SorikaiWolf89 wrote: Thu Aug 20, 2026 5:30 pm
Since WHEN though was it ever officially stated by Toriyama that Trunks’ hair was originally intended to be blue in Z anyway ???
In almost all the colored manga artwork Trunks hair is some shade of purple
It’s only on Volume 32 (Volume 16 in English) that it is a shade of blue and like 2 artworks that Toriyama was clearly just experimenting with the colors as we all know he’s infamous for
It wasn't meant to be blue in Z, it was quite obviously meant to be purple just like his mother, with only a few exceptions showing them as blue.
However, at some point, Toriyama stopped making Bulma's hair purple and - perhaps influenced when having to create artworks for select anime products and checking references - started to consistently make Bulma's hair blue, showing it was now how he considered the character to be in his mind, how he accepted that feature as part of the character.
And the thing is, when he started making Bulma's hair blue, with perhaps only one exception prior to Battle of Gods, he started to consistently make Trunks' hair blue as well: in his mind, the thing is simple, Trunks has Bulma's hair. When switching Bulma to blue consistently, he switched Trunks to blue consistently.
He updated his vision of how Trunks and Bulma's hair should be, but the anime apparently had to wait for several artworks to confirm it wasn't a one-off mistake but indeed how he consistently saw the characters now, similarly to Kaio Shin.
Shin had undoubtedly purple skin back then... but undoubtedly, consistently pink skin ever since the Perfect Edition, so they took their time but ended up correcting it for Daima too.
Took them decades to notice that Kinto-Un (Flying Nimbus) is purple rather than yellow in Toriyama's head too given how it's purple 95% of the time in his artworks, but it's only in Super Hero that they thought "whoops, perhaps Kinto-Un should actually be purple... and Kid Trunks' hair should actually be blue and Krilin's eyes should actually be white like the other characters and Piccolo's circle patches on his skin shouldn't be pink, all of this finally fitting with the author's vision of things, sometimes having been so for decades".
It seems the anime staff has trouble updating looks and retroactively changing them when the author does, Toriyama has to hammer in the fact that now he sees the characters like that with several artworks before the anime staff "oh, perhaps we should update it like the author does when he designs the character like this ten times in a row..." (the "ten times" being exaggerated here).
Meanwhile, the manga doesn't shy away from correcting things as needed from one series to the next or even from one arc to the next.