Post
by Rukawa11 » Sun Jan 08, 2017 1:35 pm
Without a shadow of a doubt. Toriyama laid the groundwork for what a successful Shounen anime should be like. To me, this becomes clear when I look at Dragonball's contemporaries within the Shounen/ Fighting genre. The two biggest (and possibly the only) series I can think of are Fist of the North Star (which predates DB by a year as a Manga) and Saint Seiya (first chapter released in early 1986, followed by an Anime adaptation in October that same year). There's no question that both Fist and Seiya have a place in history, but both series suffered the tragic flaw of taking themselves way too seriously, of having incredibly stiff fight scenes that focus solely on getting the characters all battered and beaten to a pulp (and never on those characters enjoying the fight), and of having an all-serious cast without a tiny hint of a quirk or anything funny at all. It's amazing how, beyond the fact that those two series fall under the same Action/ Super Powers genre of DB/Z, they have almost nothing else in common with it.
Everything I'm going to list below about DB/Z is something that Seiya and Fist terribly lacked (whereas Bleach, Naruto, One Piece, Fairy Tail, Yuyu Hakusho and many other subsequent series had followed like it was the Bible). It should show you how revolutionary Toriyama was:
- Unlike Seiya and Kenshiro, Goku doesn't start out as some powerhouse who carves out one victory after another without any sort of training. In fact, DB/Z's formula of including having to train or learn a new technique each time a powerful threat emerges is what almost every Shounen anime contains now.
- Goku doesn't take himself too seriously and doesn't spout stuff like "I'm the savior of this world" or "I fight for justice" every five minutes. I don't think Goku's ever uttered the word "Justice." Instead, Goku manages to retain a smile and enjoy a fight even against a villain who'd killed his friend ten minutes ago. Goku would even praise that villain and tell him how much he's enjoying the fight. You won't believe how such a tiny trait had added an astronomical level of freshness to the heroes of this genre, because Seiya or Kenshiro would simply wear the most hateful expression ever and seek to kill their opponent as soon as possible, which is to say, they'd react in a more realistic/ typical way expected of someone who'd lost his friends at the hands of his opponent. Toriyama didn't take this typical approach.
- Leaving the quirky heroes aside, DB actually treated us to quirky villains. Blue missed his chance to kill Goku because he freaked out when he saw a mouse. Tao Pai Pai postponed his assassination for a change of clothes. The Ginyu Force would actually tell each other stuff like "Ah man, our cleaning bill is gonna skyrocket cause of this dust" or "You'll treat us to a chocolate parfait in exchange for taking this long to kill Vegeta" amidst a fight (this reminds me of this humor within the Akatsuki members or the countless goofy villains of One Piece). Once again, Dragonball's contemporaries didn't contain any of this stuff. We're simply treated to countless villains who all act the way villains should act: cold-blooded and dead serious.
- Goku having to find a "pichi pichi" girl to train under Roshi and invent puns that would make Kaio-sama/ King Kai laugh to learn the Kaio-ken sort of became a staple for newer Shounen Animes (the one example that comes to mind right now is Naruto having to impress Killer Bee with a few rap verses so he could teach him to contol his Biju).
- Finally, the action in DB/Z presented a level of swiftness that Seiya and Fist could never come near (rendering their fight scenes incredibly stale and stiff by comparison). Saint Seiya was 90% about the opponents standing in their places, exchanging blows from long range, and getting their bodies and heads cracked open and somehow managing to stand up (only to repeat the same scenario once more, only with more blood-stained faces and shattered armors). Fist, on the other hand, was martial arts based, but it hardly contained any fights where the opponents were evenly matched. And as such, all we get to see is one character beating the other to a pulp with mostly close range combat. Compare this to Dragonball (even before Z came along), where the action could suddenly take to the sky, or the whole landscape would change cause of a powerful ki blast, or the fight itself could become close-range, long-range, and return to close-range in a matter of seconds. Dragonball pushed the boundaries of what a fight is. Even a Samurai series like Rurouni Kenshin was evidently influenced by it in the switfness department (for those who've watched it, where else could the author had come up with the Kenshin vs. Sojiro fight?)
No matter how you look at it, it's not Fist or Seiya's formula that Naruto, Bleach, OP, Yuyu and the others have followed, it's Dragonball's. The whole purpose of this somewhat lengthy response is to point out that, among the first "Big-Three" of Shounen Fighting Mangas (Fist, DB, Saint Seiya), it was DB whose formula had prevailed.
