Is Future Trunks' purple hair part of a possible scrapped idea?

[Deathbringer]

In the manga version of the series, Trunks (both versions) and Bulma always have the same hair colour whenever they're both depicted in the same drawing, for the best example of this we have the volume 32 front cover with all 3 of them depicted with blue hair.

Now when it comes to Dragon Ball Super the reason Future Trunks has blue hair is possibly due to Toriyama basing the colouring off the anime's more popular blue hair for Bulma (and Toei likewise not correcting him, or any number of speculative reasons). Thinking about that whole situation lead me to realise that all Toei really needed to do to course correct in a way that would keep most fans satisfied was to give Kid Trunks the blue hair instead of Future and likewise give Future Bulma the purple hair to match with her son, seeing as a good number of fans prefer Trunks with purple hair. This would make sense in universe since they're both in different timelines and would in fact have been a cool indicator that Trunks is from a different timeline.

Which brought me to my main question: was Future Trunks' purple hair actually intended as an indicator that he's from a different future rather than just Toei goofing and not knowing that him and his mother are supposed to share the same hair colour? Was it a possible idea that they had when choosing that colour that they later forgot about/shelved when it came to designing Kid Trunks and Future Bulma?

Not sure how much discussion there has ever been around this in the past, in either fan or official production material, hence a thread here by me (something I haven't done in a while!) for anyone else's speculation or ideas.

[Cold Skin]

I really think it all started with Toei either not realising that Trunks and Bulma are supposed to share the same hair color, or choosing to ignore it when they adapted Z because Bulma already had sort of greenish hair instead of blue or purple and maybe they thought greenish hair didn't fit Trunks' design, so they went "oh well, let's keep it purple like the manga and not change it this time, that'll do".

My guess goes to the first option, where they simply didn't see that Trunks is basically supposed to be Bulma turned into a guy but with the serious eyes / look on his face taken from Vegeta (this latter part being even mentionned in dialogues while they all wait for Goku if I remember well).

Apparently, Toriyama's vision is quite simple: Trunks and Bulma have the same color. During the original release and a few years after that, when he mostly colored Bulma with purple hair, he mostly colored Trunks that way too, they have the exact same shade whenever they are on the same picture. When he switched to blue hair for Bulma years later - probably being influenced by the anime whether it was conscious or unconscious -, he made Trunks with the same blue hair as soon as they were reunited on a picture again (BoG designs). His thought process when it's time to color Trunks has probably been "and the hair is Bulma's color, so..." and since Bulma has become naturally blue-haired in his mind, so is Trunks now.

Note that Shueisha themselves, while respecting most colors from the DBS anime (even having Krilin's eyes skin-colored or Piccolo "arm circles" pink on the contrary of the DB manga edition) still decided to have Kid Trunks with blue hair from the get-go unlike the anime. So it seems even Shueisha, when accepting the anime's divergent design choices for colors, were like "but having Kid Trunks with purple hair was a mistake, so we need to correct that one and make both versions of Trunks and Bulma all have blue".

[Deathbringer]

Yeah the fact that Trunks in his original blue jacket looks way better with purple hair (not to mention the clear blue sky in that scene makes it harder for the hair to stand out) is probably the biggest factor in their decision. Also I had forgotten that they course corrected in Super Hero and gave present Trunks the blue hair.

[WittyUsername]

I really think it all started with Toei either not realising that Trunks and Bulma are supposed to share the same hair color, or choosing to ignore it when they adapted Z because Bulma already had sort of greenish hair instead of blue or purple and maybe they thought greenish hair didn't fit Trunks' design, so they went "oh well, let's keep it purple like the manga and not change it this time, that'll do".

My guess goes to the first option, where they simply didn't see that Trunks is basically supposed to be Bulma turned into a guy but with the serious eyes / look on his face taken from Vegeta (this latter part being even mentionned in dialogues while they all wait for Goku if I remember well).

