[Drayenko]

Hello!
In another forum we are having a discussion on GT & Super, due to the new series being announced. Someone made a comment about Super being super ( ) successful, and that's why a new series had to be made. Which, of course had to happen.

Personally, I dislike Super. And GT too! But as we were discussing I wondered, how come GT was cut short? The ratings took a dive, sure. But it doesn't seem to be anything too drastic. Do we have ratings for other series that were being broadcasted at the time?

Basically what I would like is to collect all the data that we can. I don't want this to be a GT vs Super (both series are mediocre ). So le't just skip that and find what happened to GT.

Final Bout sold well enough to get a The Best for The Family release in Japan!. Undoubtedly the series was a worldwide hit, I can assure this by having traveled to countries in Europe, South America and here in the U.S at the time. From 98-2005~ and even after that, GT was a strong series with a strong fanbase. So how come we always get the same answer that it bombed? I don't believe that. There's got to be something more we haven't looked into.

Some points we can research are these:

*Ratings of other series at the time.
*Dragon Ball revenues before, during, and after GT.
*Dr. Slump Remake ratings. Revenue(?)

Any other revenue reference would be great too, of course.

If you have any other things we could think of/find please share!

Let's see what we can learn from this ^^.
Please no Super/GT comparisons.

[zarmack]

Hello!
In another forum we are having a discussion on GT & Super, due to the new series being announced. Someone made a comment about Super being super ( ) successful, and that's why a new series had to be made. Which, of course had to happen.

Personally, I dislike Super. And GT too! But as we were discussing I wondered, how come GT was cut short? The ratings took a dive, sure. But it doesn't seem to be anything too drastic. Do we have ratings for other series that were being broadcasted at the time?

Basically what I would like is to collect all the data that we can. I don't want this to be a GT vs Super (both series are mediocre ). So le't just skip that and find what happened to GT.

Final Bout sold well enough to get a The Best for The Family release in Japan!. Undoubtedly the series was a worldwide hit, I can assure this by having traveled to countries in Europe, South America and here in the U.S at the time. From 98-2005~ and even after that, GT was a strong series with a strong fanbase. So how come we always get the same answer that it bombed? I don't believe that. There's got to be something more we haven't looked into.

Some points we can research are these:

*Ratings of other series at the time.
*Dragon Ball revenues before, during, and after GT.
*Dr. Slump Remake ratings. Revenue(?)

Any other revenue reference would be great too, of course.

If you have any other things we could think of/find please share!

Let's see what we can learn from this ^^.
Please no Super/GT comparisons.

I think its because Japan was generally losing interest in the DB franchise since the Buu saga, and GT did nothing to make it hot again was why it was cut short.

[Drayenko]

Could be, but merely 5 years later they released Dragon Ball Z for PS2 (Budokai 1) which sold like crazy, and a few years later the Dragon Boxes.

For the past 12 years(?) maybe more, Dragon Ball has been bigger than One Piece or any other Anime/Manga franchise for that matter, worldwide that is. So am I to believe that in those 5 years TOEI could afford not generating anything from the money making making machine that is Dragon Ball? Hmm... it's all too weird.

And in recent times anything they put out is sold instantly. Today there's an overload of things and it's gonna stop soon, because it's easy money. So, it's hard to believe that people got tired in 20 episodes of GT, after they consumed 30~ episodes of rehashed Super episodes... and the series kept going.

I mean, I'm sure One Piece ratings have dropped over the years, but they still make money like there's no tomorrow off of it. So, when GT came out toys stopped selling? Cards? and any other merchandise?

I would love a chart with revenue data from the 90's, if that's even available...

[ekrolo2]

Geekdom explained that the lack of a DB manga was a big contributing factor to why GT was cut short. Even Zs ratings started steadily dropping once the manga concluded. Having a manga back then was considered a big factor in making a mega successful series, so much so that when Yu Yu and DB ended, Shonen Jump had a small crisis until replacements for them eventually came around.

[Drayenko]

But Super doesn't have a manga to follow, how do we explain that? Sure, there's a manga, of things we already saw in the anime.
And how can we say that when around that time Pokemon, Digimon, Medabots and many other successful series that came out at the time had no manga. Sure they were based off of video games, but still.

[ABED]

DB was on the air continuously for over 10 years. That's bound to affect people's interest.

