DB 30 Years

Older than most of its fans, DB keeps on going

By Mike LaBrie

The Dragon Ball series is 30 years old. Can you believe it?

When I started “VegettoEX’s Ultimate DBZ Links Page” in 1998—the foundation for what would become “Daizenshuu EX” and now “Kanzenshuu”—never in a million years did I have any kind of expectation that I would be here in 2014 putting together a celebratory magazine.

Within these pages, you’re going to read words from a few people that I consider to be some of my closest friends in the world. Some of them I see on a regular basis, and some of them I’ve never met in real life at all...but that doesn’t matter, ‘cuz Dragon Ball, yo.

I have Akira Toriyama to thank for that—a guy who wanted to make some quick cash, to write some poop jokes, and didn’t want to work too hard.

Man, I can relate to that!

The Biggest Fight

Dragon Ball’s first foray into fighting games: Super Butoden

By Joe Walker

In the early 90s there were two things that dominated the thoughts of boys and young men across Japan: Dragon Ball and Street Fighter. Akira Toriyama’s masterpiece was dominating both the manga and anime scenes and Capcom had popularized an entire genre with its innovative one-on-one fighting game. Someone at Bandai saw an opportunity: dropping Dragon Ball’s powerful cast into this new genre was the perfect fit. The result was Dragon Ball Z: Super Butoden, developed by TOSE and published by Bandai for the Super Famicom in March 1993.

Despite the obvious influence from Street Fighter, Super Butoden definitely brought a flavor all its own to the table. Rather than having multiple buttons dedicated to various strengths of punches and kicks, Super Butoden played to what made Dragon Ball’s spectacular battles so interesting by pairing punch and kick buttons with buttons dedicated to dashes, ki attacks and flight.

The stages were massive, not only featuring both “ground” and “sky” planes that players could jump between with the tap of a button, but characters were also able to get so far away from each other that a split-screen mode would kick in. This allowed for the huge, cinematic ki attacks the series is known for, with the action pausing to highlight trademark techniques like a fully-voiced Kamehameha. All of these features would come to define the Butoden series, setting it apart from more traditional 2D fighters.

Later that year in December, the game’s sequel, Super Butoden 2, was released. While such a quick turnaround would almost surely mean the game was slapped together, things turned out quite the opposite. Super Butoden 2 improved on the original in every way: fights were faster and more fluid, the story mode was expanded upon, the graphics were greatly improved and the cast was updated to focus on both the Cell arc as well as movies 9 and 10.

Bandai and TOSE weren’t done yet, and a third game was released in September 1994. In almost a complete flip-flop from the transition between Super Butoden and Super Butoden 2, the third iteration seemed rushed and unfinished despite the longer development period. The story mode was removed (understandable, given that the Buu arc was still ongoing at the time), there were fewer stages with much less variety and there were only three playable characters without blonde hair. To its credit, it played wonderfully, with even faster battles than Super Butoden 2.

While Super Butoden 3 was the end of the “official” Super Butoden series, there were still several games that carried on its legacy. Dragon Ball Z: Buyuu Retsuden hit the Sega Mega Drive in April 1994, featuring many of the same mechanics as its Super Famicom cousins. Shin Butoden, released for the Saturn in November 1995, mixed the hand-drawn graphics from the PlayStation’s Ultimate Battle 22 with mechanics more reminiscent of the Super Famicom titles. That seemed to be the end of the Butoden series until 2011, when Dragon Ball Kai: Ultimate Butoden landed on the Nintendo DS.

These days it’s impossible to think about Dragon Ball video games and not think about gigantic casts, enormous 3D battlefields and fighting through the series from Raditz to Buu. Despite all the advancements in modern day gaming, it’s always fun to remember a time when all we had was a dozen or so characters, two dimensions and 16 bits of power with which to play out our own dazzling skirmishes.

JOE (“SpaceKappa”) hosts The Backlog, a retro game show: youtube.com/PKBloggin

Super Dragon Ball Z

What if Capcom made a DBZ game? They sorta did back in 2005.

Noritaka Funamizu and his team at Crafts & Meister pulled from their experience working on games like Street Fighter to create one of the deepest fighting experiences the Dragon Ball franchise has ever seen. It hit Japanese arcades in 2005 and PS2 in 2006. You probably missed it. Shame on you.

By Rory McHugo

Dragon Ball games aren’t exactly a rarity; in fact, besides a small gap in the late 90s to the early 2000s, there’s practically been a home console Dragon Ball game pushed out every year since 1986! Though there has been some variety in the franchise’s video game outings, the majority tend to be shallow “pick up and play” fighting games, with the main goal seemingly being: “recreate the feeling of the anime.”

It wasn’t until 2005, when Crafts & Meister—headed by an ex-Capcom producer for the Street Fighter series and Arika (yeah, those Street Fighter EX guys!)—co-developed a game for Japanese arcades (later to be ported to PS2), where Dragon Ball saw its first truly fleshed out fighting game, in the form of Super Dragon Ball Z. Using the control scheme of a traditional 2D fighting game, Super Dragon Ball Z is actually a 2D/3D-hybrid fighter of sorts, where two characters fight using 2D inputs, with the ability to move up and down to navigate a full 3D environment. Though a well-crafted fighting game engine was a serious talking point for the game, it also tossed other Dragon Ball game conventions out of the window, especially in regards to its visuals. Super Dragon Ball Z’s art style was entirely based on the manga—as opposed to the anime—with the game’s 3D characters and environments having textures reflecting Akira Toriyama’s original color schemes and even his more-subdued coloring style. With this, an option to level up your own characters, and even the ability to give your characters some “what-if” moves (Freeza using the Kamehameha!?), Super Dragon Ball Z was a Dragon Ball game like none before it.

Flow is the name of the game here; everything in Super Dragon Ball Z has a sense of fluidity to it. Sure you’ve had your quarter-circle motions before, but Super Dragon Ball Z executes it with such grace that every Kamehameha feels fantastic to pull off. This is further enhanced by the game constantly running at a rock solid 60fps, and the character animations are no slouch either, continuing to add a feeling of diversity to the cast. Ultimately, every character feels completely unique; Goku and Freeza aren’t just 3D models on a screen with different looking energy blasts, they’re entirely different characters with varying move-sets, strengths, and weaknesses which require different strategies to utilize. When combined with everything else, this gives Super Dragon Ball Z a feeling of polish that had never really been seen before in the series, and arguably has still not been seen since.

What Super Dragon Ball Z excels at is really bringing you into Toriyama’s world of Dragon Ball. The atmosphere presented in the game is a real testament to the developers at C&M and their ambition to replicate the manga as closely as possible. If there was a mood board for this game, it would just be pinned up tankobon covers. With hand drawn textures, and an environment that looks like a constantly moving manga panel, Super Dragon Ball Z executes its visual style with such confidence that it’s almost impossible not to respect it.

Though it had no sequels with which to refine its mechanics, add to its roster, or to even enhance its visuals, Super Dragon Ball Z still holds up brilliantly. Its expertly crafted fighting mechanics and inspired visual style allows it to stand out as not only a Dragon Ball game, but as a solid fighting game in its own right.

RORY, a devoted DBZ game fan, works as an illustrator and game designer in the UK.

Look to the (Jump) Stars

Jump Super Stars & Jump Ultimate Stars on the Nintendo DS honor the various Jump manga in their own way

By Mike LaBrie

If you weren’t paying attention, you might have missed some of the best licensed games of all time.

Jump Super Stars (2005) and Jump Ultimate Stars (2006) allowed you to pull from the rich history of Jump series and characters to construct your teams literally panel-by-panel. Developed by Ganbarion and published by Nintendo on the DS, they are essentially Smash Bros.-type games filled with your favorite shonen heroes and villains.

They never left Japan—what a shame!

MIKE (“VegettoEX”) is one of the co-founders of Kanzenshuu. He played a lot of Jump Ultimate Stars.

10 Years: Budokai 3

Still widely regarded as one of the best DBZ games.

By Mike LaBrie

Dragon Ball Z 3—known internationally as Budokai 3—was a seminal release for the franchise. It remains one of the most highly-regarded Dragon Ball video games, and for good reason. Improved graphics? Check. International re-releases featuring both the English voice cast and selectable Japanese voice cast? Check. Solid gameplay mechanics? Check. Branching story mode with tons of unlockables? Check. Huge roster of playable characters? Check. Endless rumors about extra playable characters? Check. Bombastic soundtrack from Kenji Yamamoto? Check.

Said soundtrack full of songs ripped from other artists? Check. Well, hey: I guess you can’t win ‘em all.

It feels like we’re still trying to recapture all the magic that Budokai 3 brought to us back in 2004, which is what made the HD Collection (PlayStation 3 / Xbox 360) such a disappointment.

Many of the changes make sense from a production standpoint, but do a disservice to the game’s legacy and show a lack of respect for historical preservation. Censorship in the original European releases is present in the North American edition, while the Japanese voices (and their inadvertently-hysterical subtitles) are not also ported over. “Rock the Dragon” remains as the only song from the original versions, with the entire musical score haphazardly replaced with music from other, non-Kenji Yamamoto games. Budokai 2—with its repetitive yet innovate board game story mode and original fusion characters—is nowhere to be seen.

Perhaps we’ll see a Sparking! HD collection one day. Will it include optional international soundtracks? Probably not. For now, if you want to experience these games, stick with PS2 versions.

MIKE (“VegettoEX”) is one of the co-founders of Kanzenshuu. He bought a Japanese PS2 to play DBZ3 all over again before it received a bilingual re-release.

A Game Not Forgotten

Dragon Ball Online may have closed, but its legacy is about to live on…!

By TheDevilsCorpse

Dragon Ball is a franchise with an ever-expanding library of games that encompasses a wide variety of genres. You have the now standard 3D fighters, the classic 2D fighters, traditional RPGs, action RPGs, card battle games, and many more. In my opinion, out of all of them, none are more important than the MMORPG: Dragon Ball Online.

Dragon Ball Online was a game changer, from the moment it was announced back in 2007. South Korean developer NTL partnered with all the rights holders for the manga and games to produce something the fans had not quite seen before. While the likes of the DBZ / Budokai and Sparking! / Budokai Tenkaichi series are relevant for their gameplay and sales, DBO took an entirely fresh approach by introducing new concepts on a whole new level, all of which were under the strict supervision of Shueisha and series author, Akira Toriyama. Not only was DBO the franchise's first official MMORPG, but it also allowed players to insert themselves into the game by creating their own avatar with which to traverse the Dragon Ball world in a new, distant AGE. In addition to experiencing the new story created specifically for the game while playing, a rich history was conceived just to set up the new take on the Dragon World as set forth by the game. You could meet new characters, friends and foes alike, or travel through time with Trunks and interact with the original characters you love…all with other players from across the world. It was a dream come true for many fans.

Ultimately though, while some fans were lucky enough to play it after the February 2010 launch, the game was never released outside of select parts of Asia. It never even made it to the series' homeland of Japan before the final server closed 31 October 2013. The lack of references to the game's content in modern guidebooks for the franchise suggested that the game's failure would leave DBO's original characters, story and lore to be ignored throughout the rest of the franchise once closed. However, it was not long before those worries were put to rest.

May 2014 brought the announcement of Dragon Ball Xenoverse and during the course of its promotion, updates revealed the presence of DBO-inspired material: avatar customization, traveling through time with Trunks, combating the evil Towa and Mira. All of the important bases appear to be included and are being utilized on platforms with much wider reach than DBO's limited install base to boot. This material is scheduled to spread even further thanks to a cross promotion, as Xenoverse's content will be debuting in the next, new card series for the Japanese exclusive arcade game Dragon Ball Heroes, sometime after the Ja’aku Ryu Mission 8 update in January 2015. It will be exciting to see what is kept or left out of both at release!

CHRIS (“TheDevilsCorpse”) hangs out at Kanzenshuu and is a DBO info guru like none other.

The Tale of Publication Dates

When did Dragon Ball actually premiere in Weekly Shonen Jump? Was it November 20th or December 3rd back in 1984?

By Heath Cutler

Before the Dragon Ball series was conveniently compiled into tankobon (“standalone book”) and kanzenban (“perfect edition”) formats as most fans see it today, it was printed one chapter at a time in the pages of Weekly Shonen Jump (hereafter referred to as Jump), a weekly manga anthology magazine for young male readers established in 1968 by Shueisha. The manga within Jump was roughly printed, with faded and blotchy ink, on cheaply produced paper so thin the reader could often see through it. And to read their favorite series, fans would venture down to their local convenience store each week to pick up a copy of the latest issue, which was roughly the size of a phone book, for less than a dollar.

Being a continually running weekly magazine, each issue of Jump is categorized by its corresponding publication year and weekly issue number (i.e. 1984 #51). At the time Dragon Ball was in serialization, Shueisha also provided a single date along with this volume number, typically corresponding to the Monday of that week of the given year. However, this “issue date” printed on the cover of each issue was merely for categorical purposes only, and is not the actual date the issue was released.

During the serialization of Dragon Ball from 1984 to 1995 copies of Jump were officially released on Tuesdays, usually (though not always) the Tuesday two weeks prior to the “issue date.” However, retailers commonly put copies on sale as soon as they received them, which meant that the magazine was generally available on Mondays in all but the most remote parts of Japan, even before its official switch to a Monday release in May 2003. Exceptions to this Tuesday rule were generally when the Monday of that week was a holiday (pushing it to the Saturday before), and the last issue of December and first issue of January were even more variable. Nevertheless, this is the “sale date,” the official release date of the issue.

Until the beginning of the 21st century, when Jump began posting the “sale date” on their official website, the only way to find the official release date of a given issue was to personally check the preview for it in the previous issue. And in early-2014, that’s exactly what our very own Julian Grybowski set out to do. He boarded a train and traveled to Higashi-Osaka city to visit the World Children’s Literature wing of the Osaka Prefecture Central Library, which houses a complete collection of Jump issues.

Finding an empty table, Julian sat down and for hours combed through each issue of Jump published during Dragon Ball’s serialization. Each time he was done with his current batch of issues, a library employee would wheel out the next batch of issues, by the hundreds. After a few weekends, and somehow managing to avoid excessive paper cuts, Julian had finally documented every publication date.

From there we’ve undertaken numerous manga-related projects for Kanzenshuu, but ultimately it brings us full circle to this 30th anniversary magazine. How can one properly celebrate unless we know the actual anniversary date of the series’ premiere? Well, since you’re reading this magazine, you should already know the answer to that: November 20th.

HEATH (“Hujio”) is one of the co-founders of Kanzenshuu. In addition to being one of the manga gurus alongside Julian, he keeps the site from crashing and burning on a daily basis.

The Big Review

Podcast Segment: Manga Review of Awesomeness

The hosts and friends of Kanzenshuu review the entire 519 chapter Dragon Ball manga series in a monthly podcast segment

By Mike LaBrie

What we were getting ourselves into?

The goal with our podcast was to cover news in a timely fashion, sure...but also to produce timeless content that could be visited and revisited at any point in the future. Reviewing the entire manga would provide us with predictable content for a long stretch of time. We tossed some ideas around, and in February 2007 we launched what would later be christened—by our own co-conspirator Jeff Heller—the “Manga Review of Awesomeness.”

It needed a fresh perspective, though. That’s where our buddy Jeff came in. Whereas I had read the whole thing front-to-back, Julian had read the whole thing front-to-back in English AND in Japanese, and Meri had read a bunch but was primarily familiar with the anime...well, the only thing we were missing was someone who had never read it before. Enter Jeff.

Through Jeff’s eyes, we saw and learned things we never noticed. When you are so intimately familiar with material like this, you tend to miss the obvious things. Why did so-and-so just do that? Wait, where are they going? Who is that again?

We’re already fans. We already know the series is great. The podcast gave us an excuse (as if we needed one!), however, to revisit the original comic with a more critical eye. With the knowledge we could now bring to the table, seeing events that are either purposefully or inadvertently foreshadowing future events would bring a whole new understanding to Toriyama’s writing style.

Perhaps the biggest payoff for the entire review was the quiz at the end. Fans of the series have so much—let’s face it, trivial—knowledge packed away that it can be hard to divorce ourselves from our own history with the franchise. What happens when someone who’s clearly enjoyed the series, but done so somewhat casually over a four year period, is presented with ten questions covering all 42 volumes?

The best thing about the manga review is that, like the actual comic itself, it will always be there. Any time you want to dive back into the source material and have some friendly commentary provided for you, it’s just a click away! It took us a little longer than anticipated to actually complete the darn thing, but thankfully it’s not going anywhere!

Manga Review Mini-Segments

As you listen through the archive, some of the recurring mini-segments you will hear include:

·         “Viz-isms”

Adaptations made in Viz’s English translation of the manga include name changes, speaking patterns, etc.

·         TV/Anime Comparisons

Beyond traditional “filler” material added to pad the TV series, how are certain scenes adapted differently from the manga to the anime?

·         Predictions

As a fresh reader becomes familiar with Toriyama’s writing style, is it possible to predict what will happen next? How accurate are those predictions?!

How can I listen to the podcast?

Despite its name, you do not need an iPod (wait, does anyone even use those anymore...?!) to listen to a podcast!

A “podcast” is simply an audio program delivered over the Internet. Files are traditionally distributed as MP3s, but can also be encoded into alternate formats or even produced as video. At Kanzenshuu, we produce a (usually!) weekly audio show as an MP3 that you can listen to directly on our website, download to your computer or phone, or—most importantly—subscribe to so you automatically receive new episodes as soon as they are released.

Our show opens with the week’s big news, transitions into an in-depth topical discussion or review, and wraps up with a recap on any upcoming releases and comments from the audience.

Listen to the entire “Manga Review of Awesomeness” archive on our website at: www.kanzenshuu.com/podcast/reviews/

Now if only we could get back on track with that “Dragon Ball GT Review of Awesomeness”...

MIKE (“VegettoEX”) is one of the co-founders of Kanzenshuu and is the main podcast host.

Cover Project

The evolution of Dragon Ball manga volume covers

The name up top is always the same, but the image representing it has slowly changed over time. Here’s a quick look at the three main types of covers the Dragon Ball manga has received over the years in Japan.

By Mike LaBrie

In 2009, the collected volumes of the manga received a facelift. While the actual artwork itself remained the same, the surrounding title and borders went through an overhaul. The full “Dragon Ball” title was replaced by neon green “D” and “B” letters on each side, while the Jump brand and Akira Toriyama’s name jumped up top.

As a part of the new revival for Dragon Ball, 2002-2004 saw the release of the kanzenban—the “complete” or “perfect” edition—of the manga. Akira Toriyama created all-new artwork for both the front and back covers of the series, which was condensed from 42 down to 34 total volumes. No content was cut from the series, but rather more chapters were combined into fewer volumes.

The kanzenban was printed on much higher-quality paper and sized up from 17cm tall to 21cm tall. No other print release of the manga has come close to this premium edition!

MIKE (“VegettoEX”) is one of the co-founders of Kanzenshuu. He has a lot of manga.

Tale of the One-Shots

Foundations for more than you think can be found in Toriyama’s pre-Dragon Ball stories.

By Julian Grybowski

While there are many obvious similarities between Dragon Ball and Dr. Slump, how much do you know about Toriyama’s one-shot comics? The one-off stories he produced in the years leading up to Dragon Ball’s debut were fertile ground for Toriyama to play with concepts that resurfaced in early (and sometimes not-so-early) Dragon Ball, especially as he started experimenting with ideas for a new series starting in 1983. Don’t believe me? Why don’t we take a look?