Apparently, Toriyama's vision is quite simple: Trunks and Bulma have the same color. During the original release and a few years after that, when he mostly colored Bulma with purple hair, he mostly colored Trunks that way too, they have the exact same shade whenever they are on the same picture. When he switched to blue hair for Bulma years later - probably being influenced by the anime whether it was conscious or unconscious -, he made Trunks with the same blue hair as soon as they were reunited on a picture again (BoG designs). His thought process when it's time to color Trunks has probably been "and the hair is Bulma's color, so..." and since Bulma has become naturally blue-haired in his mind, so is Trunks now.

Note that Shueisha themselves, while respecting most colors from the DBS anime (even having Krilin's eyes skin-colored or Piccolo "arm circles" pink on the contrary of the DB manga edition) still decided to have Kid Trunks with blue hair from the get-go unlike the anime. So it seems even Shueisha, when accepting the anime's divergent design choices for colors, were like "but having Kid Trunks with purple hair was a mistake, so we need to correct that one and make both versions of Trunks and Bulma all have blue".

I don’t see how Toei back in the day could’ve missed that Trunks was supposed to look like Bulma. The reveal had already been several months old in the manga.

[Cold Skin]

^ It's was easy enough for them to miss it when the manga was in black and white most of the time, they might easily forget that Bulma's hair was purple to begin with in the manga after years of animating her with turquoise hair and colored artworks with her from Toriyama being quite rare in comparison of the many anime pictures/sheets they had to come up with.

I can believe that at this point, teams in charge of the anime had become oblivious to Bulma's original purple hair.

Maybe they just went "let's wait for some colored artwork of this to see how we should color this when he appears in the upcoming episodes. Oh, apparently Bulma's son has purple hair rather than greenish blue for some reason. Well then, let's go with purple hair, why not?"
And all of this without thinking twice.

It's possible that this was a choice: maybe they just thought the greenish-blue hair wouldn't suit Trunks, or maybe they thought it made it too obvious that the oh-so-mysterious eventful warrior was connected to Bulma from the get-go, unlike the black and white manga that couldn't spoil anything through colors.

We'll never really know, but now it's been fixed even in the anime, that's what's important!

[WittyUsername]

^ It's was easy enough for them to miss it when the manga was in black and white most of the time, they might easily forget that Bulma's hair was purple to begin with in the manga after years of animating her with turquoise hair and colored artworks with her from Toriyama being quite rare in comparison of the many anime pictures/sheets they had to come up with.

I can believe that at this point, teams in charge of the anime had become oblivious to Bulma's original purple hair.

Maybe they just went "let's wait for some colored artwork of this to see how we should color this when he appears in the upcoming episodes. Oh, apparently Bulma's son has purple hair rather than greenish blue for some reason. Well then, let's go with purple hair, why not?"
And all of this without thinking twice.

It's possible that this was a choice: maybe they just thought the greenish-blue hair wouldn't suit Trunks, or maybe they thought it made it too obvious that the oh-so-mysterious eventful warrior was connected to Bulma from the get-go, unlike the black and white manga that couldn't spoil anything through colors.

We'll never really know, but now it's been fixed even in the anime, that's what's important!

I wouldn’t say it was fixed in the anime. Present Trunks still has purple hair in the anime, which creates a weird discrepancy between him and Future Trunks that’s never explained.

[Cold Skin]

^ I include Super Hero into the anime progression, so that's why I mentionned it being fixed.
Well, at least fixed when Kid Trunks reached a certain age and size.

But yeah, I guess if we ever see Kid Trunks being younger in any production (for example appearing in an adaptation of the Moro arc just like in the manga), Toei might make him go back to purple hair out of "coherency" (ironically, because it wouldn't be coherent with the latest production being shown with Super Hero) simply because they never showed him being a kid and having blue hair at the same time, so...