[superfan2024]

But Super doesn't have a manga to follow, how do we explain that? Sure, there's a manga, of things we already saw in the anime.
And how can we say that when around that time Pokemon, Digimon, Medabots and many other successful series that came out at the time had no manga. Sure they were based off of video games, but still.

Super does have something to follow though, and that's Toriyama's outlines which they expand upon. The directors/producers for Super even communicate with Tori sometimes to see what they could expand/change upon for the series.

Also, for the beginning of the U6 Arc, the anime was actually using the manga as reference since the manga was at least 3 months ahead of the anime at that point of the story in time.

[Nokra]

Maybe because...GT wasn't very good

[Bullza]

Geekdom explained that the lack of a DB manga was a big contributing factor to why GT was cut short. Even Zs ratings started steadily dropping once the manga concluded.

Wrath of the Dragon was also the lowest grossing Dragon Ball Z movie at the box office as well. By a significant amount.

[sunsetshimmer]

But Super doesn't have a manga to follow, how do we explain that? Sure, there's a manga, of things we already saw in the anime.
And how can we say that when around that time Pokemon, Digimon, Medabots and many other successful series that came out at the time had no manga. Sure they were based off of video games, but still.

1. Akira was said to be author of story and fans are crazy about him and never officialy stated canon in series
2. It was almost 20 years since last series and due to DB being aired in many other countries after GT ended which made DB popular again (also a lot of games kept it alive) i guess people were just crazy about new series anyway

[Drayenko]

Wrath of the Dragon was also the lowest grossing Dragon Ball Z movie at the box office as well. By a significant amount.

What about Path to Power?

You posted this btw:

Fusion Reborn - ¥1.98 billion ($22.7 million)
Wrath of the Dragon - ¥1.1 billion ($12.2 million)

Fusion came out March 95, and Wrath July 95. The manga finished a month ago before Wrath, why would the sales be so extremely low? Did the movie not get enough publicity? Was the manga the only thing holding Dragon Ball together at the time? If so why would the ratings of GT's first episodes be close in ratings to those of Z... it'd be good to see how much Path to Power made, cannot find that.

[Bullza]

What about Path to Power?

Path to Power did even worse. It was the only Dragon Ball movie that failed to make ¥1 billion and because of that it's hard to find specific grosses but at an estimate I think it did around ¥700-800 million.

So between that and Wrath of the Dragon it was easy to see why they didn't make any more.

I don't know why Wrath of the Dragon had such a steep drop either because the anime was still running for months after it came out so it's not like there wasn't something active going on.

[Drayenko]

Then again, Games at the time sold like this:

1995 Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Battle 22 PS1 0.261
1996 Dragon Ball Z: Hyper Dimension SNES 0.163
1996 Dragon Ball Z: Idainaru Dragon Ball Densetsu PS1 0.164 http://vgsales.wikia.com/wiki/Dragon_Ball *That's 164,000, and so on.

And in '97 Final Bout came out, as we know it focused on GT. I can't find sales numbers but the game received the Family Best edition. According to wikipedia, at the time a game had to sell 400,000 units to get that kind of treatment. And that's Japan only.

[Cipher]

Waning interest as the series had run its course over the past ten years, a controversial start to the series itself, and a lack of the kind of established cross-promotional avenues the series currently enjoys were all likely factors.

In comparison, Super had multiple things going in its favor before it even hit screens: Interest in DB bolstered by a nostalgia boom, the return of the original author and two well-received movies penned by him, and a massive product empire already enjoying success and just waiting for something to promote it further (Heroes was well and off the ground at this point). It would have had to try much harder to fail, at least from a commercial standpoint.

[Chuquita]

Re: Movie 13

My guess for why it didn't do well was a lot of that movie is the Kid Trunks and Tapion show, which despite being something different may not have been engaging enough for younger viewers or exciting enough for older ones. It's a sweet friendship, but it may not be what fans were looking for in the then final Z movie. Also Goku comes out of nowhere with the win it's kinda strange how thrown in there that is.

Re: Path to Power

It's been a while since I've seen it, but my guess is it was early DB in a late DB world and the nostalgia wasn't there yet with older fans and newer ones weren't interested in kid Goku at the time.

[Hellspawn28]

I feel like GT would have gone on longer if the rating and merchandise didn't tank. DBZ went on for several years with over 200 episodes while GT ended with 64 episodes. I think Toei would have kept GT going for a long time if things went well as plan.