POLA & ROID

·         Released: 24 March 1981

·         In: Weekly Shonen Jump 1981 #17

·         Summary: Roid, an interplanetary taxi driver starved for adventure and women, is hired by Pola, a teenage girl fighting the evil Gagambo Empire on Planet Kongaragatta. Through a series of mishaps, the pair save the planet and depart for Earth, meeting some familiar faces from Dr. Slump along the way.

·         Other notes: This was Toriyama’s first entry in the Jump Readers’ Award competition, where the 10 most popular authors in Jump each drew a one-shot and readers selected their favorite. Toriyama won first place, netting a free trip to Europe. It’s also drawn entirely in felt-tip pen, rather than Toriyama’s usual “G-Pen” nib.

PINK: THE RAIN JACK STORY

·         Released: 23 October 1982

·         In: Fresh Jump December 1982 issue

·         Summary: Pink is a young girl living on her own in the middle of a long drought. She survives (and bathes) by stealing water from the corrupt Silver Company, which sells its mysteriously-obtained H2O at outrageous prices. When the company head calls in local sheriff Cobalt Blue to investigate this recent spate of robberies, the lawman befriends Pink, and she develops a youthful crush. Together, the two end up rescuing the imprisoned Thunder God from the company’s clutches, bringing rain back to the world.

·         Other notes: This story was later adapted as an animated feature shown alongside Dragon Ball Z Movie 3 in July 1990.

DRAGON BOY (Parts 1 & 2)

·         Released: 23 June 1983 (Part 1), 22 September 1983 (Part 2)

·         In: Fresh Jump August 1983 issue (Part 1), Fresh Jump October 1983 issue (Part 2)

·         Summary: Tangtong (唐童 tanton / tángtóng), a young martial-artist in the “Sage Country” (仙の国 sen no kuni), is assigned to escort the princess of the “Flower Country” (華の国 ka no kuni) back to her homeland. Together, the unusually strong boy and the sheltered girl must learn to work together and overcome the many obstacles in their path. Oh, and they’ve got something called a “Dragon Jewel” (竜宝 ronpao / lóngbǎo), which does... not a whole lot.

·         Other notes: Toriyama wrote this pair of one-shots in direct response to his editor, Kazuhiko Torishima, telling him to “draw a kung-fu comic” after learning that he liked the movies of Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. Reader response was favorable, which helped determine the path of his next series.

THE ADVENTURE OF TONGPOO

·         Released: 29 November 1983

·         In: Weekly Shonen Jump 1983 #52

·         Summary: Tongpoo, a young cyborg, crash-lands on an unfamiliar planet after his ship self-destructs. There, he encounters Plamo, the last remaining survivor after her ship was shot down and the other crewmembers murdered by a marauding alien. In order to escape the planet and return to Earth, the two must defeat the alien bandit who killed Plamo’s crewmates and find a ship...

·         Other notes: This was Toriyama’s last one-shot before he began Dragon Ball. While it takes place in a futuristic outer-space setting rather than an ersatz ancient China, it retains some of Dragon Boy’s kung-fu elements, and also introduces a vital piece of technology essential to the Dragon World.

JULIAN (“SaiyaJedi”) lives in Japan and provides translations for Kanzenshuu. He’s purchased Toriyama’s various manga more times than he would like to admit.

Dr. Dragon Slump

Akira Toriyama Revisits Ideas and Plot Points from Dr. Slump in Dragon Ball

By Julian Grybowski

Toriyama may be no stranger to reusing the concepts he’d first played with in one-shots, but he also borrowed more than a little from his previous smash hit, Dr. Slump. Let’s take a look at some of the concepts, characters, and even gags that resurfaced in Dragon Ball!

Spy Robots and Androids, Oh My!

Frustrated with the main character constantly destroying his creations, an evil mad scientist closely observes said main character with the use of spy robots, in order to create the perfect fighting machine....

Dr. Gero? No, I mean Dr. Mashirito, the evil inventor (and caricature of Toriyama’s first editor, Kazuhiko Torishima) who wants to use his robotic creations to take over the world. Unfortunately, his luck is about the same, as the “artificial human” result of these efforts is not only unimpeachably good, but actually falls for Arale and becomes a member of the main cast. A.I. is a crapshoot, indeed.

Mighty Majin

The dastardly Bisuna of the Chakabo Kingdom has kidnapped the Nanaba Kingdom’s Princess Cusmat as he prepares to invade. When Cusmat escapes, he pursues her to Penguin Village and accidentally “recaptures” her doppelgänger Akane Kimidori instead. Faced with the might of both Arale and an angry Tsun Tsukutsun, he attempts to secure his exit by threatening to unleash a malevolent spirit from a teapot. When Tsukutsun releases the creature anyway, it’s a...wait, have we met before? The no-holds-barred battle that ensues, including destruction of a decent chunk of the globe (as a gag) and even biting, may feel a tad bit familiar.

This creature is even referred to in supplemental materials as a “Teapot Genie” (茶瓶魔人 chabin majin), and certain elements of this story feel quite similar to the story arc surrounding Majin Buu, another “genie” you may have heard of. Of course, that is because they (along with Mr. Popo) draw on some of the same sources for inspiration. Its clothes, too, are less Buu’s in particular than the generic “Middle Eastern” style Toriyama also used with Bulma during the end of the first Dragon Ball hunt. But the similarities are there.

God

An old man with a long beard, who carries a familiar-looking staff, and has a penchant for porn. Kame-sen’nin, is that you...? Actually, it’s none other than God. No, not the green one. This is the God of Dr. Slump, who originally intends to “cleanse” the earth of humanity and start over, but has an inadvertent change of heart thanks to Senbe & co.

So what is he doing in the guise of an old martial-arts master in Dragon Ball? In his “Ask-Me-Anything” corner for tankobon volume 3, Akira Toriyama reveals that he liked the character a lot, so he reused him in Dragon Ball, simply sticking sunglasses on him. Thus Kame-sen’nin was born. (The similarity is even more obvious in his guise as Jackie Chun, where he’s not wearing the shades.) The former character’s penchant for puns, however, ended up being removed, and was later transferred to Kaio.

It doesn’t stop there, though: the animated version actually takes the connection one step further. Not only does Kame-sen’nin share the same character design as the God of Dr. Slump, he also shares the same voice actor! Kohei Miyauchi, who had previously voiced God in the Dr. Slump - Arale-chan anime, was also cast as the voice of Kame-sen’nin.

You’re So Punny

In Dragon Ball chapter 210, Goku’s first test is to make Kaio laugh, which is no easy task considering his penchant for lame puns. However, Goku comes through with the joke, “Futon ga futtonda!” (“My futon blew away!”)

Believe it or not, this is actually not new...or Toriyama’s invention. It was first used in Dr. Slump chapter 216, “Unidentified Flying Object,” where a “Dr. Umashika” uses it to disarm the “UFO” terrorizing Penguin Village (actually just an invisible kid with a hard candy). It’s also not Toriyama’s; when he uses it in Dr. Slump, he specifically credits the “really dumb gag” to fellow cartoonist Masakazu Katsura.

As stated previously, the character of God in Dr. Slump is also big on these old-man puns, and this trait is passed on to Kaio himself in Dragon Ball. Perhaps there’s just something about divinity that brings out a love for silly wordplay...?

Flushed Away

Toriyama has always been one for toilet humor... and there’s one gag in particular involving a toilet that he actually repeats. Would-be space pirate King Nikochan the Great is searching for a way back to his own planet, when he happens upon Senbe’s toilet and assumes it is a device that can send him back home. Meanwhile, Kame-Sen’nin’s attempt at perverted antics with Bulma’s Microband backfire badly, as he gets flushed away. Both of them emerge from the nearby septic tank, distinctly malodorous and decidedly nonplussed.

Familiar Cars

Oh hey, look! Taro and Peasuke are taking Bulma’s Renault 5 Turbo out for a spin. And Senbe’s hard at work on the Pilaf Gang’s Autobianchi A112. And Arale is driving Yamcha’s Fiat-Abarth 695...? What...?

You know how there’s the phrase, “write what you know”? Toriyama’s motto might as well be “draw what you like.” It started when he was a kid, where he would draw things that he wanted until he either got them or lost interest, and his body of work as an adult shows that this never changed. His interests (in this case, cars) are reflected as-is in the pages of his manga, and he happens to like these three models quite a bit indeed. He even had an A112 of his own, detailed with “STUDIO UCCELLO” (“Bird Studio” in Italian) on the side!

JULIAN (“SaiyaJedi”) is one of the translators for Kanzenshuu. He lives with his family in Japan.

Dragon Ball in Jump

Exploring history’s “rough draft” of Akira Toriyama’s magnum opus: Weekly Jump issues

By Julian Grybowski

I have a confession to make: despite having lived in Japan for years now, and despite being a regular reader of Weekly Shonen Jump when it comes to current series, I had little interest in looking up Dragon Ball in issues of yore. This largely came down to practicality—where does one put 517 issues of a phonebook-sized magazine?—and probably a bit of fan-snobbery, as well. After all, we already had the entire series in pristine quality thanks to the kanzenban, right? One needn’t look any further. But perhaps one should.

I have Peking Duck to thank for my change of heart. When Japan’s #1 Dragon Ball collector made it known that he had the entire series’ run at his disposal, he also did something else unprecedented: he made Toriyama’s weekly comments from each issue available to the public, at first on Twitter, and later in book form, printed at his own expense. These comments are a window into Toriyama’s world, and collected together, they tie a decade of seemingly meaningless observations into the outline of an individual: his habits, his likes and dislikes, and the things that shape his work, laid out in plain sight week by week. Sometimes they’re relevant to the series, and sometimes not, but they are the kind of knowledge we at Kanzenshuu ache to share with the world’s fans. With his permission, we made translating them a top priority.

I visited Peking Duck’s house outright in 2013 to help prepare for the HokoTate auditions, and my experience there motivated me further to seek out the magazines the only place I knew at the time: the library. These helped me fill in the gaps in data that Heath had been collecting over years, but the hours spent there also impressed upon me both the value of the magazine as a source of information (including things that never made it into the guidebooks, like Bulma’s birthday or the backstories of Coola’s minions), and the uniqueness of the series when viewed in Jump itself.

It’s not just that the series is still in motion from week to week with possibilities not yet realized, but each chapter itself is still in-progress, so to speak: extra text hypes current contests or encourages the reader to check out the latest episode of the TV show. Toriyama’s own color art is embellished with extra splashes supplied by Shueisha. And, most intriguingly, sometimes things are different from the collected release. Characters get misnamed, like General White (“General Silver” in chapters 63 and 64) or Videl (“Devil” in Chapter 425), and there is the occasional typo. And then there are the things that never needed correcting.

Until I’d seen Dragon Ball firsthand in Weekly Jump, I had thought that the kanzenban was truly “perfection” for the series. While I still agree that it’s by far the best release in any language, my opinion of it is less favorable than it once was. First, there’s the art. While considerable effort is spent to make the series look really good (high-quality paper, great contrast, intact color chapters), it sometimes goes too far.

I’m not just talking about taking away the taglines from the title pages: much more troubling is its tendency to try and “fix” things. Shuu’s name is changed to “Soba” in Chapter 110, matching his first appearance, but orphaning Mai’s name pun. The date of the Cell Games is changed to Dragon Ball Z’s “May 26th” rather than the manga’s original (and perplexing) “M. 17th”. Art errors early on, such as a stray “Turtle” emblem on Kuririn’s monk robes in Chapter 53, and Goku in his training clothes before he changes into them in Chapter 24, are carefully “corrected.” And title pages for which the color originals were seemingly lost, such as for chapters 5 and 86, are redrawn digitally rather than scanned from an extant copy of the magazine itself.

And despite this tendency to try and smooth over inconsistencies that no one ever complained about (and which would have been fodder for jokes in Dr. Slump), the kanzenban still misses a ton. The original title page for Chapter 12 has never been reprinted since it ran in Jump back in 1985. Trunks still warns Goku of Artificial Humans “19” and “20” despite only knowing of 17 and 18. The original title pages of Chapters 19 and 44, once spared from oblivion as the covers of tankobon volumes 2 and 4, are omitted completely (and in the latter case, actually replaced by a complete fabrication using different artwork).

All this might sound like fanboy whining, and I suppose to an extent it is. I’ve certainly caught flak from some fans who think pointing out mistakes like these, whether by Toriyama or by the publishers, amounts to a kind of heresy, or at least trying to ruin others’ fun. But hear me out: once you’re exposed to Dragon Ball in Jump, it’s hard not to see the manga as something alive. Akira Toriyama toiled on this for over ten years, one week at a time, but he was never as methodical or painstakingly precise as the kanzenban tries (and fails) to make it appear. Rather than the product of careful plotting, Dragon Ball is the distillation of the author’s creative energies, and these more recent attempts to “perfect” it after the fact take away from that. You don’t respect the series by taking what was once alive and draining it of that vitality until it becomes inert. Instead, you should embrace its faults and its imperfections, letting it jump off the page of its own accord, no less vivid than when the first chapter was published back in 1984.

So what if it’s just a bunch of musty, browning magazines? Long live history’s rough draft of Dragon Ball.

How old is Gohan? Changes to the manga you may have never known about

For years, we’ve joked about how the FUNimation English dub of Dragon Ball Z aged Gohan up by a mere year-and-a-half, as though that would make much of a difference to the beatings he would soon be subjected to.

It turns out that the manga actually did the same thing.

When chapter 196 of Dragon Ball first ran in Weekly Shonen Jump in October 1988, Gohan actually gave his age as three years old, not four. Looking at his hand, this appears to be more than a simple error: he is actually holding up three fingers. Nevertheless, the very next week, the title page of chapter 197 was suddenly referring to him as four, and tankobon volume 17, released in May 1989, changed Gohan’s line in chapter 196 to match.

Why the change? In the absence of an official comment, we can’t be completely sure, but the answer probably lies in what came between the chapter’s first appearance and the release of volume 17: Dragon Ball Z. With Toei Animation staff already planning out the future of the TV adaptation, they would understandably be worried about such a young child being subjected to violence. (And moreover, a three-year-old isn’t that easy for primary schoolers to relate to!)

With the timeframe already set as “five years later,” Gohan could not be made much older, but he was made as old as biologically possible: four.

But just to be clear, for the record: in his very first appearance anywhere, Gohan was three years old!

The Cigarette That Wasn’t

Back when the kanzenban was first released, the title page of chapter 5 was digitally redrawn (the original manuscript page was probably lost). This change caused a minor stir among fans due to a bit of apparent censorship: in the original version (present, albeit in greyscale, in the first tankobon), Bulma had been smoking a cigarette; in the redrawn version, she was not. Let’s take a closer look.

In Weekly Shonen Jump 1985 #04/05, we find the page accompanied by the tagline, “Even little girls look bigger when they get dressed up!” Bulma is dressed as a fighter pilot, but the plane behind her—a fanciful interpretation of a Lockheed P38 Lightning—is tiny, squat, “toy-like.” Her cigarette is also unlit: a curious detail, since the author almost always draws in “smoke” when characters are smoking. A look at her right sleeve pocket reveals the answer: the pack of “cigarettes” reads “CHOCO”. It was a candy cigarette, all along.

JULIAN (“SaiyaJedi”) is one of the translators for Kanzenshuu. He lives with his family in Japan.

Discovering DBZ

What was it that grabbed your attention? Here’s Masako’s take!

By Lawrence Simpson

I remember when I first discovered Dragon Ball Z: it was at the turn of the millennium and DBZ was new on British airwaves. At once, I was hooked. The action happening before my eyes was FAR more intense than what had I had seen before. That moment when Freeza got taken down was especially brutal. I was thirteen at the time and it left me reeling for days. Despite the censorship and tame dub, its potency remained palpable.

Seeing these characters fight in such an energetic and violent manner as well as screaming at the top of their lungs for hours on end left me wanting more, and I spent the majority of my free time traipsing the Internet for old, low-quality music videos of Dragon Ball, learning about characters and forms of Saiyan I hadn’t seen in the anime yet and all the other fascinating facets of the Z universe. You could say it was what got me into anime in a big way; Sailor Moon had struck a small chord, but it mostly passed me by...but Dragon Ball stuck and continues to do so to this day.

However, it’s only in the last few years that I’ve begun to truly understand the cultural impact that the series has had on not just the anime world, but the entire world and with people of all ages. Tons of references, nods and allusions to Toriyama’s seminal work are littered across world cinema and television. The tale of a young boy and girl on the quest for some mystical orbs that grant wishes has touched millions of people over the last thirty years and will continue to do so for at least another thirty...and probably another thirty on top of that. So Dragon Ball: don’t stop, don’t stop!

LAWRENCE (“MasakoX”) is a member of TeamFourStar and voices Goku in their Dragon Ball Z Abridged fan parody series. He also produces content for Anifiles Reviews.

Memories of…DBZ

The series is actually a time capsule back into your life

By Joe Yancone

It’s hard to think of a time in my life when Dragon Ball wasn’t a part of it.

I first discovered the series back in 1994 while getting Street Fighter cards in a Carddass machine in China Town. There was this odd machine right next to it with cards from a series called “Dragon Ball Z.” I had never heard of it, but the art was really interesting. So, I put my quarter in and out popped a card: it was of Trunks and Goten in the last pose of the fusion dance where they’re touching fingers. Out of context this seemed very strange. I didn’t know what was going on but, I was interested. I got another card; this time a fat pink blob was fighting a guy with long yellow hair. I had no idea what was going on or who these people were but it was the start of something that would last for the next 15 years of my life, and will hopefully continue on until I grow old.

Now, in my early 30s, I feel like I know everything there is to know about Dragon Ball. From the production staff to the story arcs, I could easily have a conversation about any of it, and yet, I’m not tired of it one bit. My fandom has spanned so many years of my life that I now associate Dragon Ball dubs, movies, story arcs and even Dragon Ball games with a period in my life and what I was doing at that moment in time. When I put any episode of Dragon Ball on it’s like seeing an old friend again, and no matter how old I get I think I’ll always feel that way.

JOE (“TanookiKuribo”) is a longtime fan of the series and enjoys diving into and tearing apart any product that falls off the truck ahead of its actual release date.

Get That Dream Job!

One fan’s life ambition becomes reality: Dragon Ball opens the translation door

While Steven J. Simmons was busy translating Dragon Ball Z, GT, and the various movies (not to mention other series FUNimation was picking up at the time), the ever-growing workload necessitated more translation help. Enter the Tomato.

By Clyde Mandelin

I actually can’t remember the first time I encountered Dragon Ball, but I’m pretty sure it was when I was very young and living in Hawaii.

My hazy memories of Goku were suddenly revived over a decade later when I was flipping through TV channels one weekend morning and stumbled upon a show about a strong kid with a power pole and silly friends. Even though I was now in high school, old memories and thoughts of, “Whoa, I remember this!” came flooding back to me. I had no idea there was an anime of it…and that it had been dubbed into English! This was actually my first exposure to FUNimation too—little did I know that in just a few years I’d have the honor of helping to translate even more Dragon Ball for them!

During college, I realized my dream in life was to translate Japanese games, anime, and entertainment into English, so I studied and worked hard for that goal. After graduation, I had trouble breaking into the industry, thanks to the age-old problem of, “How am I supposed to get years of experience if no one will hire me in the first place?” The job hunt continued for months, and just days before I was about to run out of money, give up on my dream, and take an ordinary office job, I was contacted by FUNimation to work as a translator.

To my surprise, one of my very first projects was the original Dragon Ball series. It was a whirlwind of a project, during which I learned so much about the industry and the translation trade and so much more. It almost felt like I was on a big adventure of my own, one that I got to share with all of the Dragon Ball gang.

