Has Dragon Ball Aged Well?

[Dragon Ball Ireland]

In your opinion do the original three anime series (original, Z and GT) and their respective movies and series hold up as battle shounen from the 80s and 90s?

I would say yes, aside from some of the humour from characters like Roshi and Bacterian, I think these shows tell Toriyama's story wonderfully. The art and animation is also memorable despite being low budget, looking back I do think all the staff put their heart and soul into it. The performances of the Japanese cast as well as Kikuchi and Tokunaga's scores have aged like fine wines, especially when heard with the broadcast audio.

I can still enjoy other anime I grew up with like Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh and Beyblade but I haven't felt compelled to try them out fully in Japanese as I have with Dragon Ball, which is still a truly amazing show after all this time.

[Majin Man 101]

In your opinion do the original three anime series (original, Z and GT) and their respective movies and series hold up as battle shounen from the 80s and 90s?

I would say yes, aside from some of the humour from characters like Roshi and Bacterian, I think these shows tell Toriyama's story wonderfully. The art and animation is also memorable despite being low budget, looking back I do think all the staff put their heart and soul into it. The performances of the Japanese cast as well as Kikuchi and Tokunaga's scores have aged like fine wines, especially when heard with the broadcast audio.

I can still enjoy other anime I grew up with like Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh and Beyblade but I haven't felt compelled to try them out fully in Japanese as I have with Dragon Ball, which is still a truly amazing show after all this time.

Yes Dragon Ball has aged well and will continue to be one of the biggest media franchises of all time going forward. I think over time Dragon Ball's popularity will continue to grow. I think that the new era of Super was just a hint at how popular this series can be. Also, I think people make too big of a deal about Roshi and original Dragon ball humor. There is nothing that original Dragon Ball has done that other anime shows haven't as far as being pervy. I don't understand what sets Dragon ball apart where people get all bent out of shape over pervy jokes in Dragon Ball, but accept it everywhere else in anime culture.

Even with Roshi humor, Dragon ball will continue to fascinate audiences worldwide.

[Majin Man 101]

In your opinion do the original three anime series (original, Z and GT) and their respective movies and series hold up as battle shounen from the 80s and 90s?

I would say yes, aside from some of the humour from characters like Roshi and Bacterian, I think these shows tell Toriyama's story wonderfully. The art and animation is also memorable despite being low budget, looking back I do think all the staff put their heart and soul into it. The performances of the Japanese cast as well as Kikuchi and Tokunaga's scores have aged like fine wines, especially when heard with the broadcast audio.

I can still enjoy other anime I grew up with like Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh and Beyblade but I haven't felt compelled to try them out fully in Japanese as I have with Dragon Ball, which is still a truly amazing show after all this time.

Yes Dragon Ball has aged well and will continue to be one of the biggest media franchises of all time going forward. I think over time Dragon Ball's popularity will continue to grow. I think that the new era of Super was just a hint at how popular this series can be. Also, I think people make too big of a deal about Roshi and original Dragon ball humor. There is nothing that original Dragon Ball has done that other anime shows haven't as far as being pervy. I don't understand what sets Dragon ball apart where people get all bent out of shape over pervy jokes in Dragon Ball, but accept it everywhere else in anime culture.

Even with Roshi humor, Dragon ball will continue to fascinate audiences worldwide.

The 90's artstyles of the original run of the anime will always be loved by those who lived in that time, and I'm sure future audiences will find a charm in it. The Kikuchi score is timeless, and one of the greatest scores to grace any media franchise. Tokunaga probably will not age well. Tokunaga's score was feeling dated as early as 2000. It sounds odd and the mix isn't great even with the broadcast audio.

Also, in comparison to the other anime that you have mentioned above, Dragon Ball is honestly on a whole other level. Not saying that Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon aren't enjoyable, but Dragon Ball as a story is definitely leagues above those, and I think the story, characters, and incredible artwork is what keeps people coming back.

[Cipher]

I think, away from some of the remnants of its time like the humor surrounding Bulma and Turtle Hermit at various points (unfortunately clustered toward the beginning)*, it’s aged quite well, and its continued popularity with new groups of both child and adult fans is testament to that.

It’s extremely hard to not enjoy, if you can get past those badly dated bits. (And … fair enough, if you can’t.)

* Also, I disagree about reactions to this being overblown. It’s pretty bad. A loooot of pages wind up being spent on sexual harassment gags directed at a sixteen-year-old, and perpetrated by a character we’re largely supposed to respect. It is what it is, but it’s pretty off-putting from a contemporary perspective where we’ve learned to treat those dynamics more seriously.