Or if they're clever, they could slip in the correction, taking advantage of the fact that it would be a new anime or a new part of it (like Super part 2, even if the title ends up being just Super again), so that they can bring minor redesigns here and there, just like they took advantage of the movie to change a few physical traits (Krilin's eyes being finally white, Piccolo's arm circles becoming more yellow than pink, etc...).

But that's Toei, so it's kind of unpredictable from one product to the other.
They could even go back to having purple hair if they consider that it was just updated to blue for the "3D design", or if they say that it needs to be in line with the epilogue from back then when the time comes, for example.
Nothing is really certain with them!

At least the colored manga has it all blue from the start, so there's a product that has the hair thing right of mother and sons all sharing the same hair color.
BUT it brings other unusual things too: the DBS manga mostly goes with the anime colors, which means it made Krilin's eyes skin-colored and Piccolo's arm circles pink. And out of coherency, they'll have to keep them for the Super Hero arc with colors. So now, the anime will have colors closer to the original manga run and the manga will have colors that are closer to most of the anime!

All of this is kind of a mess, really!
Luckily, it's not THAT important in the grand scheme of things, but that's kind of peculiar.

[Jord]

They should never have changed Trunks' hair color in Super. Not only does it look worse color-wise since it doesn't contrast or add to the blue color of his vest but now it looked like Trunks' dyed his hair during a war.

[Cold Skin]

^ I'm on the opposite team, they made a great decision and he looks twice as good with blue hair, plus he now follows Toriyama's logic of mother and son sharing the same hair color and Trunks looking like a male reincarnation of Bulma.

Correcting things design-wise on the way is not a problem.
Or does it make you feel that in Super Heroes, Krilin now wears eye-wide contacts to make it all white like the rest and Piccolo has stuck yellowish stickers on his arm circles?

Changing colors is okay (God knows Toriyama himself did it) and Trunks' blue hair are way more beautiful and stylish than his desaturated lilac hair that are not even the deep purple of the Full Color original run.

The only mistake here was NOT changing Kid Trunks hair too for a while, but now it has seemingly, finally been fixed.

[Grimlock]

it looked like Trunks' dyed his hair during a war.

It's what every normal person does.

[Bloodthroe]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Trunks and Bulma very clearly both have purple hair on the cover of chapter 32.

In regards to Toei's decision making, I think they just went with blue hair for Bulma in OG Dragon Ball, because she had blue hair in the first chapter of the series. They never bothered to correct it to purple hair used for Bulma later in the manga.

When Trunks debuted, Toei gave him purple hair, because that's the color he was always portrayed with in the manga. Trunks and Bulma have different colored hair in the anime now and it's not that big of a deal. Lots of people have different colored hair from their parents, that's just how genes work.

Come DBS, when future Trunks debuts with blue hair in the anime, it is because Toriyama designed him with blue hair. Likely, to match Bulma in the anime. This means it was more of a course correction on Toriyama's part. Or just a whim if he thought blue hair looked better. And again, Toei just matches the anime to what Toriyama's design is.

Toriyama is inconsistent and Toei doesn't care. They just match his designs as they come. That's all there is to it.

[PerhapsTheOtherOne]

I always took the purple hair as being an indicator of Dr. Briefs's side of the family.

[jjbgood]

Toriyama didn't always paint Trunks with the same hair colour, just like Bulma's hair colour varies in his drawings. On cover 30, for example, he has very reddish hair.



Apart from that: there was an explanation for the blue hair in Super.
"Toriyama drew him this way" - official statement.
At the beginning of Super, Toriyama's artwork was still adapted. Kid Trunks also had blue hair, which was then adapted for the series - this was later dropped. Today, they don't take the established style of the past into account. In the films, they also started to use designs that were true to the manga, with Frieza and Piccolo, for example. Personally, I would have preferred the Z hair colour, but Bulma's hair has also changed. It used to be turquoise, but now it's ocean blue. It's just a modern design decision that makes no sense in the series itself (especially with Kid Trunks next to it) - but you have to live with it.