It’s been almost 12 or 13 years since then, but I still look back fondly on those early days and feel glad to have almost grown up alongside the Dragon Ball franchise!

CLYDE (“Tomato”) translated the original Dragon Ball TV series for FUNimation. He is also responsible for the popular Mother 3 fan translation and runs legendsoflocalization.com

The Dragon Ball Series: Dividing it Up

How do you split the series up? By “arc” or by “saga”…?

By Heath Cutler

Story arc divisions for the series have been a debated topic for as long as I can remember. Whether you call it a “saga” or an “arc,” these divisions have really become dependent on each individual fan. In fact, even my personal division of the series has changed over the years based on my own experiences. Unfortunately there’s really no correct division to follow, so fans have always been left to their own exploits. While many fans have concocted relatively similar divisions, no matter their regional origin, they aren’t necessarily the exact same.

When the series was first being published in the pages of Weekly Shonen Jump there was no breakdown by story arc. Events simply flowed from one to another. Even when the manga chapters were being conveniently compiled into tankobon (“standalone book”) volumes, they were simply given numbers with no discretion for a distinguishing story arc. It was not really until both the anime and manga series had run their course that companies began putting much consideration into designating story arcs. Why, you may ask? Well, for the sole purpose of guidebooks.

Following the conclusion of the manga, Shueisha released the Daizenshuu (lit. “Great Complete Collections”) guidebooks, but they needed a way to more conveniently divide things up within the pages. This would mark the first real division of the series by an official company, and it most certainly would not be the last. Not only did the Daizenshuu provide story arc divisions for the manga series, but also the anime series, which it divided up into arcs with smaller “acts” within each. Over the years Shueisha released numerous other guidebooks, all with varying divisions.

Toei Animation eventually divided up the series themselves with the release of the “Dragon Box” DVD sets, but this did nothing to squelch the ongoing debate. All of these “official” story arc divisions have contradicted each other, even within the same companies. It has become clear over time that the majority of these “official” divisions came out of mere convenience for that specific company, depending on what product they were trying to sell. And that is all just in Japan.

Enter the foreign markets, each with their own story arc divisions. Some foreign companies stuck with very basic larger divisions, while some divided them up so much they had seven to eight episode “sagas.” There is no true global consensus or consistency. Even in the United States, there are two companies that at times are in conflict not only with each other, but with themselves as well.

So just stick with what you have, or go switch it up a bit. In the end it’s not that one fan is more right than the other, it’s that each fan gets the opportunity to decide and interpret the series for themselves.

“Saga” vs. “Arc”

I often get into discussions about my use of the term “arc” over the traditional American use of “saga” to describe the various major story elements of the Dragon Ball series. My reasoning is frequently assumed to be based on some anti-FUNimation sentiment, or that is how the Japanese do it. Well the latter is the easiest to explain away

In Japanese they don’t use either term—“saga” or “arc”—to refer to these sorts of things. The word used is 編 (hen) or 篇 (hen), both of which mean “compilation” or “volume.” For instance, in Japanese it is written サイヤ人編 (saiya-jin hen), which I typically translate as “Saiyan arc.” It is just one of those instances where it is easier to adjust to the English language’s vernacular, because in English these terms are not normally used with respect to animated works. But I know what you might be thinking now: why not translate it as “saga” then, since that is what FUNimation uses?

Well, it all comes down to understanding the difference between these two terms. The definition of a “saga” is a “very long story with dramatic events or parts” and is typically a “narrative or legend of heroic exploits.” This does not describe the individual divisions of the series; if anything it is how you would describe all of Dragon Ball as a whole. However, the definition of a story arc is “an extended or continuing storyline in episodic storytelling media.”

So by definition, the saga of Dragon Ball is made up of numerous story arcs, but not vice versa. Think of other great fictional stories, such as Star Wars. Each film is a piece of the entire Star Wars saga, but they are not actual sagas themselves on an individual level. Sometimes fans must use their own judgment in these cases. Just because someone told you that is the way it has to be, that doesn’t make it so.

HEATH (“Hujio”) is one of the co-founders of Kanzenshuu. He’s very exact about things.

Continuous Evolution: Viz Manga

By Julian Grybowski

Starting out as the underdog thumbing its nose at FUNimation, Viz promised to bring us the real story. For at least a few years, their manga was also the only place English-speaking fans could follow Son Goku’s boyhood adventures past the initial Dragon Ball hunt, although the dual-focus on “DB”/“DBZ” made its progress slower than it could have been.

Times change, though, and as FUNimation started getting its act together with the anime, Viz reneged on its promise of uncensored manga, and a petition to get it back only helped for a few years. Still, they blazed a trail through the Anglosphere with the series that other series would soon follow, with a market now dominated by unflopped manga, and a domestic Shonen Jump that would eventually release day-and-date with the Japanese original. Every step of the way, Dragon Ball has been Viz’s vanguard, at the forefront of these tectonic shifts in the industry.

Now would it be too much to ask for a new translation and a competent uncensored release? Pretty please?

JULIAN (“SaiyaJedi”) lives in Japan and provides translations for Kanzenshuu.

Dragon Ball Heroes: Victory Mission

The card-based arcade game gets a spin-off manga

Naho Ooishi may have been the first new spin-off author on the scene, but Toyotaro took center stage with his Dragon Ball Heroes comic

By Mike LaBrie

Little did they know it, but Bandai Namco and Shueisha set a new stage of history with just two pages in the November 2012 V-Jump.

Dragon Ball Heroes, a popular card-based arcade game for the franchise, was already becoming massively popular with Japanese kids. Episode of Bardock successfully launched across a manga release, an anime adaptation, video game inclusions, and related home video releases. What else could the companies do to spread the success of Dragon Ball Heroes?

Enter “Toyotaro.” An accomplished fan artist in his own right (see next page), the mysterious “Toyotaro” stormed the pages of V-Jump with Dragon Ball Heroes: Victory Mission, a spin-off and promotional manga taking elements from the arcade game and introducing them to new and existing players alike. It was not at all unlike the Pokemon TV series, which acted as a sort of strategy guide and hype machine for the games.

What started as a self-contained, two-page first chapter has now grown into a fully-serialized monthly comic. Victory Mission helps introduce new gaming mechanics, new characters, new transformations, and does so with an astounding eye for Akira Toriyama’s art style.

It’s not just the art, though. Each month, Victory Mission readers are treated to fully-realized name pun schemes and even the occasional cameo from various Toriyama works. Check out chapter four to see hidden Jiya, Dub & Peter, and even Dragon Ball GT cameos!

Who is the mysterious “Toyotaro”…?

Similarities to work from “Toyble” are huge.

Soon after the first Victory Mission chapter hits V-Jump, fans start to notice artistic similarities with work from “Toyble,” author and illustrator of a Dragon Ball AF fan-comic.

A big hint comes from Toyble in mid-2012.

Toyble releases a message stating that, “due to a variety of circumstances...” he will be unable to give his fan-comic much more attention. The message is accompanied by what is obviously a silhouette of Beat from Dragon Ball Heroes: Victory Mission. Confirmation from Toyble himself?

MIKE (“VegettoEX”) is one of the co-founders of Kanzenshuu. He has lots of V-Jump issues.

Who is Bardock?

He’s Goku’s father…but what else do we know for sure?

By Lance Rumowicz

Perhaps out of all of Dragon Ball’s diverse cast, Bardock, Goku’s father, is its most unique character....which is very interesting considering that, design-wise and vocally, he’s basically a Goku-clone accessorized with evil. And even in that regard, he was beaten out of the gate by a good three months by his sinister, botany-loving doppelgänger, Tullece, from the third DBZ movie. Still, despite his meager appearances in any Dragon Ball medium, Bardock stands out. In the past, that was because the story he inhabited was far more sinister and tragic than any other Dragon Ball had told. While that is still the case, more recent outings have made him almost as memorable for his confusing and contradictory histories unparalleled in the Dragon World.

Designed by Katsuyoshi Nakatsuru and revised by Toriyama himself, Bardock debuted 17 October 1990 as the protagonist—although not hero—of Dragon Ball Z’s first double-length television special, “A Final, Solitary Battle. The Father of Z-Warrior Son Goku, Who Challenged Freeza.” On paper, the idea of a prequel wherein Goku’s near-identical father faces off against Freeza sounds like the worst kind of fan-servicing tripe. In reality, the “Bardock Special” managed to avoid most of the prequel pitfalls. Bardock isn’t a famous hero. He doesn’t “see the light” and become a good guy. He doesn’t even care about his son until he becomes aware that the boy could kill Freeza in his stead. He’s a murderous thug, and all of his plans to rebel fail. His “epic showdown” with Freeza is barely even noticed by the latter. No, Bardock is just a standard lackey, albeit achieving pathos due to a telepathic curse that allows him to see the unpleasant fate he has in store, but lacking any way to do anything about it. It was the kind of story that Dragon Ball, with its upbeat tone and persistently happy endings, had never told, and was in fact, the kind of story that Toriyama himself admitted he lacked the ability to tell. Instead, he gave the special what could be considered the highest of honors: he included a brief flashback to Bardock’s final moments in a chapter of his own manga. It was shockingly unprecedented, but it seemed that Toriyama had incorporated this “filler” work into his own Dragon Ball continuity!

For years, that was Bardock’s legacy. However, the second decade of the 21st century brought with it an influx of new Bardock stories in practically every medium imaginable, with each one seeming to produce a different take on the character. The now-defunct, Korean-produced and Toriyama-supervised video game, Dragon Ball Online, was released in 2010. In it, players assume the role of a member of Time Patrol and travel back to pivotal moments in the Dragon Ball chronology to ensure history isn’t knocked off-kilter. On a few occasions, though, their efforts are hindered by a mysterious masked man, who turns out to be Bardock. The game’s time-traveling villain, Mira, had apparently brainwashed him and whisked him through time after saving him from the explosion of Planet Vegeta in the Bardock Special.

Apparently the idea of a time-traveling Bardock caught on. When 2011 rolled around, the arcade game Dragon Ball Heroes had granted Bardock a Super Saiyan transformation and needed a new story to help promote it. To that end, the powers that be hired Naho Ooishi, already a DB veteran with her Dragon Ball SD series, to create a sequel to the famed Bardock Special. The result was a three-chapter tale entitled Episode of Bardock. Ooishi is a self-proclaimed Bardock fan, so it seems odd that the “episode” seemed to forget what made the Bardock Special...special. It turns out that Freeza’s planet-annihilating blast doesn’t kill Bardock but instead flings him back in time where he can become the reluctant hero of a group of cute little aliens, defeat Freeza’s ancestor, and apparently become the basis for the entire Super Saiyan legend. He’s no longer a villain but just another grumpy Uncle Piccolo. He no longer dies a pointless death but soundly achieves his revenge against Freeza’s race. He’s no longer a forgotten mook but might just have become one of the most important figures in the entire Dragon Ball mythos. Perhaps this is the reason why most great tragedies don’t have sequels...

If that wasn’t a big enough shock to the fandom, an unexpected one would occur in 2014 after Toriyama wrapped up his light-hearted Dragon Ball prequel, Jaco the Galactic Patrolman. For the collected edition of Jaco’s run, Toriyama included a bonus chapter entitled “Dragon Ball Minus.” The publicity centered around the fact that fans would, for the first time, be introduced to Goku’s mother, Gine, but Bardock was once again the star. Strangely enough, though, “Minus” appeared to blatantly contradict all the previous Bardock stories entirely and also managed to rewrite Toei Animation’s creation into a completely different character. Goku’s origin always bore a resemblance to that of Superman’s, but in this the parallels were unmistakable. This new Bardock is Jor-El! He’s a mass-murdering Jor-El, but that’s about the only difference. This Bardock is a family man who comes home to his loving wife and son after a hard day of slaughtering indigenous people. He loves his son so much that, upon deducing Freeza’s plan to annihilate their race, sacrifices his own life to launch the boy into space and to safety. Moreover, the chapter is so short that it reads more as a bullet point list of events rather than an actual narrative. Regardless if “Minus” is a betrayal or an improvement, this was definitely not the same Bardock fans had known for 24 years.

But what does all this mean for Bardock? Who is Bardock anymore? Doomed henchman? Time renegade? Saiyan legend? Doting father? Now that Toriyama himself has weighed in on the issue, is the original Bardock Special going to be swept under the rug like Dr. Frappe? At the moment, it seems difficult to say for sure. The only certainty about Bardock is how uncertain all his creators seem to be.

LANCE hangs out at Kanzenshuu and produces the “Dragon Ball Dissection” manga review video series: youtube.com/MistareFusion

Episode of Bardock: All the Copies

I fell into the hole the first time, and the second time…

By Mike LaBrie

My name is Mike, and I have a problem.

I bring it upon myself, really. I get too wrapped up in projects and feel the need to complete collections that no sane person on the planet would actually worry about filling out.

This is how I ended up with five complete versions of Episode of Bardock. Five versions. Of something I only sorta kinda like.

It started out innocently enough: we learned that Naho Ooishi, previously only known for her manga adaptation of the 2008 Jump Super Anime Tour special and Dragon Ball SD, was going to be writing a “sequel” to the Bardock TV special. Great! I’ll pick up the three requisite issues of V-Jump. Maybe it will get collected into one volume in the future, and I’ll pick up that compiled version for convenience.

Three chapters in the August, September, and October issues of V-Jump. Animated adaptation included on a double-feature DVD (alongside Plan to Eradicate the Super Saiyans) in the March 2012 issue of Saikyo Jump. Collected manga reprint as an insert in the April 2012 issue of V-Jump (with two bonus pages!). Included as a bonus video feature in the Xbox 360 video game Dragon Ball Z for Kinect in October 2012. “Super Kanzenban” bonus inclusion in the March 2014 issue of V-Jump.

We have to be done now, right?

‘Cuz Episode of Bardock shouldn’t rival my DBZ Movie 1 collection.

MIKE (“VegettoEX”) is one of the co-founders of Kanzenshuu. He has lots of Bardock stuff.

ドラゴンボール グッズの歴史

ドラゴンボールの関連商品はこの30年近くでどういう風に変わってきたのか。日本一のDBコレクターが語る。

By Peking Duck

ドラゴンボールグッズの繁栄

ドラゴンボールが今年で30周年であるように、ドラゴンボールの商品にも、30年近い歴史があります。

1986年、TVアニメ「ドラゴンボール」の放送が始まると共に、ドラゴンボールに関する様々な商品が、様々なメーカーから発売されました。

玩具メーカーであるエポック社からはゴム人形やボードゲーム、文具メーカーであるショウワノートからはノートや鉛筆や消しゴム、食品メーカーであるＳ＆Ｂからは付録つきのコーンスナックやビスケットが発売されました。また、バンダイからはTVゲームも発売されました。

1987年にはバンダイから「消しゴム人形」が発売されます。「ガチャポン」と呼ばれる自動販売機により、100円で2個の消しゴム人形が購入できるもので、当時は造形技術も低く、彩色もされていないものでした。

翌年1988年には「カードダス(CARDDASS）」が発売されます。自動販売機で1枚20円で購入する事ができました。当時の日本では、お菓子のおまけとしてのコレクションカードは存在していましたが、カードだけを買うという文化はあまりありませんでした。このカードダスの登場により、日本にトレーディングカードが根付くきっかけになったとも言えます。ドラゴンボールカードダスは1998～1997年まで販売され、累計販売枚数は10億枚を超えています。

1989年にはTVアニメのタイトルも「ドラゴンボールZ」となり、玩具だけではなく、音楽CD、衣類、シャンプー、入浴剤、飲料水、自転車など様々な企業が商品を発売しました。

ドラゴンボールはなぜ売れるか

メーカーにとってもドラゴンボールは非常に優れた「商品」でした。なぜなら、絶えずストーリーが変化し、新しいキャラクターが登場し、時には主人公の年齢や身長まで変わるため、常に新しい商品を生み出す事ができるからです。

実際に、ショウワノートから発売されていた文房具は3ヶ月に１度新しいデザインのものが発売されていました。3ヶ月前のデザインは、既に古いキャラクター、ストーリーになってしまっているからです。

絶えず変化するストーリーに合わせ、1990年～1995年までの間、様々な商品が発売されました。この様子は、「ドラゴンボール大全集（全７巻）」にも掲載されています。

「Ｖジャンプ」という雑誌

1993年、週刊少年ジャンプ(WEEKLY SHONEN JUMP)の兄弟誌ともいうべき雑誌「Ｖジャンプ」が創刊されます。これは鳥山氏の初代担当でもある鳥嶋氏が立ち上げた雑誌で、今では常識となった「ゲーム・マンガ・アニメ・ホビー」を組み合わせて売っていくというメディアミックス戦略の元に創刊されたものでした。この雑誌における鳥山氏の貢献も素晴らしいものでした。ゲームでは鳥山氏デザインのドラゴンクエスト、クロノトリガー、TOBAL No.1が掲載され、連載漫画は鳥山氏による「GO!GO!ACKMAN」にアニメーター中鶴氏による「ちょっとだけ帰ってきたDr.SLUMP」「貯金戦士CASHMAN」が掲載。この情報誌に掲載された商品の宣伝効果はすばらしいものでした。

ドラゴンボールグッズの衰退

1995年にドラゴンボールの連載が終わり、アニメ「ドラゴンボールGT」が始まりましたが、徐々にドラゴンボールグッズを販売するメーカーは減っていきました。TVアニメの視聴率が低迷し、グッズの売れ行きが悪くなったためだと考えられます。

そして1997年に発売されたPSソフト「DRAGONBALL FINAL BOUT」を最後に、日本国内でのドラゴンボールグッズはほぼ発売されなくなります。

ドラゴンボールブームの再燃

ブーム再燃のきっかけとなったのは、2003年に発売されたPSソフト「ドラゴンボールZ」、およびDVD-BOXの発売、2005年から稼働したビデオゲーム機「データカードダス」によるものが大きかったと思われます。情報誌であるＶジャンプが積極的にこれらのドラゴンボール特集を行なう事で、その人気をバックアップする形となりました。

また、2000年前半は「彩色済フィギュア」という商品が世に出つつある時代でもあります。1990年代のフィギュアは「ガレージキット」と呼ばれるもので、レジン製のパーツを自分の手で組み立て、色を塗る事で完成させるものがほとんどでした。それがPVC（ポリ塩化ビニル／polyvinyl chloride）によるフィギュアの登場で、最初から色の付いたフィギュアを誰もが手軽に手に入れる事が出来るようになりました。

また、ドラゴンボール連載中に漫画を読んでいた子供達が親の世代となる事で、その息子たちと共に楽しめるコンテンツとして、ドラゴンボールが注目されています。従来からのファンの経済力も豊かになっているため、さらに様々なグッズが今後も販売されていく事でしょう。

これらの新しいホビーの誕生、技術レベルの向上などにより、連載終了から20年経った今もなお、新しいドラゴンボールグッズは世に生まれ続けているのです。

PEKING DUCK ドラゴンボールコレクター暦25年。フィギュア・玩具・カード・衣料・文具・食品など、ドラゴンボールに関するありとあらゆる物を収集。TV番組「ほこたて」などに出演。: pekindbz.blog90.fc2.com

History of Dragon Ball Merchandise

How has Dragon Ball merchandise changed over the years? Japan's foremost DB collector tells all.