[Lord Beerus]

It was simply franchise fatigue hitting Dragon Ball hard around the second half of the Majin Boo arc. And that had an extensional effect on a lot of material at the time. The movies were massively decreasing in profit, the video games were selling less, the ratings for the TV anime were on the decline. I mean, Dragon Ball went 5 years without releasing any kind of content in Japan (1997-2002), and this was specifically after GT ended. That in itself speaks volumes of how much people had basically moved on from Dragon Ball and there wasn't much of audience left to market to in its native region.

GT was just caught in the midst of major burnout fans had towards Dragon Ball as a whole.

[Robo4900]

To those arguing about the manga: The point is that there is a manga for Super, not that there isn't a manga that it follows on from.

Anyway, reason GT failed is ratings, nothing else. Ratings were plummetting in the mid-Boo arc, and only really picked up for the very end. When GT hit the air, ratings went back to the low they'd sunk to in the second half of the Boo arc, and only fell further down from there(Albeit slowly). No one was tuning in. And with no manga around, there was no new media appearing in book stores, in the big Shounen Jump magazine, no way to catch up to the current run of the show, no quicker, alternate way of experiencing it that's easier and more accessible to pick up and read, so it lost anyone who was just casually reading the manga... So, with the TV version failing, and there being no manga to casually flick through, the merchandise didn't sell well, and it just didn't make the money or pull in the ratings it needed to continue on past 64 episodes... (Though it is worth noting this was an extension of the inital 40-epsiode order it received)

It really is as simple as "Franchise fatigue". It needed a break. People needed some time. The video games that came out a few years later sold pretty well, but remember that that's not new Dragon Ball, it's a video game based on what was at the time a finished work. And, when the Dragon Box DVDs and the Kanzenban hit shelves, people bought those up... Then Kai came around, which was very popular despite very poor merchandise sales... Then, finally, having slowly eased people back into it, and having given new Dragon Ball a long break, they brought us new Dragon Ball with Super, and it's popular.

The fans needed a break. GT was a victim of poor timing. If they'd waited 5 years, then put it out then, it probably would've done well. As it stands, it's the last bit of the series that fans never tuned in for. As I understand it, Japanese fans are generally quite positive towards it on reflection, but just never watched it at the time when it was new.

[ABED]

To those arguing about the manga: The point is that there is a manga for Super, not that there isn't a manga that it follows on from.

Anyway, reason GT failed is ratings, nothing else. Ratings were plummetting in the mid-Boo arc, and only really picked up for the very end. When GT hit the air, ratings went back to the low they'd sunk to in the second half of the Boo arc, and only fell further down from there(Albeit slowly). No one was tuning in. And with no manga around, there was no new media appearing in book stores, in the big Shounen Jump magazine, no way to catch up to the current run of the show, no quicker, alternate way of experiencing it that's easier and more accessible to pick up and read, so it lost anyone who was just casually reading the manga... So, with the TV version failing, and there being no manga to casually flick through, the merchandise didn't sell well, and it just didn't make the money or pull in the ratings it needed to continue on past 64 episodes... (Though it is worth noting this was an extension of the inital 40-epsiode order it received)

It really is as simple as "Franchise fatigue". It needed a break. People needed some time. The video games that came out a few years later sold pretty well, but remember that that's not new Dragon Ball, it's a video game based on what was at the time a finished work. And, when the Dragon Box DVDs and the Kanzenban hit shelves, people bought those up... Then Kai came around, which was very popular despite very poor merchandise sales... Then, finally, having slowly eased people back into it, and having given new Dragon Ball a long break, they brought us new Dragon Ball with Super, and it's popular.

The fans needed a break. GT was a victim of poor timing. If they'd waited 5 years, then put it out then, it probably would've done well. As it stands, it's the last bit of the series that fans never tuned in for. As I understand it, Japanese fans are generally quite positive towards it on reflection, but just never watched it at the time when it was new.

This

It's what leads me to think that this revival won't go on forever. This revival fad is just that, a fad. The occasional revival will happen, but it won't be this glut we're seeing these days.

[Drayenko]

I think you underestimate DB... Naruto hasn't stopped since '98 and Boruto is going strong. Same with One Piece. Same with Pokemon...
With that said, I don't know about Japan, but in Europe -Spain & France specifically- and South America, DB has never slowed down. Sure, there's up and downs, but yeah.