Ah, Daizex. Probably the only Dragon Ball board on the Internet where "hardcore"' is a dirty word, power-level discussions get pushed to side-threads in subforums and moderators correct for grammar (which I can't express my gratitude for enough). If you're not owning up to the fact that Dragon Ball is a happy-go-lucky kids' series, you're in the wrong place.
"Look at the goofy crossovers with One Piece! Look at the 2008 Jump Special! Toriyama can't remember things! It's silly, silly, silly and Toriyama can't even remember anything!"
"'Rock the Dragon'? Misinterpretive blasphemy. The Toonami aesthetic? Misinterpretive nostalgic, awesome blasphemy. Serious? Never. Power levels? Their failure was a major theme of the Namek arc and they were never brought up again."
Spend a week or two on Daizex, and you'll walk away with the impression that Dragon Ball, apparently, was never hardcore in Japan.
And as far as the manga goes, that seems fairly accurate. It's very tongue-in-cheek. Toriyama's second editor (from what I understand) pushed him in a more action-oriented direction in the Saiyan, Namek and Android arcs, but even then we had humorous villains, the strongest characters taking the smallest forms, and a general disregard for logic when it got in the way of having fun. The final 26 volumes may be a little more serious, but they're very much give the impression of a light-hearted manga artist doing his best to approximate what would seem "cool" and "badass" to Japanese children and tweens at the behest of his editors. If not always completely silly, it's always very fun.
But the franchise as a whole? Whoo-boy. Japan was rocking the dragon before other dimensions were even a twinkle in Funimation's eye (huh?). Without further discussion, let's just set the tone for Dragon Ball marketing in '91-'95 or so with these:
The DBZ "Virtual Triangle" Music Hits CD: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULgJ_YAhYAM
DBZ "Hyper Anime" Special: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXSkOle8IXQ (WARNING: Gratuitous '90s)
See also: Insert songs "Battle Point Unlimited" and "Solid State Scouter," any other early '90s CDs, any early '90s promotional art (poster art, wall scrolls, etc.), any '90s video-game intro or commercial, any '90s Carddass set (which can all be found conveniently here.)
See also, any of the Z movies, which suddenly concern themselves with over-muscled villains unlike anything seen in the series proper. Oh, Toei, you have to put those kids in the theaters over break, right? (See observations about the Z movie villains here.)
Maybe it's not immediately recognizable as over-serious "hardcore marketing," being a very '90s, occasionally very neon (dat Carddass), very stylish, Japanese version. But it is. For a frame of reference, if it involves mentions of the word "battle power," "virtual," uses any gratuitous CGI, involves dramatic poses and muted colors, or conversely, really garish neon colors, or any combination of these elements, it's being marketed deadly seriously.
Toei's Dragon Ball franchise is guilty of all of that in spades, and while it began as an attempt to stay relevant in the '90s, elements of it have remained fixed in the franchise worldwide.
Why? What was happening? Well, in 1990, something very interesting began to happen. The '90s started. And with them, pop media the world over (but particularly in Japan and America, with their increasing back-and-forth) decided it had to become hardcore. Like, really hardcore.
For a frame of reference, the same time U.S. Transformers comics (Hey, look, a joint Japanese-American franchise! How convenient!) were producing hyper-violent stories about big guns and vaguely defined green-gray mech fluid:
These are NOT your father's Dragon Balls.
But seriously, these are really good. Don't judge them.
The franchise in Japan was seeing a series of manga and magazine story pages by Hidetsugu Yoshioka directly modeled upon their American counterparts: http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Transformers:_G- ... ry_page%29But seriously, these are really good. Don't judge them.
Also at the same time, Transformers commercials across the world looked like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23EvUt5DXZk
Neon everywhere? Gratuitous CGI animation? HARDCORENESS? Holy shit, it's the DBZ Hyper Anime all over again. Cue synthesized bass and dancing Cell.
It's tangential, but it's there to give you an impression of what other Japanese(-ish) productions clearly trying to make themselves more serious at the time were doing, and just how much the Dragon Ball franchise at the time fit in. And of course, at the same time, you also had Godzilla making his kind-of serious, but not-really-that-serious-it-turns-out return in the Heisei series. It was all over.
And before you think, "Well, okay. But Dragon Ball was just being marketed as a serious shonen property for a while. That's pretty timeless," it's not. Dragon Ball was as '90s hardcore as '90s hardcore got. Compare it to the marketing One Piece gets now, which (I don't follow it, but I'm tangentially aware) is still a lot more happy-go-lucky in its films and promotional material. Even Naruto, which, the last time I experienced it back in seventh grade, is a far more self-important series than Dragon Ball ever was, promotes itself a bit more broadly. (And aren't its films a little sillier as well? Am I making that up?)
And finally, let's touch on the much-magligned power levels. I don't want to aggregate all previous discussion on it, but they were clearly less an effort to provide a message on over-reliance upon technology, and more a calculated attempt to appeal to children in that serious shonen vein. It's been discussed here multiple times before. Japanese children, more so than in the West, it seems, dig numerical power rankings, card games, etc. To that extent, they continued to appear in promotional materials (we had some movie power-level magazine scans floating around here recently, didn't we?) and Carddass sets years and years later. The "Kili" in the Boo arc seem less a story-telling necessity and more an attempt to promote a more useable scale as well. I have no doubt someone was giving Toriyama input from a marketing perspective.
So, yeah. It's all a very Saturday-morning, Japanese, '90s sort of "hardcore," but that was the face of Dragon Ball for a long time in Japan. That was what got kids buying the merchandise and what put them in their theater seats each break to see hardcore villains like Coola and Android 13 tearing up the screen. Dragon Ball was less tongue-in-cheek and more "cool" and "hardcore" in a way not even most "serious" shonen series have been since. It's plainly obvious how much the franchise has moved away from that aesthetic in recent years as well. There are virtually no traces of it in the happy-go-lucky Kai era (again, similar to One Piece's branding). (Although we get a bit. Post-Budokai video-game intros/promotion, anyone? A certain element of that '90s edge has never left the series.)
And so, when it came stateside and got its Saturday-morning, American, mid- to late- '90s sort of "hardcore" reimagining, is it really so outrages? Before you laugh at the idea of "hardcore" Dragon Ball, think really hard about whether or not you enjoy any non-manga aspect of the franchise from the '90s. It was the product of a seriously "hardcore" age, and that philosophy has become so entwined with the franchise, it'll never truly leave (see again, all recent video-games, just to start with).
I still got it too 