By Peking Duck

Dragon Ball Merchandise Flourishes

Just as Dragon Ball turns 30 this year, Dragon Ball merchandise has close to three decades of history. In 1986, as broadcast of the Dragon Ball TV series began, a large variety of items came on the market from a large variety of manufacturers. The toy-maker Epoch produced dolls and board games; the stationery company Showa Note produced notebooks, pencils, and erasers; and the food-products company S&B came out with corn snacks and biscuits packaged with bonus items. A video game from Bandai was released as well. In 1987, Bandai came out with “eraser dolls.” You could purchase two for ¥100 from a vending machine called “Gachapon,” although the sculpting technology at the time was not great, and they were not colored.

The next year, in 1988, Carddass went on sale for ¥20 each from vending machines. At that time in Japan, collectible cards existed as bonuses with sweets, but the custom of buying the cards themselves didn’t really exist yet. You could even say that it’s thanks to the debut of the Carddass that trading cards took root so strongly in Japan. Dragon Ball Carddass were sold from 1988 until 1997, with total sales exceeding 1 billion cards. In 1989, the title of the TV series changed to Dragon Ball Z, and many different manufacturers brought out not just toys, but things like music CDs, clothing, shampoo, bath salts, drinks, and bicycles, as well.

Why Do Dragon Ball Products Sell?

Dragon Ball was an outstanding “product” for the makers, as well: since the story was always changing, new characters appeared, and sometimes the main character even grew in years and height, they too were constantly able to put out new products. In fact, the stationery items from Showa Note came out with new designs once every three months, because the characters and story elements in the designs from three months earlier were already out of date. To go along with the ever-changing story, all sorts of products were sold between the years of 1990 and 1995, as can be seen in Daizenshuu vol. 7.

V-Jump Magazine

In 1993, V-Jump was inaugurated as a sister publication to Weekly Shonen Jump. This magazine was founded by Toriyama’s first editor, Kazuhiko Torishima, based on the strategy of promoting a mix of media in “games, manga, anime, and hobbies,” which is now commonplace. Toriyama’s contributions to the magazine were extremely impressive, as well. The Toriyama-designed Dragon Quest series, Chrono Trigger, and Tobal No. 1 were all featured in the magazine, and manga included Go! Go! Ackman by Toriyama himself, and The Brief Return of Dr. Slump and Savings Warrior Cashman, drawn by the animator Katsuyoshi Nakatsuru. The advertising-effect for products featured in this information-magazine was incredible.

The Decline of Dragon Ball Merch

In 1995, Dragon Ball’s serialization ended, and in 1996, Dragon Ball GT began, but the number of makers of Dragon Ball products gradually declined. This is thought to be a result of foundering ratings for the TV series and worsening merchandise sales. And then in 1997, with the release of the PlayStation game Dragon Ball: Final Bout, sales of Dragon Ball merchandise in Japan all but came to a halt.

The Dragon Ball Boom Reignites

It’s thought that the major sparks that reignited the Dragon Ball boom were the release of the PlayStation 2 game Dragon Ball Z (Dragon Ball Z: Budokai internationally), the first Dragon Box set in 2003, and the start of the Data Carddass game machines in 2005. The game-information magazine V-Jump actively promoted these through Dragon Ball features, which helped popularity climb back up. The latter half of the Aughts is an era that also saw pre-painted collectible figures released into the world. Almost all such figures in the 1990s were in the form of “garage kits,” with resin parts that had to be first assembled and then painted before they could be considered “complete.” With the arrival of PVC figures, anyone was now able to easily obtain figures that were painted from the outset.

In addition, now that the generation of children who read Dragon Ball in serialization have become parents, they have looked to Dragon Ball as something that they can enjoy together with their own children. The economic power of these adult fans is now quite substantial, which will likely spur the release of a variety of additional merchandise going forward.

Thanks to the birth of new hobbies and improvements in technology, new Dragon Ball merchandise continues to be born into the world even now, 20 years after the end of the manga in serialization.

PEKING DUCK has spent 25 years as a Dragon Ball collector, amassing anything and everything Dragon Ball-related, including figures, toys, cards, stationery, food products, and more. Has also appeared on the TV program HokoTate: pekindbz.blog90.fc2.com

Dragon Ball Fandom: A Personal Introspective

One fan’s reflection on his own fandom, its many twists-and-turns, and how it continues to evolve

By Heath Cutler

Dragon Ball, the series that has become such a large part of my life, turns thirty this year. I myself am in my thirties, and many of my closest friends here are as well. It makes one truly look back at their journey with true fondness...to see where you once were and to see how far you have come. Not only has the series evolved over this long stretch of time, but we as fans—as people—have changed as well. Many of us are no longer kids, but have grown to be kids at heart. The age range of fans varies so drastically these days that it now encompasses children in kindergarten to full-grown adults with children of their own. But at the center of it all is one thing: Dragon Ball!

Each fan has their own story, their own introduction to the series. For many it is the same, but to each it is unique. To each fan, the series shares something different, something that intrigues them. The series provides us all with an outlet to a common adventurous world centered on a country bumpkin. While it is true that the series has evolved as much as we fans have over the past years, it cannot be ignored that the meaning of the series has changed within each of us. For some, the series is simply a window back into their past, a vehicle for nostalgia if you will, while to others the appealing natures of the series have completely changed over time. What intrigued us about the series all those years ago may not be what intrigues us today.

As much as we convince ourselves that we are in control of our own fandom, it is also largely influenced by its origin. In the United States, our fandom has always been divided, due in large part to how the series was introduced. Dragon Ball was an experiment. While other series had paved the way, it was Dragon Ball that was used as a stepping stone to help shape the landscape of the modern anime and manga industries as we see them today, and its fandom paid the price. Many modern day series do not see such a divide within their fandom thanks to simulcasting episodes and chapters, providing more accurate translations, and an overall complete shift in dubbing practices to maintain the integrity of the original series.

At the same time this division also makes the Dragon Ball fandom very unique, providing diverse opinions and discussions. It has further separated this fandom from any of its peers, setting it apart in so many ways. No other series has quite the checkered past, or such a complicated history, as Dragon Ball. New fans that have been tossed into the fray quickly become aware of this fact. It is within this unique and complicated history that we find ourselves, the fans, trying to make sense of it all. We all bring our own history along with us, which shapes our opinions of what the series is to us.

I was about 14 when a childhood friend of mine first mentioned Dragon Ball Z to me. It was a new cartoon I had never heard of airing on TV right after school. At the time I was already interested in similar animated TV series, such as ThunderCats and Voltron, but I really had no idea about their background. After a few episodes of Dragon Ball Z I was hooked, absolutely intrigued with the story and characters, and I was driven to know more about the series, more so than I had been with any other series up to that point.

Along came the Internet and its hundreds of fansites to my rescue, or so I thought. The Internet in those days was equivalent to the Wild West, with no law or order. You could do, or say, just about anything. We were all so young then, with a shiny new toy in front of us which we didn’t quite yet know how to wield. It was at this time that I began working on web design, teaching myself code and learning how to use photo-editing software. For me, web design and Dragon Ball have always been inextricably linked. In my mind the two are inseparable.

As time went by and the series became more widely available to fans, my intrigue shifted from the series’ story elements to its production. Now in college, I wanted to know how the series was made and who made it. I became infatuated with learning the ins-and-outs of Dragon Ball’s production process and researching the production staff that had created it. It was shortly thereafter that the Dragon Boxes were announced in Japan, and my infatuation hit an all-time high as I became engrossed with sorting through episode credits. For the first time, I could actually see who did what on each episode of the series. I was astounded by how much I could learn from this. But there was one issue: I barely knew a lick of Japanese and therefore had no way of deciphering the credits.

It was because of this moment that I first began learning Japanese. If it were not for this series and my blinding passion for answers, I can safely say I never would have attempted such a thing. From then on, Japanese opened up a window into a world I could only have dreamt of in 1998, one I never thought I’d find myself in. It has allowed me to delve into the series I love more than I ever thought possible. It opened up the world of Japanese goods and collectibles, including the original collected volumes of the series, their associated guidebooks, and much more. My collection has been ever-growing since, with no end in sight.

Since then my attention has swayed from subject to subject, and I find myself always looking for more answers. Most recently my attention has switched back to the very beginning, researching the series’ original serialization in Weekly Shonen Jump. Much of the research is due in large part to the unprecedented access we have to materials in Japan thanks to Julian. Every day is now a new adventure of its own, providing us tidbits about the series once lost to time. To be able to hold original issues of Weekly Shonen Jump in my hands, as I scour their pages, takes me back—if only for a brief moment—to a feeling of what it must have been like picking up a brand new issue and reading it for the first time, not knowing what was going to happen in that chapter. It is truly indescribable.

We all enter this fandom with our own preconceived notions, thinking we know what we want from Dragon Ball: action, adventure, and more action. But if you stick around long enough, Dragon Ball has a remarkable way of giving back.

The experiences, the knowledge, the skills, and the life-long friends...all these things are my fandom now. It is a remnant of its former self. It is ever evolving, and will surely be even more different years down the road.

And I’m okay with that.

HEATH (“Hujio”) is one of the co-founders of Kanzenshuu. In addition to being one of the manga gurus alongside Julian, he keeps the site from crashing and burning on a daily basis.

Animazement

2013 Convention; Raleigh, NC

By Doug Cruces

If you asked me what the best day of my life was, I would have to say it was a three-way tie between the three days of Animazement 2013!

Not only did I get to meet the amazing guests, but I also got to meet fellow members of Kanzenshuu. Even though I had barely talked with them on the forums prior to Animazement, we all became instant friends through our mutual love of Dragon Ball.

I had the chance to make Masako Nozawa glee with joy over seeing the Battle of Gods “Super Collaboration Ticket” I brought for her to sign. She sounded as excited as Goku would be if he discovered a fridge full of food! Through her translator, she told me that the ticket was very rare and to take good care of it. I can promise you all that you will never see it up on eBay. If times ever get tough I would rather sell the cardboard box I’m living in than that ticket.

DOUG (“Drabaz”) has taken up the torch of making award-winning DBZ AMVs. He also made a DB LittleBigPlanet level. Doug is a pretty cool guy.

Con Prizes + EXP

Looking to level up your fandom? The experiences and prizes at conventions are for you!

By Mike LaBrie

My first anime convention was Otakon 1999. Making my way down to the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, and having only been running my website for less than two years at that point, I had no idea what was in store for me.

Over the years I’ve had the pleasure of attending, interviewing, and presenting at Otakon, Shoujocon, AnimeNEXT, Katsucon, Anime Weekend Atlanta, AnimeUSA, and Animazement. Though my attendance has waned over the years, each time I make my way through the sea of fans (and after making it through the usual “I’m too old for this...” apprehension), I somehow manage to come away with a smile on my face and having learned something new.

The Internet is an amazing place for fans of all types to meet, gather, and share ideas...but there is something particularly special about actually meeting those friends “in real life” and sharing moments together.

Like meeting Masako Nozawa. Seriously.

MIKE (“VegettoEX”) is one of the co-founders of Kanzenshuu. He has gone to conventions.

Neo-Shonen

Written for Japanese boys, loved by boys and girls worldwide

Dragon Ball was one of a few Shonen Jump series to start bringing in a significant female fanbase. How did the “Golden Age” start changing audiences?

By Daryl Surat

I confess: I’m not as knowledgeable about the specifics of Dragon Ball as most of you reading this. But Dragon Ball has stayed alive and relevant for 30 years because of its influence on today’s shonen action adventure stories. For thanks to both the timing of its release, the longevity of its run, and the changes to its own formula throughout, Dragon Ball is the bridge between “classic” shonen of the past and the modern shonen of the present day (I’ll call it “neo-shonen”).

Akira Toriyama got his break in the early 1980s with Dr. Slump. Edited by Kazuhiko Torishima, its art style and often scatological-based gags epitomized the phrase “boys’ comics.” In 1984, once the duo started work on Dragon Ball, the early wacky antics of Son Goku were cut from the same cloth. Why, just look at the edits that had to be made to get it released in English!

But beyond the pages of Son Goku’s adventure, other gears were in motion. Under the editorial guidance of Nobuhiko Horie—the basis for “Mad Holy” in Blue Blazes!—1983’s Fist of the North Star set the gold standard for “battle manga,” from its character archetypes, narrative beats, and (lest we forget) being forced to continue for 109 additional chapters due to popularity despite concluding its story in chapter 136. Then in 1985, City Hunter—also edited by Horie—proved a surprise success among female readers, thanks in large part to its art style and interplay between the male and female leads. A similar thing happened in 1986 with Saint Seiya, and (oddly enough) 1988’s Bastard!! Dragon Ball would have to adapt to keep from being surpassed.

(Yes, 1981’s Captain Tsubasa was instrumental in giving rise to BL as we know it now, but we’ll omit that for now because those fans weren’t exactly sending in reader surveys to the publishers!)

With the way Weekly Shonen Jump operates, the editors may as well be un[der]credited series co-writers/creators. Editorial reigns were handed over to Yu Kondo, a former shojo manga editor who knew how to keep girls interested without alienating the target boys demographic. Penis and poop jokes faded away in favor of planet-destroying battles. Little Son Goku grew up, married and had children, but in his adulthood became [someone who could totally beat] Superman [but NOT Kenshiro]. New characters such as female fighter Android 18 and the handsome (by Dragon Ball standards, anyway!) Vegeta and Trunks were introduced.

By the early 1990s, Nobuhiko Horie became Shonen Jump Editor-in-Chief and a massive turnover in editorial staff occurred. Jump reached its peaks in circulation thanks to titles deliberately crafted to appeal to boys and girls, like Slam Dunk and Rurouni Kenshin. Incidental to this, Dragon Ball changed again; its final three years were edited by Fuyuto Takeda. By this point, Son Goku’s child Son Gohan was now a high school teenager who fought crime as a superhero while being in a relationship with the tomboyish Videl.

Today, Horie’s influence on Dragon Ball and Jump in general (Fist of the North Star and City Hunter aside) has been downplayed from the official record since he left Shueisha to form his own publishing company, Coamix. But he did make one undeniable contribution to ensuring Dragon Ball remains relevant to English-speaking anime fans in 2014: had Horie not launched the now-defunct Raijin Comics, a weekly manga anthology translated into English, there would’ve never been an English edition of Shonen Jump for Dragon Ball to be re-serialized in! Yep, Shueisha started the entire initiative out of spite, and they put Goku front and center on the cover to lead the charge with then-fledgling series One Piece—the spiritual amalgamation of Dragon Ball, Fist of the North Star, and Rurouni Kenshin—in the corner. The recently-concluded Naruto started shortly after, in Issue #2. The primary image on most of these covers? You guessed it. A more empirical case for Dragon Ball being the bridge to shonen manga’s present you will not find.

DARYL writes for Otaku USA magazine and is one of the hosts of the Anime World Order podcast at: animeworldorder.com

鳥山ワールド

読者全員を住民とする、鳥山作品の世界観。その一番の特徴とは…？

By Kei17

自分は自他共に認める重度のドラゴンボール中毒患者である。人生の幾分かの割合をドラゴンボールに割いてきたと言ってもいい。しかしながら、いくら悩んでも今まで自分の中で答えを出せないことがあった。フリーザ篇や人造人間篇のように「Z」的なシリアス要素の強い話も好きな一方で、それらストーリーに「何かが欠けている」と感じることである。

「ドラゴンボールの話はどこで終わるべきだったか」「鳥山先生は○○篇で終わらせるつもりだった」という話題は、国や文化圏を問わずファンの間でよく繰り広げられるやり取りだ。そしてそういった中で決まって候補に挙げられるのが前述の二篇である。特にフリーザ篇はドラゴンボールの作品全体を通して世界的に見ても一番人気のある話であるし、悟空のルーツにも関わる話に決着をつける、プロット上で大きな役割を担う部分なのは確かだ。鳥山先生のアクション描写も研ぎ澄まされ、バトル漫画としてドラゴンボールを見た際に一つの絶頂に達している頃だと思う。そして続く人造人間篇は悟空から悟飯への世代交代を実現させた。登場以来主役の交代を匂わせながらも曖昧な位置に居続けた悟飯が遂に才能を開花させ、悟空を超えて次世代のヒーローとなる。こう書くと確かにこれら二篇は話を終わらせるには調度良い区切りであるように思える。しかし、それでは自分にとって何か納得のできない点があった。それが何であるのか気づいたのはごく最近のことである。

恥ずかしながら、私は大のドラゴンボール好きかつ鳥山ファンでありながら、実は『Dr.スランプ』をまともに読んだことがなかった。単純に世代でないから触れる機会が少なかったというのもあるが、「流石に古すぎて楽しめなさそう」と思っていたのが大きな理由である。しかし最近になって、やはり鳥山ファンである以上は全て読むべきだろうと思い立ち、一気に読んでみた。予想していた通り時代を感じる点は多々あったものの、読んでいるうちに何とも言えぬ安心感と大らかな作品世界に包まれている自分があった。Dr.スランプは基本的にドタバタ系コメディであるが、最大の特色は、純粋無垢で馬鹿力の何でもありなアラレちゃんがあらゆる事象を自分の世界に巻き込んでいってしまう事である。千兵衛博士を散々振り回した後はペンギン村の人々を、そして遂には宇宙人に至るまで全てアラレに飲まれていってしまう。驚くほどに多くのキャラクターが登場し、果てしなく作品内の世界は広がり、それでいて行き着く点はいつもアラレワールドとでも言うべき純粋無垢な世界観である。私がこのDr.スランプを読んだ際と同じものを感じたのが『神と神』を観た時だった。話は果てしなく広がり、どんどん敵も悟空も強くなっていく。しかし最後は全て悟空というキャラクターに飲み込まれてしまい、得も言われぬ安心感と温かい心と共に物語は終わる。これらは鳥山明という人間自身の発想の豊かさ、純粋さ、そして全てを自身の世界に落としこんでしまう驚異的な寛容さがそのまま作品に現れている結果だと思う。これこそが「鳥山ワールド」なのである。

話をフリーザ篇と人造人間篇に戻すと、つまりこれらが決定的に欠いているのは鳥山ワールドらしさに他ならない。確かに作者らしい豊かな発想による世界の広がりとスケール感はあるし、シリアスなバトルもまた鳥山作品の大きな魅力だろう。しかしこの二篇で起きていることは、基本的に「外との衝突」である。物語やキャタクターの背景に大きな進展と決着があっても、帰結としては決定的な分断や別れがあるばかりで、鳥山作品的な寛容さ・包容力とでも言うべきものを見出すことはできない。要は「話としては綺麗に収まったけど、それがこの作品の何たるかではないでしょう」ということだ。

私がブウ篇や『神と神』の終わり方が好きなのも、そして逆に悟空の物語に終止符を打った『GT』の終わりに強烈な違和感を覚えたのも、今にして思えば全て納得がいく。ドラゴンボールは孫悟空というキャラクターとその世界の物語であるべきだと思う。何だかんだで悟空に惹き寄せられた人々が集い、いつも悟空の無垢な笑顔と更なる物語の広がりへの期待を以って終わるべきなのだ。そしてそれはそのまま作者自身と我々受け手たちの関わりでもある。世界を巻き込んで果てしなく広がる純粋無垢な鳥山ワールドに我々は魅了され、いつしかその住人となってしまうのだ。その広がりは原作漫画の連載開始30周年を迎えた今も世代や文化を超えてずっと続いている。鳥山先生が今後も「鳥山ワールド」を広げ続けることを、私は楽しみにしている。

Toriyama World

The world of Toriyama’s makes all readers its denizens. But what is its defining characteristic...?