[Wrigglything]

I'd say it does. The charming blend of slapstick, cartoonist humour with action is what made me come back to the series in spite of its less than stellar moments, and its not just the stuff that's been discussed in this very thread so far. Honestly, it's rare for other anime to really pull it off as effectively as Dragon Ball to me through that combination alone, even if the stories and characters are better fleshed out and paced well otherwise, or the action scenes flashier and have better and concrete connections to the characters, world, and even our real world sensibilities.

And if it didn't age well, there'd probably be less of us here in this forum right now (and perhaps this website might be at risk of shutting down if it hadn't by that time) and it would definitely not get the merchandise and collaborations it has in the modern age. Just look at how the Crunchyroll servers were busy during DBS premieres, the fan screenings of the final episodes, and the Fortnite event showcasing Goku doing the griddy.

[VegettoEX]

I think, away from some of the remnants of its time like the humor surrounding Bulma and Turtle Hermit at various points (unfortunately clustered toward the beginning)*, it’s aged quite well, and its continued popularity with new groups of both child and adult fans is testament to that.

It’s extremely hard to not enjoy, if you can get past those badly dated bits. (And … fair enough, if you can’t.)

* Also, I disagree about reactions to this being overblown. It’s pretty bad. A loooot of pages wind up being spent on sexual harassment gags directed at a sixteen-year-old, and perpetrated by a character we’re largely supposed to respect. It is what it is, but it’s pretty off-putting from a contemporary perspective where we’ve learned to treat those dynamics more seriously.

Want to follow up on this and acknowledge just how goddamn often it is that I see -- pretty regularly on the Reddit sub-forums -- people who are new to the series come in with "I'm definitely no prude, but what the actual goddamn fuck is going on with all the rapey shit at the beginning of this series?"

Even if you don't like said content, if you're a long-time fan of the series, you get pretty desensitized to it, particularly when the main focus of conversation tends to revolve around how strong one monkey dude is versus some other alien dude.

And if it didn't age well, there'd probably be less of us here in this forum right now (and perhaps this website might be at risk of shutting down if it hadn't by that time)

And finally just want to add that there's absolutely no risk of Kanzenshuu as a website ever going away. External popularity of the series has absolutely nothing to do with what WE do!

[Majin Buu]

I think it has aged well, for all the reasons people have already mentioned, but also for its character designs. Toriyama has always been an expert at producing character designs that just look cool and unique (well, as unique as you can get when you only have a certain amount of base designs in your repertoire).

[JulieYBM]

As overall works of art? I don't think so. I still think that Dragon Ball (1984) has genius art paneling through to how simple and easy it is to follow (I'm pretty sure I have sensory processing issues, so it really helps for the original comic to have such good art) in its early years, up through the Cell Game. The comic contains a lot of awful, demeaning panels for its female and queer characters and that shit just hurts. I also think that Toriyama's attempts at being overtly contrarian is short-sighted a lot of the time and winds up making the characters unrelatable to a large degree.

For the first three cartoon series, I think that they also have their issues. I think they're important pieces of art for the contributions by the actors, Kikuchi Shunsuke and directors like Nishio Daisuke, Yamauchi Shigeyasu (especially Yamauchi) and Ueda Yoshihiro but their contributions are still small and in between. I don't think the original three anime age well in an overall sense, though. The older I've gotten and the more art I have experienced the higher my standards have evolved past the limited time and resources present in those three cartoon series. Yamauchi had only a fraction of his true power shown in those days. Go watch what he did for Digimon and Ojamajo Doremi just a few short years after Dragon Ball GT, it's amazing.

I think NARUTO does the 'long-running shounen' thing a lot better because since its inception (as far back as Episode #17) it was doing what other long-runners were not: pooling resources together to produce regular auteur-driven episodes. Even the big Yamauchi episodes never reached the level of what Yuu Yuu Hakusho was doing at the same time with its Shinbou Akiyuki/Wakabayashi Atsushi episodes.

[WittyUsername]

I’m surprised no one here has mentioned Mr. Popo. That’s another infamous thing about Dragon Ball that is rather problematic from a Western perspective.

I suppose it’s always important to keep in mind that while Dragon Ball is timeless in some respects, it’s still a Japanese manga/anime series that started in the 1980s, so it comes with a lot of the baggage you’d expect from something like that. Of course, Hollywood movies at the time weren’t exactly immune to this either. Just as an example, there are a lot of things about the Indiana Jones movies that would not fly today.