By Kei17

I am recognized by everyone, including myself, as having a serious case of Dragon Ball addiction. You could even say that I’ve given over a certain portion of my life to Dragon Ball. Even so, up to now, there was something I couldn’t come up with an answer for within myself, no matter how much I’d fret about it: while I like the the Freeza and Artificial Human arcs, with their more serious story elements, I felt like there was something lacking to their stories.

The topic of “what point Dragon Ball should have ended at,” or “Toriyama-sensei intended to end it at the ____ arc,” is a conversation that’s unfolded between fans regardless of country or culture. And, the arcs that always get brought up as potential candidates are the aforementioned two. Even looking at the wider world, the Freeza arc in particular is the most popular story out of the entire Dragon Ball series, and it is certainly also a part that carries a large role in terms of plot, bringing the story involving Goku’s roots to a conclusion. Toriyama-sensei’s depiction of action was well-honed, and when looking at Dragon Ball as a battle manga, I believe it had reached a peak. The subsequent Artificial Humans arc then brought to fruition the generational shift from Goku to Gohan. Gohan, who had a whiff about him of a changing of the guard since his debut, yet remained in a vaguely defined position, at last has his talents blossom, and surpasses Goku to become the hero of the next generation. Writing like this, these two arcs can certainly be thought of as just right for cutoff points at which to end the story. However, there was something about them that just wouldn’t sit with me. It was only just recently that I realized what it was.

I’m ashamed to admit it, but while I’m a huge Dragon Ball and Toriyama fan, I had actually never properly read Dr. Slump. There was, of course, the simple fact that I wasn’t of that generation, so I had fewer chances to come into contact with it, but the bigger reason is that I thought it was just too old for me to be able to enjoy. However, I recently resolved that as a proper Toriyama fan, I should read everything, so I read it all in one go. As I had anticipated, there were many points that felt dated; as I read, however, I felt an indescribable sense of relief as I became wrapped up in the easygoing world of the series. Dr. Slump is essentially a madcap comedy, but its most distinctive characteristic is the way that pure, innocent Arale-chan, for whom anything can happen with her jaw-dropping strength, gets the universe caught up in all sorts of crazy antics. After getting Dr. Norimaki wrapped around her finger, it’s on to the people of Penguin Village, until finally, everything—up to and including aliens—gets pulled into Arale’s orbit. A surprisingly large number of characters appear, and the series’ world spreads out endlessly, but even so, the destination is always a pure, innocent worldview that ought to be called something like the “Arale World.” I felt the same thing reading Dr. Slump as I did when I saw Battle of Gods. The story spreads out endlessly, and both Goku and his opponent keep getting stronger and stronger. But in the end, everything is subsumed into the character of Goku, and the tale ends together with an indescribable sense of relief and a warm heart. I think that this is the result of everything showing up as-is in the work of the man known as Akira Toriyama himself: his abundance of ideas, his purity, and his astounding openness to let everything fall into his own world. That is the “Toriyama World.”

Returning to the discussion of the Freeza and Artificial Human arcs, in short, what these are definitively lacking is none other than that “Toriyama World”-ness. Certainly, there is an expansion of the world and a sense of scale due to the abundant ideas characteristic of the author, and serious battles are probably another big draw of Toriyama works. But the things that occur in these two arcs are essentially “clashes with the outside.” Even though there are large developments and conclusions in the story and the background of the characters, for the dénouement, it’s all decisive breaks and partings, and one can’t find any of the things that might be called the openness, or inclusiveness, of Toriyama’s works. The key is in how “it’s wrapped up neatly as a story, yet that’s not really what this work is about.”

Thinking about it now, it all makes sense: the fact that I like the way that both the Buu arc and Battle of Gods end, and conversely, why I felt an intense discomfort at the end of GT, which punctuates the end of Goku’s tale. Dragon Ball should be a tale about the character of Son Goku and his world. People should always gather together through a variety of events, drawn in by Goku, and it should always end with Goku’s innocent smile and a sense of expectation for an even further expansion of the story. And also, that’s just the involvement between the author, and us, the recipients, as-is. We are attracted by the ever-expanding, innocent Toriyama World, which gets the globe caught up in it, and before we know it, we become its denizens. That expansion, crossing generations and cultures, continues even now, as the original manga reaches its 30th anniversary. I’m looking forward to Toriyama-sensei’s continued expansion of the “Toriyama World” in the future.

KEI lives in Japan and has been a fan of the series since childhood. He enjoys commenting on the evolving art and music of the series among many other things.

The Essence of Son Goku

A Shonen Archetype

He’s a character all his own. Since Dragon Ball, many other characters have emulated his characteristics, but just who is Son Goku?

By Scott Frerichs

In my formative years, I fell into anime much as any other North American my age would: early morning airings of Voltron, Robotech, and later Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z. Before the advent of Pokemon, which would quickly become the essential “anime” that most children would inevitably start with, you were likely to be familiar either with magical wands or energy blasts, often (though not necessarily) divided by gender.

While I fell into both camps as a child, I always found myself fascinated with Dragon Ball. Its kooky art aesthetic, its violent action, the serialized plot; these were many angles from which no other animated series in North America even began to approach me from, and I was in love. I found this new form of storytelling to be utterly fascinating and, as I grew older, I would only go on to learn more and more about the series that inevitably introduced me, by and large, to anime culture.

But one essential aspect of Dragon Ball, in almost all its incarnations, has stood out to me as one of the most intriguing and endearing facets of the series: the main character, Son Goku.

Son Goku’s entire character, from top to bottom, was something that I’d never truly encountered as a child. Completely eschewing his instantly recognizable and iconic design, his personality was strikingly and curiously alien to me. A socially bereft, simple-minded, battle obsessed manchild with several times more battle savvy than common sense, and a glutton at that? Commonly in western animation, these sorts of qualities were reserved for brutish villains or comic relief; very rarely, if ever, did a competent protagonist ever exhibit these qualities.

That’s where Son Goku, to me, shines as a main character. He’s a selfish, largely single-minded boy/manchild obsessed with food, battle, and physical self-improvement over everything else in his life. While these characteristics are often typical of a less endearing character, they’re tied together with a sense of childlike wonder and genuine heart that takes these qualities and makes them positive aspects of his personality. You find his obsession with food charming, his reckless ambition empowering, and his obsession with battle invigorating.

If you’re a fervent manga reader/anime watcher, especially within the shonen genre, you have more than likely seen these characteristics in other characters as well. Since Son Goku’s first appearance in 1984, his influence could be felt years after in many manga within the genre to follow. Fans of series such as One Piece, Hunter x Hunter, Toriko, and to a lesser extent Naruto and Fairy Tail, will find striking similarities between these series’ protagonists and with Son Goku, to varying degrees.

Monkey D. Luffy of One Piece fame is perhaps the most immediate, with his simple, uncultured, and frank nature, combined with his lust for both food and battle. Gon of Hunter x Hunter is often lauded as a more realistic interpretation of (what some refer to as) the Goku Type: eternally pure, endlessly dedicated to one task, and someone who began his adventure at a young age. The titular character of Toriko is, in some ways, a hybrid of Son Goku and Kenshiro of Hokuto no Ken, combining Son Goku’s love for food, battle, and his simplicity with the fighting styles and physique of Kenshiro.

His visual aesthetic has also continued to inspire shonen heroes, with both Toriko and Naruto strutting the iconic orange and blue that Son Goku embodied throughout the entire run of Dragon Ball, and Naruto sporting blonde, spikey hair. Masashi Kishimoto, mangaka of Naruto, has openly stated that he drew inspiration from Son Goku in both his design and personality, as has Yoshihiro Togashi concerning Gon’s character.

Whether or not one can say for certain the Akira Toriyama did, in fact, inspire all of these creations and their subsequent protagonists with his own, I will always look to Son Goku as an excellent example of subverting the qualities of the traditional hero protagonist and making his very own, distinct impact on the genre, as well as the medium of anime at large.

SCOTT (“KaiserNeko”) is a member of TeamFourStar and edits their Dragon Ball Z Abridged fan parody series.

Crossover Madness: Cross Epoch

Akira Toriyama and Eiichiro Oda combine forces to release a Dragon Ball x One Piece spectacular

The casts of Dragon Ball and One Piece gather together in small groups in a new fantasy world where Mr. Satan is king, Buggy and Pilaf have joined forces, and Shenlong has a tea party. What else would you expect from these two?

By Greg Werner

As I sat down and read through Toriyama-sensei and Oda-san’s collaborative one-shot Cross Epoch for the first time in a good four years, I started to recall where I was when I first read it on December 25th, 2006.  I could picture the scenery, the sounds and even the smells of the busy city around me. Somehow I even remembered precisely the chapter number of One Piece it accompanied that week in Jump (#439). So can someone please tell me...

How did they do that!? How did they use pen, ink and paper to create what I would contend is an honest-to-goodness time machine for my senses?

Those who’ve mastered the art of storytelling have earned a place in history. Their characters will entertain us from one generation to the next creating new memories, forging new friendships and inspiring readers to rise to great challenges. Thirty years is just the start for Dragon Ball and it will continue as long as we dream of wishes.

Greg has run popular DBZ and One piece websites. He writes for Shueisha’s V-Jump magazine in Japan.

You Don’t Forget Your First Love

Making the Transition from Dragon Ball to One Piece

By Alex Kazanas

It’s no secret that I love One Piece. As much as it is a Japanese pop-culture juggernaut, as well as a story that has captured my own heart, it wouldn’t be possible without my first love:

Dragon Ball.

Dragon Ball has occupied my attention, admiration, and affection since the very early days of the Internet. I’d constantly peruse the World Wide Web for all the information I could find, and when the DBZ anime went on hiatus in the United States I had to double my efforts. I needed to find out what happened next! I became a sponge, soaking up everything DB-related I could fine. I’d print out pages upon pages of manga summaries and buy bootlegged fansubbed VHS tapes in an attempt to satiate my never-ending Son Goku-like hunger. In those days, Dragon Ball-related anything was still slim pickings in the States, so I took what I could get. I imported soundtrack CDs and snatched up what I could of the Ani Mayhem Collectible Card Game. I attempted to emulate Toriyama’s art style. I would practice Ryusei Nakao’s iconic Freeza laugh when nobody was around. I guess what I’m trying to say is, I loved Dragon Ball.

I would also watch Dragon Ball whenever I visited family in Greece each summer. The show came on at 7:00 a.m. on ANT1, and sported a rockin’ Greek dubbed version of “Makafushigi Adventure.” It was neat following my favorite show in another language, and I continued to do so whenever I visited. This brings us to the summer of 2002. After Dragon Ball, my cousins continued to watch their morning rounds of cartoons, which was mostly Greek dubbed versions of other shows that were popular in America a few years prior...except for one in particular that stood out. The first thought going through my head was, “Is that guy using THREE swords?” This particular series, called “Drake and the Search for the Treasure,” (which I found out a day later was actually called “One Piece” after some Internet sleuthing) would soon become what Dragon Ball was to me.

Seeing as Dragon Ball had long ended by the time One Piece came into my life, it wasn’t such a jarring transition. I figured it was a good time to get into something new, and what better way to do it than with something that, for some weird reason, still reminded me of Dragon Ball. It was partially the art style, but mostly it was the tone. It was lighthearted as a whole, but serious when it needed to be. And it was funny! It hit that perfect blend of comedy and action I had come to love with Dragon Ball, while also impressing me with how well the story itself was told. It wasn’t long before I had found out that Dragon Ball was indeed an inspiration for One Piece. Eiichiro Oda cited Toriyama as his hero, and even had an extensive interview with him in the One Piece art book, Color Walk 1. It was suddenly clear to me why I had loved One Piece so immediately: it was the spiritual successor to Dragon Ball!

Since One Piece was nowhere to be found in the U.S. at that time, I began to repeat the motions of when I had gotten into Dragon Ball during that time when it wasn’t easily accessible. Parroting the methods of my younger self, I snatched up whatever One Piece merchandise, soundtracks, art books, and information that I could, and strangely enough, it was even tougher than the earlier days of Dragon Ball. One Piece had virtually no American audience, even when it became published in Viz’s Shonen Jump later that year! I must admit it was nostalgic to hit all the same beats as before: a resident badass character catching my eye (for DB, it was Piccolo; Zoro for OP), Oda’s art style influencing my own, doing whatever I could to acquire more of it, and even running into the same source for some of my information. I had been a longtime fan of Greg Werner’s “Ultimate Dragonball Z Information Site,” and over the years we had developed a friendship. I was pleasantly surprised that he too was very much into One Piece. It was like history was repeating itself, but this time was different. I was into what was already the “new” Dragon Ball in Japan, and I wanted to be proactive about it. I wanted to help others get into this amazing series, just as others before me helped me grow to love Dragon Ball so much.

Since then, I’ve been active in the One Piece community, watching it blossom. I’ve met some of my greatest friends through our love for One Piece, which echoes the series’ overarching theme of friendship pretty well. However, one similarity is a constant between every One Piece fan I’ve met: we were all Dragon Ball fans first. I’d like to think that we all know good storytelling when we read it, so naturally it makes sense that both series would share fans cut from a similar cloth. And when Toriyama and Oda collaborated with each other for the special one-shot Cross Epoch, it not only brought each series’ characters together, but the fans as well. A defining moment, if there ever was one.

So yes, by now you must know that I love One Piece. But know whenever I say that, I’m also saying, “I love Dragon Ball.”

ALEX (“The Dude”) is a longtime Dragon Ball fan and regular contributor to the Unofficial One Piece Podcast at: onepiecepodcast.com

In the Mood for a Melody

A transformation into BGM superfan

By Kenneth Locke

It was 2000, and I was finally starting to get into this anime series on Cartoon Network that my sister and her gaggle of girlfriends wouldn’t stop talking about. Dragon Ball Z wasted no time digging its claws into me, even though I had only caught a handful of scattered episodes—from different story arcs—effectively stifling whatever hope I had of figuring out context or continuity. I happened to catch the tail end of the Cell Games arc as it was first airing, and at last real curiosity took hold and motivated me to hit the Internet, not only to find out which parts of the series I had seen, but also to see if fans had anything to say about the Japanese version, and how the FUNimation dub compared to it. I had already stumbled upon Dogasu’s English-to-Japanese Pokemon Page (now known as Dogasu’s Backpack) some months earlier when I was first getting into Pokemon, and immediately became fascinated by the concept of comparing a dubbed, imported series to its original-language version.

It was through this fascination that I came upon Chris Psaros’ DBZ Uncensored. Here was a fan whose passion for the source material shone through in his episode comparisons, and some of my favorite moments were those where he’d gush lovingly over the original Japanese version’s background music (known to many anime and video game fans as BGM, for short), which was composed by Shunsuke Kikuchi, and how this score measured up against the replacement one created by Shuki Levy for FUNimation’s first stab at the dub (and later the Faulconer Productions score).

To make a long story short, in his eyes, the Kikuchi score won, no contest. Where both of the U.S. scores were fully electronic and had a tendency to meander, only occasionally producing something resembling a melody (an opinion I didn’t entirely share, though later I would personally hold to the notion that Faulconer’s team at least gave their work much more thought and heart than Levy did), the Japanese score had a grand, sweeping orchestral presence, with only limited amounts of synth. At least that was the impression I came away with after reading Uncensored; I had never heard the original for myself, aside from a handful of quick snippets in the form of video clips offered for a short while on what was then known as Daizenshuu EX. The more I read of Psaros’ compelling thoughts, the more I ached to experience the vintage DBZ in its entirety.

Some months later I got my hands on a massive fansub set that contained everything from the Captain Ginyu arc clear to the end of DBZ. This gave me my first fleshed-out experience of what the music was truly like. It may come as a huge surprise to those who know me online, but the Kikuchi score actually wasn’t “love at first sound” for me. It was instead an acquired taste. I’m not sure what I was expecting after reading everything Psaros had to say about it, but it wasn’t something that sounded to my ears like it belonged in the ‘60s or ‘70s. Talk about old-school! There was so much emphasis on blaring, in-your-face brass, with frenzied strings placing second...er...fiddle, backed up by the high-pitched squeal of a flexatone here or the conspicuous BOING! of a Jew’s harp there, and bringing up the rear was the near-omnipresence of a rattling vibraslap, reminiscent of classic spaghetti westerns. I found the whole ensemble odd. Not altogether unappealing, just odd.

However, I simply could not deny the man’s talent for catchy earworm melodies, and the more episodes I watched, the more the score grew on me, until it eventually became—for lack of a better phrase—music to my ears. I remember one scene in particular: that of Piccolo’s first encounter with Cell. Having read so many of Psaros’ comparisons and noticing a certain recurring theme, I went into this episode expecting the entire scene where Piccolo walks through the eerily deserted Ginger Town to feature no music whatsoever, at least until the big reveal of Cell. As it turned out, I was only half-right. There was some presence of silence, but not before an unusual, threatening electronic piece with wah-wah pedals underscored the first moments of Piccolo’s investigation, then built up to a big, dramatic orchestral finish. That was when the silence seeped in, and of course when Cell began to step out of the shadows, another music cue kicked in. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the former cue at first; it seemed a little loud for the scene, especially since I was more used to the Faulconer score’s use of the subdued-yet-amply-creepy latter half of “Ginyu Transformation” here. But it didn’t take long for the Japanese cue to grow on me, and some time later I learned that it had been tracked (recycled) from the opening scene of the third Dragon Ball movie.

There were other cues I grew fond of, most of them used very prominently during the Freeza arc. One was used as the go-to battle theme, which after starting with a chime and a short build-up with strings, featured an electric guitar churning out a portion of Piccolo’s leitmotif in repetition, as a bass kept the beat. Frantic strings and brass punctuation rounded out the whole thing. Another great cue was typically used whenever Freeza came close to doing in the heroes, with a return to the electric guitar and desperate percussion all throughout. And who could forget the piece that so brilliantly illustrated the surprise and shock of Goku’s first transformation into a Super Saiyan? It began with a low-key, threatening piano that gave way to unsettling synth until the wind and strings took over, shrieking in horror one moment and spinning in a cyclone the next, the percussion thundering its way through two minutes of sheer confusion. Now that was memorable.

Finally, there was the inspiring theme signifying a slow rise to victory or a hopeful moment, usually involving Goku’s arrival after the other heroes had been mauled. It began very softly, with two muted instruments—what sounded like a piano backed up by percussion—stating three notes, which were collectively repeated twice in succession then quickly swallowed up by the silence. A second later there was a reiteration, then the two instruments were joined by a guitar, then the wind section. Everything combined to build to a heroic crescendo, ever so gradually, until an almighty sounding of trumpets wrapped it all up on a fist-pumping fanfare, filled with triumph. Every time this cue came on, I got chills. I needed this music in isolated form.

After I was done with the fansubs, I learned about the legendary 5-disc music box set, three discs of which were dedicated to BGM from Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z. Whenever I saw this particular piece of merchandise brought up on forums and fan pages, it was always with the air of one of two attitudes: either it was spoken of in a sort of written equivalent of hushed, reverent tones...or a maniacal explosion: “HOLY @#$% THIS SET IS A MUST-HAVE! YOU HAVEN’T LIVED UNTIL YOU OWN THIS THING!” So I tracked down a copy and found, to my dismay, that it was a far from complete collection. Sure, it had all three of the aforementioned cues used as Freeza arc staples, but the heroic piece was noticeably absent, as was the ominous “Piccolo meets Cell” cue described above. There was also a beautiful violin theme associated with Chiaotzu that I had been aching for, and my heart fell into my stomach when I heard merely a quick statement of the leitmotif, but not the full-length cue.

All the same, I spun those discs (especially 4 and 5) religiously, for months. Indeed, it wasn’t long after getting the set that I took a few sheets of scrap paper and wrote for myself an outline of every track on each disc (breaking down the contents of each suite), how long each cue lasted (as near as I could figure anyway, as tracks 2-13 on Disc 2 had the cues crossfaded and it was sometimes difficult to tell where one cue ended and the next began), and their accompanying slate number as listed in the CD booklet. I also made up my own names for the cues, as the only real names available applied to the suites as a collective instead of the individual recordings.

When I finally bought a DVD player in 2002, one of my first DVDs was the first DBZ movie, which gave me more to chew on. Now I had discovered that a large handful of the more iconic music pieces from the TV series had actually originated from this film. What was more, I noticed that all of the Dead Zone cues that happened to be on my beloved CD set were indicated in the liner notes with slate numbers marked “M8--.” There was a pattern! Immediately my OCD took hold and I charted it all out to find that the numbers corresponded with the order in which each cue “appeared” in the movie.

A few months later I left home to serve a religious mission. Mormon missionaries are expected to refrain from seeking “worldly” entertainment—to stay away from television, video games, lively music and the like, except in special circumstances—so my Dragon Ball merchandise had to stay behind. I quickly found, however, that the music I had grown so fond of over the past year had stuck with me, in my head, and continued to haunt my gray matter until I thought I would go mad for want of a “hit”: I was officially a Kikuchi junkie, and my drug felt as distant as the moon. Six months later, the first thing I did after visiting with my family was run to my CD player, pop in Daizenshuu Disc 5 and listen to M1002: the “shocking horror” piece that announced the appearance of Shenlong in DBZ Movie 3, and one of my most frequent disembodied earworms while out in the mission field. Nothing was sweeter to my ears after hearing this cue only in my head for six months.

I went on to buy all the DBZ DVDs I could, as well as the other few BGM CDs Columbia had produced (finding to my delight that one of them—Ongakushu volume 1—included the heroic theme I so adored and sorely missed from the 5-CD set), and after a while I became thoroughly fed up with how much music it turned out had never been released on CD. By late 2005, I was taking names, so to speak; I was charting out all of the music I could identify, starting with that fateful episode bearing Cell’s first on-screen appearance, and making note of where on the CDs to find the released material, and how much was unreleased.

I kept my newfound hobby to myself until Columbia announced that they would be coming out with a new CD set after all these years. The online store listings cruelly referred to this upcoming release as the “Dragon Ball Z Complete BGM Collection,” but I knew something was amiss when I saw in the product details that it would be merely a three-disc set. I didn’t yet know just how many discs it would require for a complete DBZ music collection, but three was definitely too low a number. I posted what I had finished of my BGM episode documentation on the Daizenshuu EX forums so that others could get a larger scope of how much unreleased material we were looking at, and eagerly awaited February 2006, when this new set would hit and I’d finally know the truth about its contents. Sure enough, the word “complete” in its title turned out to be some kind of fluke in the marketing, because nowhere on the packaging did it claim to be all-inclusive, and for good reason. Not only was more than half the set a rehash of Discs 4 and 5 of the Daizenshuu collection (most of the tracks being the exact same suites), but Columbia had also bogged down disc space with movie-size versions of each film’s end credits song.

Of course, if we’re being honest, the Daizenshuu set had a misleading title as well; even though I’ve seen daizenshuu translated as “anthology” (a legitimate way of putting it in English), the literal meaning is “big complete collection.” While it is true that the 5-disc set came out before the series was even finished being produced, it still could have included so much more pre-1994 material.

All in all, the BGM Collection wound up containing 198 cues in total, only 64 of which (less than a third) had never been released before. Had they placed a specific focus on unreleased DBZ cues, it could have included well over 150 and still had room left over for iconic repeats from previous albums, or maybe even some unreleased stuff from the original Dragon Ball as bonus tracks.

The history of Dragon Ball BGM releases is confusing and woeful. The CDs that focus on one movie (Ongakushu vol. 2, as well as the movies 10 and 11 soundtracks) are great, and there’s very little to complain about those...but each new release that’s structured in the “every track is a suite of cues” format is bogged down with problems. Even the very first release, the Dragon Ball Ongakushu vinyl, had a problem of its own which would thankfully never be repeated outside of its 12 recycled tracks on the 5-disc set: the aforementioned crossfading together of the cues, a practice I simply could never get behind, as it renders it impossible to cleanly separate them. There are even worse issues to explore, however, such as the fact that on the CDs, each title card fanfare, and the Next Episode Preview theme that uses “CHA-LA HEAD-CHA-LA,” are all fabrications (presumably, the masters for the true recordings are lost somewhere, but the recent surfacing of the preview theme in the Ping Pong anime for a parody suggests otherwise).

Or how about what’s arguably the worst problem: Columbia’s tendency to treat each new suite-structured release as if no CDs existed prior, instead of placing proper emphasis on previously unreleased music? We do NOT need M817 on three completely different collections, not while there’s rarer material begging for disc space. If it’s a matter of reviving material from out-of-print CDs, why must each release be so far apart from one another as to merit this practice to begin with?

The vocal songs are generally unnecessary as well; there’s plenty of room for those on the deluge of albums that come out each year. In 1998 Sailor Moon received a complete release of BGM in a colossal 10-disc collection (the “Memorial Music Box”). This from the same company and music label that owns Dragon Ball, so why couldn’t we have been graced with the same miracle for our own favorite series? Did the Sailor Moon set sell poorly, making Columbia wary of large BGM compilations? (Proving the sad case that Sailor Moon fans get everything Dragon Ball fans want.)

To make matters even more depressing, our chances of getting more releases of Kikuchi’s scores for Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z have worsened over the years: the BGM Collection is still the latest Kikuchi release for the Dragon Ball series, and as of this writing, that was nearly nine years ago. Dragon Ball GT wasn’t even scored by Kikuchi; the reins for that project went to Akihito Tokunaga. Ever since Dragon Ball Kai first started airing in 2009 with a completely new and more modern-sounding score by Kenji Yamamoto, I’ve had the uneasy impression Toei’s been slowly phasing Kikuchi out of the picture entirely due to his “dated” sound. Even the incident where the scandal over the melodies Yamamoto stole gave rise to a return of the classic Kikuchi recordings was merely out of a last-minute necessity...and it proved to be a disaster, as the person in charge of music placement, possibly due to the pressures of short notice, made abysmally poor judgment calls as to which cue would fit each scene. Add to that the fact that placement was limited to cues on the BGM Collection (because those were the ones most recently remastered and therefore offered the best sound quality), and even then, apparently only the selections they had full rights to, causing massive repetition in the use of certain cues, and it’s no wonder this whole change went over with fans like a lead balloon. I shudder whenever it hits me that this was probably most of the more casual American fans’ introduction to Kikuchi.

Consider Plan to Eradicate the Super Saiyans, Episode of Bardock, Battle of Gods and the return of Dragon Ball Kai for the Majin Buu arc, all productions from recent years, none of which Kikuchi had anything to do with. It seems that Shunsuke Kikuchi has passed the baton on to composers less daring to be unique or to indulge in strong melodies, favoring instead shapeless atmosphere and superficial attempts to be “epic,” which in the end prove largely forgettable. I recognize that, at the age of 83, Kikuchi is no spring chicken, and that’s a laughable understatement. I can’t deny being sorely disappointed, though, when the composer for Battle of Gods was announced and it was someone else. In any case, new composers would be inevitable anyway, but I would have at least preferred one with a much more classic sound. Is that really so much to ask?

Sometimes, all these frustrations pile up and I just feel like throwing my hands up in the air in defeat. In the end, it all comes down to how much I wish the general public placed much more value on film and TV scores. If they did, there wouldn’t be any of this nonsense where amazing music sits rotting away in a vault instead of being commercially released, so that those of us who appreciate this powerful art form could have our Holy Grail. Of course, I was spoiled in my early youth by some truly phenomenal TV music, so perhaps that experience gave me a certain privilege everyone ought to have. I was barely five when Disney’s DuckTales premiered, with its gorgeous collection of leitmotifs and bombastic statements in brass by Ron Jones (yet another unreleased and criminally under-appreciated score), so I guess it’s no wonder it didn’t take much for Kikuchi’s equally bombastic musical voice to work its magic on me. I think it’s an egregious shame, as I write this in 2014, that this kind of orchestral score is a dying breed.

As is to be expected, not everyone is a fan of the Kikuchi score, an opinion they are of course entitled to. However, with the Dragon Ball series offering nearly a dozen different composers (which is outrageous, really), everyone has their own favorite.

What I always find whenever someone criticizes Kikuchi is that their argument unfailingly amounts to “but his style is so dated!” I might have been on board with this sentiment once upon a time, but it took getting the 5-CD set for me to realize that all this talk about “dated = bad” is hogwash, especially in these times, when film and TV scores have all but gone down the crapper. In fact, when I look at how all the composers since Kikuchi have been coming and going like clockwork (Norihito Sumitomo seems to be sticking around for a while, but it’s only a matter of time before he too packs his bags, as he’s not exactly Don Rosa to Kikuchi’s Carl Barks), I realize that “dated” is an outlandishly ignorant word to describe my favorite Dragon Ball score.

In all honesty, it’s timeless.

KENNETH (“kenisu3000”) documents Dragon Ball music at: kenisu.webs.com

The Inevitability of Filler

Garlic Jr. and the afterlife tournament…but…also the driving episode. So yeah. Filler.

Shonen fans more than anyone else are used to “filler” in their anime adaptations: material newly and usually exclusively added to the TV series to pad things out, stall for time, and generally wait for the manga to get further ahead.

By Heath Cutler

Whenever an anime adaptation of a concurrently produced manga series is being developed, it is almost inevitable that some anime-only material is created to “fill in” or buffer out specific manga events (hence it is often referred to as “filler”). For ages fans have questioned the necessity of filler material in the Dragon Ball anime series, especially when it comes in large doses, and the most consistent answer always given is that it was necessary to prevent the anime from catching up to the manga’s storyline. Considering that typically only one chapter was released per week and each weekly episode could cover material from multiple chapters, this answer makes sense.

However, unless you were lucky enough to follow the series during its serialization from 1984 to 1995 in Weekly Shonen Jump and the broadcast of its anime adaptation on Fuji TV, there has never been any solid evidence compiled to back up this response. Is it true? Is conceding to filler even a valid response? Did the anime adaptation of Dragon Ball really catch up with the manga’s storyline, and if it did, by how much and how quickly?

To get to the bottom of this quandary, we have to travel back to the very beginning of the anime, which debuted on 26 February 1986. At that point in time the manga had reached its 63rd chapter, having already been in serialization for over a year. Using each chapter’s sale date, it is possible to match up the manga chapter and anime episode released every week, comparing the difference in the amount of the manga’s storyline covered that given week.

The first true milestone reached by the anime series came in August 1987, just a year and a half after its premiere. At this point the anime staff had halved the initial backlog of available manga material from 62 chapters down to 31. Throughout the remainder of the anime series this gap never recovered much beyond this margin, remaining at either roughly equal to or less than 31 chapters. After September 1989, which marked the beginning of the Dragon Ball Z anime series, the chapter gap would never again come close to that and hovered somewhere between 10 to 20 chapters until the very end.

In June 1991 the series finally hit its smallest chapter gap between the manga and anime with only 10 chapters of material remaining. This coincidentally occurred with the broadcast of Dragon Ball Z episode 97, the now infamous episode where Freeza fires a blast into Planet Namek and declares it will explode within five minutes. Anyone familiar with the series will often make some sort of casual joke about it being the longest five minutes in history and proceed to blame the anime for making it even worse by stretching it out so much. However, did the anime really stretch it out?

Up until this point the series had been moving along rather consistently at an average rate of 1.3 chapters per episode, but following Freeza’s aforementioned statement, the point that the series hit its lowest chapter gap, everything slowed down a bit to an average rate of a single chapter per episode. So while it did take 10 episodes (DBZ 97-106) to cover this material, it also originally took 10 chapters (DB 319-328) in the manga. This change was no doubt done to ensure that the anime would not catch up with the manga any more than it already had. Immediately following the conclusion of the battle with Freeza, an anime-only arc featuring Garlic Jr. was created (bringing back the big bad from DBZ Movie 1), extending the gap back up to 22 chapters, the largest margin seen for the remainder of the series.

While there were numerous instances of short filler story arcs being created at previous points in the series, at no other point was it so paramount to truly avoid catching up with the manga. If the Garlic Jr. story arc had not been inserted at this point, the anime storyline would have entirely closed the gap with the manga within at most two and a half months and the series would more than likely have gone on hiatus. Think of it from the anime staff’s perspective. There would have been no way for them to plan ahead, especially with an author like Akira Toriyama, who typically created the story on the fly, often the very week he drew the chapter. While Toriyama would draw a chapter two weeks prior to it being published, the anime staff would begin planning an episode at minimum a month ahead of time. As you can imagine, they had no other choice but to insert filler material and double up the amount of available manga material.

While this quite definitively answers our question about filler material playing an essential role in preventing the anime from catching up with the manga, there is another unsung hero that plays quite a significant role in preventing this: syndication breaks. While television series in Japan don’t run in season formats, at least not as typically seen in counties like the United States, they do sometimes take weeks off due to special broadcasts covering various sports, news, or national events. Believe it or not, even with the use of filler material as was originally produced for the series, the anime would have caught up to the manga by Dragon Ball Z episode 48 if not for having spent roughly 20 weeks on break by that point. Conversely, if not for these breaks, it is more than likely that even more filler material would have been produced for the series. We would not just have Garlic Jr. and the afterlife tournament, but something else entirely added into the mix!

This does also make one wonder how fast the anime would have actually caught up without the use of any filler material. To figure that out it is a simple matter of subtracting out the full episodes of filler material. Up until that point 31 filler episodes had been created between Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z. Therefore one can assume that with no filler material and no syndication breaks, the series would have caught up to the manga by Dragon Ball Z episode 17, putting the series somewhere around Chiaotzu’s suicide attack against Nappa.

In the end, filler is an inevitable part of the anime industry that doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. For the companies involved, it is their solution to avoiding the loss of syndication time and advertising revenue. For the fans, it helps ensure that a new episode of their favorite long-running series airs each week, whether they like it or not.

HEATH (“Hujio”) is one of the co-founders of Kanzenshuu. He documents a lot of stuff there.

Homages…in Filler?! Journey West!

Fan of Dragon Ball? You need to read the original journey!

By Mike LaBrie

Many fans are at least vaguely familiar with Journey to the West, if only in concept, Toriyama’s original inspiration for some of the characters in the Dragon Ball series. The 16th century novel tells the tale of a wandering priest accompanied by a collective of beastly disciples working to atone for their sins. Their ultimate goal is a series of holy scrolls located in India, and thus their journey westward from China.

Son Goku’s name is literally just the Japanese reading of the Chinese name “Sun Wukong,” and the other carryovers in the character should be obvious: he’s a monkey with an extending pole that uses his “somersault cloud” to transport himself far and wide through the sky. Zhu Bajie, or “Pigsy” as he is often called, should be another obvious parallel; the lecherous Oolong is his clear cousin. The priest Xuanzang is the last of the more obvious parallels; his search for the scrolls mirrors Bulma’s search for the Dragon Balls as she collects her own friends along the way.

Once we get past these surface level similarities (and the occasional other reference, such as the Ox Demon King taking his name directly from the early chapters of Journey to the West as well), Toriyama heads in his own story-telling direction with the Tenka’ichi Budokai, the Red Ribbon Army, and onward from there.

But that’s not it for Journey to the West in the Dragon Ball series. Enter: filler material.

The Original Story

Two monsters conspire to kidnap Xuanzang; eating his flesh will grant them long life. Silver Horn (the younger brother) heads off with thirty minions, but only ends up capturing Zhu Bajie after twenty rounds of fighting. Fifty minions are then sent out. Silver Horn eventually goes out in disguise as an injured monk to lead them back to their home cave. Xuanzang tells Wukong to carry him, which he does...but he can tell the injured monk is a monster. Silver Horn eventually uses magic to pin Wukong down, grabs the priest, and heads home. The brothers send out Sly Devil and Wily Worm with two of their treasures—the red gourd of purple gold and the pure mutton-jade vase—to help capture Wukong. With these items, if they call out his name and he answers, he will immediately get sucked in and they can trap him with some magic words; after an hour and three quarters, he will be reduced to pus.

Wukong disguises himself as they come looking for him. He says he hates that monkey guy, too, and has them tell him all about what they’re up to and what these two treasures do. He turns a piece of his hair into a gourd of his own, which he says can hold heaven! Theirs can only hold up to two people, so they should trade, but only if he can prove his gourd can actually contain heaven. After some secret talkings with deities, the Jade Emperor arranges for the sky to be blackened out, which the brothers take to mean heaven is now inside the gourd. They make a trade, and vow to be struck with a plague should they ever regret their decision.

When Wukong disappears, the minions realize they’ve been swindled and head back to the brothers. They’ve lost two treasures, but still have the Seven Star Sword and the palm-leaf fan. Their mom has the other treasure (the yellow-gold rope), so they send another two minions (Hill-Pawning Tiger and Sea-Lolling Dragon) off to get her and the treasure. Wukong follows and interrupts them saying he’s a member of their clan, which they don’t believe until he tells them exactly what they’re doing, and that he was sent to tell them to hurry up since they’re probably just going to goof off and take too long. They get there, he knocks them out, takes a hair out, and disguises himself and his hair into the two minions sent to get the mom. He eventually gets going with the mom and some of her minions, but kills them all along the way before they get back to the brothers, and assumes her form.

Zhu Bajie can tell it’s Wukong since he saw his tail; Wukong (as the mom) says he’s not too keen on eating the priest, but the ears of that pig dude sound tasty. Zhu Bajie lets it slip who’s who at this point. Wukong is then attacked by the brothers with the Seven Star Sword, but it’s all fun and games to him; with his rod, this fight is a piece of cake. Golden Horn wants to give up, but Silver Horn at least wants to fight a few rounds and tosses on his armor. Wukong knows the gourd won’t work (since Silver Horn simply won’t answer to his name), so he lassos his head with the rope. Silver Horn knows spells against his own treasure, however, and ends up capturing Wukong. He drags him back, but Wukong just ends up escaping and disguising himself again as a minion. He swaps the rope for a fake one and transforms himself into a made-up fake brother of himself. He has the evil brothers call out this fake name, and wonders for a bit...if he responds to his fake name, will he get sucked in? Yep. He does. Trapped inside, he thinks about pissing or spitting for them to swish around and make it sound like he’s dissolving, but he just starts calling out “Oh no! My such and such is gone!” instead. He takes out a hair and transforms it into a half-dissolved version of himself, and flies out when they check inside and see the fake body. He disguises himself yet again as a minion, watching the brothers drink and drink and drink in celebration of their victory. When they’re good and drunk, he swaps the gourd for a fake one, keeping the real one for good.

Wukong says he’s ANOTHER brother of his with a different name and with a gourd much like their own. He tricks Silver Horn into explaining the history of the gourd and matches the story himself. They decide to call out and answer each other’s names—Silver Horn still thinks he has the real one, so he ends up getting sucked inside the one Wukong stole earlier. Golden Horn asks which treasures are left; the vase is now useless and passed on to Wukong, but he still has the Seven Star Sword and the fan. He calls up 300 minions and heads off to fight. After twenty or so rounds the minions just gang up on Wukong. They actually get more ferocious as they fight, so Wukong is forced to pluck out some hairs and duplicate himself. They tear apart the competition until it’s just Golden Horn left standing. He swipes the fan facing south to produce fire, which Wukong simply jumps over; he heads to the cave to rescue everyone...but ends up just grabbing the vase and leaving. Golden Horn is left by himself surrounded by corpses, so he falls into a deep sleep. Wukong goes back again to rescue everyone, but tip-toes in and tries to steal the weapons off of Golden Horn. He grabs the fan, but gently brushes Golden Horn’s neck with it, waking him up. He’s attacked again with the Seven Star Sword, but Wukong wins and Golden Horn takes off. Wukong unties everyone, and they hole up there for the night with a nice vegetarian dinner.