[Cursed Lemon]

Aside from all the questionable jokes, I think DBZ specifically has a very jarring animation/art quality inconsistency that would make most people who were new to the series throw their hands up. Of course that exists in other anime as well, but I don't think I've ever seen it quite as stark as in DBZ, although I'm sure I'm about to get schooled on this by someone lol

[JulieYBM]

Aside from all the questionable jokes, I think DBZ specifically has a very jarring animation/art quality inconsistency that would make most people who were new to the series throw their hands up. Of course that exists in other anime as well, but I don't think I've ever seen it quite as stark as in DBZ, although I'm sure I'm about to get schooled on this by someone lol

I'm trying to think of a different example but I'm drawing a blank, mostly because while the production of Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball GT wanted to match the increasingly detailed art style that Toriyama was employing at the time it did not actually have the resources to accomplish such. In nearly all modern Japanese cartoons a sou-sakuga kantoku (chief animation director/supervisor) is now used to unite the various animation supervisors (who are themselves meant to unite the various key animators) under a single, unified look so as to maintain consistency. On Dragon Ball Z such a role was only officially used on one or two episodes (and one episode of Dragon Ball GT). Otherwise, Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball GT just left the finished animation from the multiple sub-contracting studios untouched. As a result, episodes sent out to Last House looked like Uchiyama Masayuki's style. Uchiyama has a loose style that could pass during the early days of the 1986 series because there was less lines and shading employed in the designs and Uchiyama and Ohara Tai'ichirou—the only two key animators to work on the Last House episodes starting mid-way through Dragon Ball Z—were both animators who focused on finishing cuts quickly. The production team at Toei was absolutely aware that Last House episodes didn't match Maeda, Nakatsuru and Yamamuro's character models spectacularly but their speed meant that they could finish episodes quickly. Deadlines need to be met and that meant allowing an animator's indosyncricities to slip through.

These days productions are a lot different. Now, not only is television animation expected to be as good as OVA/movies were in the 1980s the productions have less resources to work from, animators not centralized in a single location (a studio) and also animators working either while juggling multiple projects at once or not having been fully trained before being asked to do the work of fully-trained staff. Furthermore, productions' character designs are typically expected to include more lines and shading than in the 1980s and earlier decades. Chief animation supervisors are being employed regularly nowawdays both to keep projects from falling a part and also because merchandisers expect the animation to reflect the detailed merchandise. Using Pokemon as an example, despite the last two series making the human characters less detailed so as to be easier to animate the productions have used a higher number of animation supervisors per episode to insure the series looks on model. Meanwhile, if you go back to the 1997 series (where Ishiichi Sayuri was the character designer) you'll notice that episodes were less consistent between each other while also having more detailed character designs that are less animation-friendly.

[Koitsukai]

Humor aside, because that's from the manga, not an anime-only thing, yes, it has.
When I compare it to Saint Seiya, the other powerhouse from that time, I can't help but think SS was too formulaic.
Every arc had the same structure, so you knew before hand how everybody would perform in battle, who would beat the big bad and how. Athena in danger, Andromeda not wanting to engage and losing due to his peaceful nature, Phoenix showing up late to save his brother, sacrificing himself and disappearing until the end. Pegasus being the first one to fight, struggling, winning, finding his way to the final boss and getting help from a Gold Cloth and/or his friends. If you watched one arc and you watched all of them.

DBZ, too, follows a certain structure, but the surprise factor is there in every arc. The template it follows is looser.
At least, I can say it has aged better than another big franchise from the 80s.

[GokuHater]

Yes, I do think it aged exceptionally well.
The tale starting with a young pure hearted kid having adventures and making friends with anyone going to fierce, violent and epic battles for the sake of the world is timeless and may hook anyone instantly, especially the manga.

Even anime fans who didn't grow up with it, otherwise having their Narutos and One Pieces should respect the series as one of the earliest of it's kind. While the art is somewhat simplistic, it's full of life and very enjoyable.

The only thing which wouldn't work this well are, as mentioned, Roshi's jokes (this is a very different time than Japanese 80's) and the speed of DBZ anime which sometimes is really unbereable to watch - and I don't mean the filler, I mean the fight scenes themselves. We really don't remember it but some scenes are so incredibly drawn out and slow it makes Oolong rock paper scissor episode look fast.

The movies are a different thing though.
Recently I had a rewatch of the Blood Rubies and The Dead Zone and I must say... Unfortunately they are a product of it's time and very glorified anime ads.
The movies do get better near the end though.

[Desassina]

Dragon Ball is very visual and iconic and dare I say detached from local identity. Themes were rooted in popular culture without reference which helped them become a story of its own. Character designs were inspired and materialized into a unique style that lent itself well to animation. The power creep behaved like that of an RPG and its battles paved the way to a subset of fighting games. The world was mystical when its scope was reduced and grounded when it expanded to more sophisticated ideas reflecting the author's own growth. The original manga is one of the few that has a complete anime run and then some. It does not waste time with characterization for the sake of it, but allows them to be built from the remnants of the action in breather moments, because the way that Toriyama illustrated and wrote them did not require explanation. It has aged well but its animated format leaves something to be desired. I spoke generally because I don't feel this way towards everything Dragon Ball.