Golden Horn takes off to his mom’s place and tells all the female minions what happened. His uncle (Great King Fox Number Seven) shows up, and they go back to the cave in search of revenge. The fox ends up getting killed when even Sha Wujing joins in on the fight, and Zhu Bajie delivers the final blow with his rake. Golden Horn goes after him for this, but with all three disciples involved in the fight now, it’s too much for him and he takes off. Wukong follows him and calls out his name. Thinking it’s one of his own minions, Golden Horn answers...and is sucked inside the vase. Wukong grabs the Seven Star Sword for himself!

After all this, a blind person shows up and demands his treasures back. The mysterious person is actually Lao Tzu (who tends to the elixir of life); it turns out the two demon brothers were sent as a test for Wukong’s dedication to protecting the priest and those are his treasures, so Wukong ultimately hands over the weapons.

The Dragon Ball Filler Story

Kinkaku (“Golden Horn”) and Ginkaku (“Silver Horn”) are brothers wreaking havoc on a town. They have found that they love the vegetables there, and come once a month to eat all they want, drink all they want, and basically just be terrible guys. A little girl named Chao is off in search of a strong guy to come stop them. She finds a tiger dude, but he just wants to eat her. Goku ends up coming to her rescue and agrees to come beat up the bad guys since he’s training, anyway.

What really strikes fear in the villagers is that the brothers have a magical gourd; they do “roll call” (randomly calling of names of the villagers), and if the villager named doesn’t answer them right away, they are sucked into the gourd and eventually dissolved into sake. Everyone is worried since Chao isn’t back yet, but she gets there just in time (with Goku in tow). The brothers notice a little baby, and ask what its name is. They eventually get the name out of the mother, but before they can speak it aloud (to a baby who obviously can’t answer back yet, since it’s only two weeks old...), Goku jumps in and starts beating them up. Kinkaku jumps in with a sword, and eventually Goku’s name is called out. He doesn’t respond, so he gets sucked into the gourd.

Goku is saved from being dissolved by stretching out Nyoi-Bo near the top, but he can’t break out (even with a Kamehameha). Goku randomly decides that he needs to pee, so he just does so down to the bottom of the gourd. Since there’s swishing all around (due to the pee...), it sounds as if their captive has been dissolved, so the brothers open the gourd back up...only to have Goku jump back out and grab the gourd from them. He calls out their names in random order and an obnoxious number of times; they think they’ve answered the correct amount of times, but they’re actually one off, and are subsequently sucked inside. Goku makes them promise not to do bad things anymore, so he lets them out. The villagers keep the hoodlums under watch as they till the fields to make up for all the crops they ate, randomly calling out one of their names to make sure they’re paying attention.

Journey Onward, Readers!

If it has not become apparent from this quick look at one tiny story, Journey to the West is filled with humor, fighting, and all sorts of shenanigans...so basically, if you like Dragon Ball, you’ll love Journey to the West.

There have been numerous translations over the years, not to mention abridged versions versus complete translations of the entire 100 chapters. A popular edition has always been Arthur Waley’s 1942 abridged translation (published under the simple title of “Monkey”). It is a fine translation indeed, but fans looking for the whole story might feel a bit short-changed by how abridged it truly is; in fact, virtually none of the monster-of-the-week stories, so to speak, are represented at all. Most of the tales of Xuanzang helping out villages with their own internal problems and conflicts are told, and while they are as heart-warming as any Dragon Quest vignette, there is a great deal more to Journey to the West.

Fans looking for the real deal are encouraged to check out Anthony C. Yu’s 1982 (with a 2012 revision), four-volume, unabridged translation. All of the poetry is kept intact, all of the stories are kept intact, and all of the random peeing and bleeding and other juvenile antics are kept intact.

Admittedly, I had a difficult time penetrating the dense text my first time through. The poetry in particular can be tiresome at first; characters will introduce themselves or perhaps the narrator will describe a location, only to be followed up with pages upon pages of flowery poetry yet again describing each facet in excruciating detail.

Once you “get” the flow of the writing, though, the series becomes impossible to put down. It’s pulpy junk food as an adventure tale! The banter between Monkey and Pigsy is on par with, if not heavily surpassing, the best that Toriyama ever put to the page with his own characters. The fights elevate themselves to insane degrees, with incredible tales of double-crossings, weapon acquisitions, godly rage, and more.

There are plenty of other Journey to the West references in Dragon Ball if you care to dive in. The Furnace of Eight Trigrams, An’nin, the Mountain of Five Elements...the entire ending-filler-arc to the TV series is filled with references and retellings.

Journey to the West references are so prevalent in Japanese media that you have probably seen them countless times without realizing it. Without even going into full-on Journey to the West-inspired episodes, you’ll occasionally see passing references and costumes.

Other shows will do one-off episodes retelling the story in their own way. Characters like Ginkaku and Kinkaku have not only appeared in Dragon Ball, but have been adapted as somewhat major characters in Naruto!

If you are a Dragon Ball fan, you owe it to yourself to check out Journey to the West. A story about a monkey who gets trapped under a mountain and then cleans up horse crap can’t be too bad a read, right?

MIKE (“VegettoEX”) is one of the co-founders of Kanzenshuu and enjoys poop jokes.

Dragon Ball Theology

Gods, deities, guardians, attendants…

By Jake Schutz

In a V-Jump interview that was part of the lead-up to Battle of Gods, Toriyama explained that “gods and aliens” have long been staples of his work. That’s why he designed Beerus as a cat: to help set him apart from the gaggle of gods that had come before. Over here in the U.S., nobody would bat an eye if you said DBZ features loads of aliens, but if you said it features a ton of gods too, you’d probably be met with more than a few blank stares. Here, the series isn’t typically seen in that light, and a big part of the U.S. reaction to Battle of Gods was hype based on the idea that this was the first time Goku and the gang would take on a foe of literally godlike power. A big part of it, of course, is that this is the first time FUNimation has really embraced the mythological side of the series. Their Battle of Gods English dub freely tosses around the G-word, whereas before this they mostly tiptoed around the issue by claiming there’s a Guardian of Earth named Kami, and a Supreme Kai in charge of a bunch of other Kai guys. Even on the Japanese side of things, Toei was apparently confident that fans would find the title enticing, and not just think “oh, is Dende finally going to throw down with Mister Popo?”

One factor in this bit of collective amnesia is that while the series has more gods than you can shake a pointed stick at, they tend to not quite live up to expectations. In that same V-Jump interview, Toriyama explains that he prefers to make his gods pretty much the same as humans. Nothing better demonstrates this than the fact that one of the first major gods in any of his works, the God of the Galaxy who appears towards the end of Dr. Slump, is an older gentleman who likes puns and dirty mags, and who happens to look exactly like Kame-sen’nin. In the Dragon Ball tankobon #3 Q&A corner, Toriyama is upfront about how he recycled this god’s character design for one of his human characters. And just as Dr. Slump’s God gets casually outclassed by Arale and friends, the various deities throughout Dragon Ball likewise get surpassed by the Z-Warriors before too long.

While Dr. Slump’s version of God doesn’t turn up until almost the end of the series, we’re introduced to the concept of gods right off the bat in Dragon Ball. Shenlong means “Divine Dragon,” and in chapter 1 Bulma refers to him as the “god of dragons,” while in chapter 23 Pilaf prophetically calls him “God’s dragon.” But these initial references aren’t followed up on until the release of the Adventure Special, when the manga was midway through the Demon King Piccolo story arc. In the Q&A section of this special DB-centric issue of Weekly Jump, a fan asked Toriyama about who made the Dragon Balls. This prompts Toriyama to say he’s “thought up something really cool”: that the Dragon Balls’ creator “would have to have been God, I guess.” Apparently Toriyama was quite taken with this idea, since he incorporated it into the main storyline as soon as the Piccolo arc wrapped up. Since Piccolo broke Shenlong, in chapter 162 Goku has to go ask Shenlong’s creator to fix him. And as Karin explains, Shenlong’s creator is “God, of course.”

But this God turns out to not be quite what anyone would expect. For one thing, he looks just like Piccolo, who at this point is the big bad of the entire series (imagine if Batman went to heaven and found out God looks just like the Joker). God wasn’t always God: he used to just be a talented martial artist, like Goku. And like Goku, one day this martial artist met God. The problem is, Gods have lifespans just like regular folks, so this God needed a successor to take over when he kicked the bucket. The martial artist wanted the job, but to meet requirements, first he needed to expel all the evil from his heart. When the old God died, the martial artist became the new God, the evil that used to be in his heart became Piccolo, and the rest is history.

If you’re a bit confused, I should explain that the Japanese word for God is “Kami” (神). The FUNimation English dub left the word untranslated, typically treating it as the character’s name rather than his title, and for his title they used “Guardian of Earth.” “Guardian” became their catch-all PC replacement for “god” throughout the series, up until their dub of Battle of Gods. Even in Japanese the different gods in Dragon Ball are described as “watching over” their domains, so “guardian” isn’t an awful description for them, and the term does have something of a history being used as a replacement for “god” (see for instance ‘70s Doctor Who, where the “White Guardian” and “Black Guardian” serve as off-brand stand-ins for God and Satan). Viz’s manga translation mostly leaves “Kami” untranslated when referring to the green guy, but also usually keeps it clear that the term means “God” and is a title, not a name. They even introduce the character simply as “God” in Dragon Ball volume 16 before switching over to “Kami” (often with the Japanese honorific “sama” tacked on the end), and they freely use “god” to describe all the later ones who pop up.

In his Daizenshuu 4 interview, Toriyama admits that when he created Piccolo, he hadn’t yet thought up the idea of Namekians. Instead, he says he only came up with that when he introduced God. But even this might surprise some: right off the bat, Toriyama intended Dragon Ball’s God to turn out to be an alien. Of course, Dr. Slump’s version of God lives in a house in outer space and monitors civilizations on planets throughout the galaxy. And God’s backstory in Dragon Ball is that he started out a martial artist and only became God when the old God gave him the job. That this martial artist turns out to be from Namek rather than Earth doesn’t make too much of a difference in Dragon Ball’s worldview.

Instead, the big theological implication of Toriyama throwing aliens into the mix is that once Raditz shows up and we learn there are all sorts of other inhabited planets out there, “God” is suddenly demoted to simply the “God of Earth.” That’s what Enma calls the green guy, when he brings Goku over to the afterlife in chapter 205…though he’s still usually referred to simply as “God” throughout the rest of the series, and we never do learn his name (another reason English speakers tend to leave “Kami” untranslated and treat it as the character’s name). The implication is that every planet has its own God, equal in status to Earth’s version, but in the manga we never really see or hear much about these guys (even in the anime, we just get one-off references to the God of Planet Vegeta, or the God of Planet Conuts). Instead, we’re introduced to their superiors, the next level of the divine hierarchy.

First there’s the aforementioned “Enma Daio” (Great King Enma)…a deity Toriyama didn’t simply make up, for once. Originally Yama Raja (King Yama), the Hindu God of Death, he was incorporated into Buddhism and in this way ended up a standard feature of the afterlife in the Japanese imagination. He turns up in more manga and anime than you would believe, including Dr. Slump. When Goku died, it was inevitable that he’d meet this guy. Toriyama’s only real innovation in depicting Enma is that he dresses him and his ogre servants up as typical Japanese salarymen, and gives the whole afterlife a relatively realistic air. As he says in Daizenshuu 4, this was mainly done to set the afterlife apart from God’s rather mystical palace down on Earth.

Next up on the totem pole, we have Kaio, the “King of Worlds.” As the ogre who drives Goku to Snake Road explains, Kaio “stands above all the gods of the universe.” In other words, since Earth and all the other planets in the universe each have their own God, Kaio is in turn king of all those worlds, and by extension king of all those gods. This simple setup stands until near the end of the Namek story arc. In chapter 323, Kaio introduces himself to the Great Elder of Namek as the “Kaio of the North Galaxy,” and later in chapter 328 he tells Bulma that Namek is outside of his “domain” (apparently meaning the North Galaxy). The Dragon Ball Z Anime Special II, a magazine released shortly after chapter 328, features a roundtable interview with Toriyama and several DBZ anime staff members, including series organizer Takao Koyama and chief animator Minoru Maeda. Koyama mentions that since the Kaio we know is actually just the Kaio of the North Galaxy, then “that means there must be a South, East, and West Galaxy, as well…”  Maeda says “they could be quadruplets,” and Toriyama likes the idea: “Quadruplets! Oh, that’s good.”

Since Kaio sits out most of the Cell story arc, it’s not until the Buu arc that Toriyama gets around to incorporating the idea that the blue catfish is just one in a set of four into the main story. In chapter 428, the South Kaio turns up to watch as Goku trains under North Kaio’s supervision. He’s curious to see Goku since Goku’s supposed to be one of the best warriors in the “North Area” (for whatever reason, the term “galaxy” isn’t used here and the two Kaios’ domains are referred to as the “South Area” and “North Area”). Shortly afterwards, the DBZ anime aired the afterlife tournament, a filler story arc set between the Cell and Buu arcs, and featuring all of the Kaio. Not only do we meet the Kaio of the North, South, East, and West Galaxies (it’s “galaxies” again, instead of “areas”), but we even get to see their boss, the Grand Kaio, the god in charge of the entire universe. Toriyama provided the character design for the Grand Kaio and also the distinctive “snow globe” style design for the Dragon Ball cosmos, briefly shown during DBZ episode 195. It’s safe to say that Toriyama’s involvement with this filler arc was probably a factor in him introducing South Kaio into the manga a little while before he and the other extra Kaio popped up in the anime.

Besides Maeda’s playful suggestion of Kaio quadruplets, this new setup probably takes some inspiration from the Four Heavenly Kings of Buddhism, a group of gods who watch over the four cardinal directions. They turn up in Journey to the West, and in Japanese pop culture any group of four outstanding individuals tends to get labeled as “Four Heavenly Kings” in reference to them. That’s where the Elite Four in Pokemon get their Japanese name from, and elsewhere in Dragon Ball Garlic Junior turns up with his “Four Heavenly Kings of the Demon Clan” (aka the “Spice Boys” in FUNimation’s English dub). Though it’s more of a stretch, we might also remember how Dorothy and friends made a cameo at the Tenka’ichi Budokai, and that the Land of Oz is likewise divided into four regions (north, south, east, west), each ruled by a witch. Another inspiration? Actually, Toriyama seems to have a thing for dividing stuff up based on the cardinal directions. Besides splitting the Dragon Ball universe up into four galaxies/areas, the main locations on DB Earth follow the same pattern: West City, South City, East City, North City…as above, so below.

Grand Kaio’s reign as top dog is short-lived though. In chapter 440, Piccolo asks this mysterious “Shin” fellow if he’s the Grand Kaio (the first and only time he’s mentioned in the manga), but he turns out to be someone even higher: the Kaioshin, literally the “God of the Kaio.” So not only do you have a god on each planet (like the God of Earth), but you’ve also got kings of those gods (the Kaio), and those god-kings have a god of their own (Kaioshin). And of course, Kaioshin isn’t alone. In chapter 445, Kaioshin explains that there used to be five Kaioshin, but the others all fell to Buu and so now he’s the only one left. Later in chapter 508, he further explains that these five Kaioshin were divided up in the same way as the Kaio: a Kaioshin of the North, South, East, West, and then a Grand Kaioshin above them all. The lone surviving Kaioshin was actually the East Kaioshin back then, and in chapter 479 we’re introduced to his ancestor, the old perverted East Kaioshin of 15 generations ago.

So for each Kaio, there’s an equivalent Kaioshin (or there used to be, anyway). In the main series it’s never really explained what the point of this somewhat odd setup is, but later guidebooks like the Daizenshuu say that while the Kaio just watch over the living world, the Kaioshin watch over the afterlife as well. When Toriyama drew the map of the Dragon Ball cosmos for the Daizenshuu, he took the design he had come up with earlier for the afterlife tournament filler arc, but expanded it to include the Kaioshin’s realm as well (a process he explains in his Daizenshuu 4 interview). While Dragon Ball’s living world and afterlife are crammed inside a single huge ball, the Kaioshin’s realm gets a separate ball all its own, which revolves around the other one like a moon so that they can monitor it. A nifty idea, though one that seems like it arose mostly from the way Toriyama tacked the Kaioshin’s realm onto his pre-existing cosmos design.

The apparent redundancy highlights the difficulty of fitting a pantheon into Dragon Ball’s world of shonen-style constant power inflation. Once that initial Dragon Ball hunt wraps up, the series is all about getting stronger: the characters are always going through more intense training, reaching more powerful forms, fighting tougher and tougher enemies, etc. For the most part, Dragon Ball’s gods are there to provide Goku and co. with training, quickie power-ups, and the occasional heads-up about the next imminent disaster. Then when an even bigger threat turns up, Toriyama introduces an even higher god to provide the characters with even better training and/or power-ups. In this light, Dragon Ball’s gods are all just bumped-up versions of the more down-to-earth mentor figures like Kame-sen’nin or Karin, and even these guys are mystical immortals.

Theoretically we get introduced to new gods whenever Dragon Ball’s worldview expands (more planets=more gods; more galaxies=more Kaio, etc)…but in practice, new gods turn up whenever the series’ power inflation has rendered the old gods useless. The end result is that in the Buu arc we get the Kaioshin because at this point nobody would buy it if regular old Kaio suddenly owned magic fusion earrings or could do a funky chicken dance that made Super Saiyan forms obsolete. But there’s no expansion of the Dragon Ball world to go along with this like we had in earlier arcs, so we get new gods without anything new for them to be gods of, apart from their own realm which exists solely for them. They’re around mostly for their plot function, with only a hazy in-universe reason to exist.

It seems Toriyama was aware of the issue, since when creating a new addition to the DB pantheon for Battle of Gods, he did as much as possible to separate Beerus from all the previous Dragon Ball gods. Even before Toriyama got heavily involved in the project, the initial idea for the first DBZ movie in 17 years was that it would feature a “God of Destruction” and a “Super Saiyan God.” Once Toriyama started rewriting things, he quickly put his own distinctive spin on these ideas. Rather than a pure evil villain as originally planned, Beerus ended up a more neutral figure, selfish and ill-tempered but not actually malicious, with many humorous aspects to his personality. As already mentioned, Toriyama designed Beerus as a cat man to separate him from the other more human-looking gods, and his feline nature shines though in his laziness and obsession with food.

One phrase that got kicked around a lot in the previews and other early press for the movie was that this God of Destruction was needed “to maintain the balance of the universe.” As Toriyama explains in his Chouzenshuu 1 interview (released a few months before Battle of Gods itself), Kaioshin is actually a “God of Creation” who “provides the stimulus” for new planets to be born, and even creates new life-forms...though he mostly just watches over all these worlds, with help from the Kaio (this is the only aspect of their role touched on in the original series itself, or earlier guides). Since the number of planets is constantly increasing, Beerus provides balance by destroying worlds. It’s a bit like hunters shooting deer to keep their population in check. Of course, Toriyama never explains why Kaioshin couldn’t just stop making planets if there are getting to be too many, or why too many planets would even be a problem (can outer space get overcrowded?), but the important thing is that Beerus has a clearly-defined role. In the movie itself, Kaio gives Goku a shortened version of this explanation, saying that both creation and destruction are needed to preserve balance (though he doesn’t touch on the whole “planetary overpopulation” idea).

But the biggest difference between Beerus and prior gods is that he’s an antagonist; not strictly evil of course, but someone there for Goku to fight all the same, as opposed to serving as a mentor or martial arts master. Wrapped up in this is the idea that to fight Beerus, Goku must himself become a god, which is where Super Saiyan God comes into the picture. Like with the God of Destruction, Toriyama put his own spin on this. Rather than a super muscular guy in a cape, as was originally planned, Toriyama wanted to keep things as simple as possible: Goku is skinnier and younger-looking, with red hair and a fiery aura. The backstory (as explained in the movie by Shenlong) describes this form as the “god of the Saiyans,” originally created long ago by the few good-hearted Saiyans to oppose the wanton violence of their peers. Five good-hearted Saiyans have to share their energy with a sixth to trigger the transformation. Though powerful, it has a time limit, which prevented the original Super Saiyan God from stopping the evil Saiyans (resulting in him and the other good Saiyans getting “erased from history”), and in the film Goku’s transformation runs out midway through his fight...but he keeps on trucking all the same.

In a lot of ways, Super Saiyan God is a much bigger departure from prior Dragon Ball gods than even Beerus. Throughout the series, being a god has mainly been shown to be a job. Somebody is born an Earthling/Namekian/fruit person/etc., and only becomes a god when they inherit a position in the divine hierarchy, either by being personally selected by the current position holder or (as Toriyama explains in guidebooks) a divine lottery. There seems to be a certain amount of training involved, since they don’t want anyone who isn’t good or strong enough for the role, but overall that’s it. A bit banal, but again, Toriyama likes gods who aren’t too different from regular folks. This setup even seems to be the case with the God of Destruction: near the end of Battle of Gods, it turns out Beerus’ attendant Whis is also his martial arts master, and Whis offers Goku the role of God of Destruction once Beerus dies. The implication is that Whis likewise originally selected Beerus for the role, and trained him for it.

But Super Saiyan God isn’t a job, it’s a transformation. Getting the energy of five other righteous Saiyans causes Goku to become a god, and when the time limit runs out, he stops being a god and goes back to being a regular Saiyan. Contrast this with (for instance) Dende, who takes over as God of Earth when the old one recombines with Piccolo, and simply is the God of Earth from then on, and will be until he passes the role to someone else. Going along with this notion of transforming into a god is the new idea that gods have a special kind of ki energy, one that’s of a higher quality and “clear,” making it impossible for non-gods to sense. It’s this special ki that allows Beerus to suddenly show up unexpectedly (as opposed to when someone like Freeza swings by Earth and everyone senses him coming an hour in advance), and Goku apparently gets it as a Super Saiyan God. But it’s a bit hard to square this idea of “god ki” with the main series, where Goku spends a lot of time around gods but never seems to notice their special ki. Maybe only Beerus and Super Saiyan God have it, but if so, why? Obviously it’s not the first time Toriyama’s on-the-fly writing style has created discrepancies, but it does underline how the concept of Super Saiyan God seems to define godhood as a state of being, in contrast to almost everything else in the series.

“Almost everything else in the series”…so far.  We still know virtually nothing about the upcoming 2015 DBZ movie, but Toriyama has said it will be a continuation of Battle of Gods, and early teasers mention a battle of “godly dimensions.”

So more gods may be on the horizon. Certainly, Battle of Gods itself ends with the revelation that everything we’ve seen of the Dragon Ball world so far is just one universe out of twelve, with the implication that these other universes contain their own gods. The door’s wide open for new pages in the Dragon Ball bible. Maybe future gods will be more like Super Saiyan God, transformations rather than people simply holding a divine job title. Maybe we’ll get a truly evil god for the Z-Warriors to face. Maybe it’ll be something far stranger than anything we could possibly predict ahead of time.

God only knows.

Jake (“Herms”) provides research and translations for Kanzenshuu.

The Unexpected Dragon Ball Prequel

By Mike LaBrie

There were already hints that Akira Toriyama’s new short series, Jaco the Galactic Patrolman, would have some sort of connection with Dragon Ball before it even launched. Comments from the author told us to scale back our expectations, but there was no denying the excitement.

Simply having a consistent new series from Akira Toriyama should have been exciting enough, but did the story’s conclusion bring enough to the Dragon World?

Jaco the Galactic Patrolman tells the story of Jaco, a “Super Elite” member of the 38-member patrol force overseen by a galactic king. After being distracted, Jaco crash lands on Earth on an island inhabited by Omori, an old man with a somewhat-mysterious past.

It seems that Omori lost his wife in an accident that involved some sort of time machine, and the government is now looking to take the island back from him. When they run into a young girl named Tights, everyone’s fates become intertwined with more mystery, intrigue, and explosions, along with a good mix of posing and deadpan humor.

Jaco the Galatic Patrolman looks and feels like an Akira Toriyama work through-and-through, which means it has all the incomprehensible magic along with the expected pitfalls.

The overall style fits in with Toriyama’s “modern” art: lots of short/thin characters, some shading now that he has fully moved to digital, and the occasional great-looking action shot.

The various side characters all have the standard Toriyama charm, but none of them particularly stand out in terms of memorable design. Even recurring characters such as Katayude are so basic as to be pretty indistinguishable from any other random character. Being standard “human” characters adds to this, but as recent as 2010’s Kintoki, some of the henchman at least stood out a little bit.

Jaco is easily the most interesting character to look at, which seems odd considering his flat features. This is likely why Toriyama has him striking poses so often, and while he only barely ever smiles, we do occasionally get some great facial expressions.

Considering her family, it is no surprise to see Tights go through several great wardrobe changes throughout the short series. She seems to accessorize quite well between her head-wear, necklaces, and coats!

With Jaco never changing his (naked?!) appearance, it is great to see Toriyama give Tights and even Omori (with his scarf, proper city clothes, etc.) a little extra attention-to-detail. Omori in particular is drawn very intricately with expressive wrinkles and heavy eyes.

Jaco has a few stand-out panels, but it does feel like a severely-and-perhaps-over-polished final product. The characters carry it far more than its art, and thankfully they are a pretty fun group to be around.

Toriyama set the stage a little bit with his comment for the first chapter, noting that, “...the content has a bit of a dated feel, but if you read to the end, you’ll understand why.”

So what does “dated” mean? Does it refer to his older Dr. Slump writing style with a looser story and jokes driving the dialog? Does it refer to the timeframe of the story, and therefore fuel the flames of Dragon Ball tie-in anticipation? Well, it turns out it is a little of both.

Many fans have noted that while Jaco does indeed sprinkle the jokes, it is not quite as dense as Dr. Slump was. That is a fair assessment, but to me, it felt appropriate for what Jaco was trying to do. It was not a straight-up comedy, but it was certainly not a straight-up action series. Then again, does that mean Jaco has a bit of an identity crisis? Toriyama is—self-admittedly—not particularly one for deep stories. In an English-language exclusive comment printed alongside the first chapter, Toriyama flat-out stated, “Unfortunately, this series won’t have much flashy action like Dragon Ball did. But that doesn’t mean it will have a beautifully deep plot either. Light, goofy and happy! That’s what my manga is all about.”

So yes, Jaco walks the line between Toriyama’s two most famous series, but in the process does manage to carve out a bit of its own identity. You can feel the fun that Toriyama is having with the series, something we are treated to not nearly often enough.

The world of Jaco feels real and fully imagined. As with Dragon Ball, it is definitely “Earth” but it is hard to pin a point in the “real world” that it might take place; of course, the way the story wraps up explains that pretty well enough.

Jaco himself is very reminiscent of the titular Neko Majin characters: mostly self-centered, occasionally oblivious to his surroundings, insanely strong, and a blunt, funny straight-man to a (generally) non-existent sidekick. He is a wonderful new addition to the world, and it is hard to imagine a pantheon of Toriyama characters without him!

Jaco has a little bit of everything: action, comedy, and drama. Despite the underlying story being about the fate of the world, it ends up being a pretty endearing personal tale with a fun trio of characters.

It cannot be overstated that Akira Toriyama wrote a Dragon Ball prequel. Taken on its own, Jaco is one thing, but understanding how it fits into the larger Dragon World has its own implications. Fans may take issue with aspects that appear to contradict “common knowledge” about how, for example, certain characters should look or appear for their age, but it is equally important to note that pretty much nothing shown in Jaco—including “Dragon Ball Minus”—directly contradicts anything that Toriyama himself personally wrote or drew in the Dragon Ball comic. If you want Jaco to fit in, it sure can, and does a pretty gosh darn great job at it.

Those looking for a Toriyama story—and know what to expect from one—are in for a treat. As our own Julian noted back on our podcast review of the series, Jaco’s greatest accomplishment is also his greatest failure: by missing his opportunity to complete his mission, he inadvertently saves the world. This almost-anticlimactic bit of resolution and humor is Toriyama to a tee.

Jaco is not a story that ever needed to be told, but it adds enough to the world and is cute the whole way through. You can feel the author having fun in every single chapter, and you will have a smile on your face right there with him. In my book, that is a “win.”

You might just want to conveniently happen to skip over most of “Dragon Ball Minus.”

MIKE (“VegettoEX”) is one of the co-founders of Kanzenshuu. He aims to own every piece of Jaco literature.

Jaco: One Last Look

Jaco works as a stand-alone story, but when viewed through another lens…

By Julian Grybowski

Akira Toriyama originally never meant for Jaco the Galactic Patrolman to be a Dragon Ball story at all. It began life as a draft for another Galactic Patrol manga in the vein of Jiya, for Toriyama to script and Masakazu Katsura to draw. But when Toriyama’s planned series for the 45th anniversary of Weekly Shonen Jump began to look a little too much like Battle of Gods, he reworked his unfinished draft into something he could do himself, and almost as an afterthought, linked it up to his most popular series with the final chapter.

All of which is quite the surprise, really, because it seems to work so well. Viewed through the lens of Dragon Ball, Jaco is transformed from a low-key, odd-couple comedy with moments of high action into a profoundly melancholy meditation on the nature of fate and unintended consequences.

Consider for a moment: we already know that Omori’s time-travel research will not be completed by him. Moreover, even if he had succeeded in traveling back in time and preventing the disaster that killed his wife and assistants, the nature of time-travel in this world means that they would still be dead when he returned to his own time. Would Omori have known that beforehand? And would he have been satisfied knowing that at least one incarnation of himself could live happily, or would it have simply embittered him further? Ultimately, he is destined never to find out, as we know Tights’ sister Bulma must be the one to finally complete the time-machine, and perhaps Omori is even a better person for this failure.

We also know that, despite Jaco saving East City from a brush with disaster, it is doomed to be obliterated by Vegeta and Nappa as a long-term consequence of failing his primary objective, which is to stop a young Saiyan from arriving on Earth. The city and its inhabitants are never restored with the use of the Dragon Balls, but this event is also necessary for the Earth as a whole to be saved countless times by that same Saiyan. Son Gohan, too, is ultimately rewarded for his selfless choice to take in the child who fell from the sky with a death-by-origin-story, but that’s how it has to be.

Even “Dragon Ball Minus,” while not perfectly executed, has a similar air of subdued inevitability. We know that Bardock is right to suspect Freeza, and that whatever his or Gine’s misgivings, they must part with Kakarrot in order to ensure his survival. But we also know that Bardock’s last stand against Freeza is doomed from the start, and his message to Raditz will set his sons against each other. Would Bardock have still done this, had he known? We never get to find out. Young Kakarrot, with his look of pure anguish as he sees his mother and father for the last time, is fated to forget them, and himself, as he is set on the path to becoming the carefree boy, and eventual hero, we meet in Dragon Ball. Freeza’s genocide of the Saiyans has to sow the seeds of his own destruction. It cannot happen any other way, or the series we know cannot be.

Viewed in this fashion, Jaco the Galactic Patrolman is less about the apparent plot—an alien policeman stranded on Earth, with an important mission—and more about how the Dragon Ball world, which appears as a given, is subtly but crucially shaped by the actions of “unknowns,” who have no inkling as to their importance to the story. One wrong move, and everything would simply come apart. Is all this simply the convergence of random events, or is there some unseen force, like fate, shaping things as necessary? That much seems to be the reader’s to decide, but the fact that Jaco is imbued with this (perhaps unintentional!) question makes this the author’s most mature work yet.

Some have maligned Jaco for its apparent lack of action and its dry humor, but to my eye, it’s all by design. Toriyama has bigger sharks to punch here. By showing just how improbable everything in the Dragon Ball is from the outset, we gain a new respect for its unsung, unnoticed heroes, and see that it’s more than just strong guys firing energy beams at each other. Everyone has their role to play in the story of life, whether it be heroic, comedic...or tragic.

JULIAN (“SaiyaJedi”) lives in Japan and provides translations for Kanzenshuu. He has extensively documented Jaco’s serialization, other releases, and impact.

Dragon Ball Z Fandom in Ye Olden Days

The true confessions of a flea market junkie

Before Crunchyroll, before BitTorrent, before YouTube, before Hotline servers, before (well, at the same time as) IRC, if you wanted to watch anime subtitled, it had better have been licensed by someone cool. If not? VHS fansubs were your joint.

By Meri LaBrie

Imagine waking up at 6:00 a.m., before the morning sun has even crept into your bedroom, just to watch cartoons. In a groggy state, you stumble downstairs toward the tiny television kept in your family’s living room. It’s time for a before-school ritual, armed with a bowl of cereal of dubious nutritional value in one hand, and a remote control in another. This setting can only mean one thing: it’s anime time! Suddenly, I’m wide awake!

The year is 1996, and my 15-year-old self had recently discovered Sailor Moon that fall. One fateful morning, a TV ad for an equally exotic “japanimation” appeared during a Sailor Moon commercial break. There was some little kid who looked like a monkey, but there was fighting, a blue-haired chick with a gun, some giant robots, gorillas, and lord-knows what else.

“Dragon Ball? MUST FIND OUT WHAT IT IS!” Thanks to the ad, I found Dragon Ball’s local listing time and finally watched an episode (at an even earlier time than Sailor Moon, no less).

Unlike Sailor Moon, which aired every morning in syndication, Dragon Ball aired only one weekday and one weekend morning per week. That said, I admit it wasn’t love-at-first-sight when I had a chance to watch an episode of Dragon Ball. However, the more I watched Dragon Ball week after week, the more I started to “get it.” However, it didn’t reach the level of sheer obsession Sailor Moon caused within me. That soon began to change once I discovered a certain “underground” (I use the term loosely for dramatic effect) scene in my high school.

As anime started to become ever-so-slightly more popular in school, the kids drawn to it began coming out of the woodwork. I was in Spanish class reading a copy of Animerica magazine (THE go-to anime mag of the day) when a friend happened to notice I was reading a Dragon Ball article. I exclaimed over a drawing of “Goku.” That was when my friend said those fateful words to me: “That’s not Goku. That’s his SON.”

Wait. WHAT?! Goku, that wacky kid with the tail, has a SON!

Well, color me intrigued.

My pal then explained to me (thanks to the wonders of his growing up in Korea) that Dragon Ball continued into Dragon Ball Z, with a cast of older characters and even more of their offspring! And aliens, no less!

Needless to say, I HAD to learn more. DBZ soon aired on North American television not too long after. By growing my pool of anime friends at school, my knowledge of the Dragon Ball universe expanded. And with it, as did my knowledge on where to get my fix.

Like the mythical land of Valhalla or El Dorado, some pals at school clued me into a flea market off a local highway. A flea market? Really? That dirty, dingy place next to the Sam’s Club that I’ve always known was there, but never stepped foot in? Why is this a magical place?

Simple: piles upon piles upon PILES of fansubs. It was a glorious sight to behold! I essentially had nearly the entire library of DBZ at my fingertips. So much time, not enough money.

A few friends had loaned me fansubs from other series in prior months, but never before had I ventured out to obtain tapes of my own. I had a bit of money saved up, and I found that by age 16-17, I spent any and all disposable income on anime products (legal or otherwise). Fansubs soon joined the list of “must-have” anime items.

Every weekend was like a treasure hunt. I had only just gotten “online,” so my knowledge of the DBZ timeline was spotty at best. There were “sagas” or “arcs,” and the nice (if not somewhat shifty) folks at the fansub shop in the flea market did a good enough job of labeling their tapes.

This particular shop sold three VHS tapes for $15, and I considered this a deal. Sometimes the tapes had either no packaging or inaccurate graphical treatments if one was lucky enough to get a tape with a clamshell case. As for the content, the number of episodes per tapes ranged anywhere from three to four (FOUR?! What a bargain!), and the visual quality varied wildly. Some tapes were so horribly garbly that I had to return them to the shop. I eventually wised-up and tested the tapes while still in the shop before handing over my hard-earned money.

In this age of high-definition media, it’s frankly hard to imagine media’s visual quality as anything less than perfect. Fansubs back then (or at least, the ones I obtained) were several generations removed from the original master tapes, which themselves were derived from TV broadcasts...or LaserDiscs for the movies if you were lucky.

The fact of the matter is, I simply did not care. It was enough to get my fix. It was enough to absorb this entire universe in such short order. It was enough to get tapes, trade with friends, and talk about different parts of the series. Part of the fun and beauty of the fansub scene for me was being able to watch DBZ asynchronously. It was like a puzzle, a mystery. Frankly, it was magical.

I love that time in my life when I, not by choice, got to watch a long series out of order (for example, tackling parts of the Buu arc before I’d even seen Goku transform into a Super Saiyan). I loved that the first fansub I ever saw was DBZ Movie 13 which, at the time, was the last DBZ movie. I don’t think I’ll ever have a chance to watch a show in such a way ever again, and for that I truly treasure being able to access DBZ fansubs at a time when it was so exciting and new to be a DBZ fan.

MERI ran the “Temple O’ Trunks” website and gets to put up with VegettoEX on a daily basis.

Covering Battle of Gods

A behind-the-scenes look at what it’s like for a modern fansite to cover a new movie

Readers/listeners/fans of Kanzenshuu were used to visiting the site on a daily basis to learn all about Battle of Gods. What was that constant news cycle like behind-the-scenes, though? How did Kanzenshuu coordinate so much news & content?

By Julian Grybowski

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the peak of excitement, it was the nadir of sleep-deprived, server-side voodoo. In short, it was awesome, in all senses of the word.

July 2012. Kanzenshuu had barely gotten off the ground. We were three months out of the gate, slowly adding back content that needed to be ported (and brought up to our current standards) from the former Daizenshuu EX and Kanzentai, when “it” appeared: a teaser website, with a silhouetted figure, the letter “D,” and a countdown to July 14th. We all speculated what it might mean, but none of us really held much hope that it could be aimed at our fandom. After all, we had already received an animated feature less than a year earlier: Episode of Bardock. We considered the possibility of a continuation to Dragon Ball Kai, but it couldn’t be that; the series’ run in Japan had fizzled out anticlimactically with poor merchandise sales and a music plagiarism scandal. Toei wouldn’t be taking another chance on that, would they...?

And so, we decided it must be a special promotion for the already-announced, upcoming One Piece movie. Kei17 of World Dragon Ball famously declared on our forums that he would “eat [his] pants, wander around [his] city wearing Goku’s dogi, and draw a dojinshi featuring DB girls” if it turned out to actually be Dragon Ball. The silhouette did look a bit like Shenlong, but that was probably just coincidence.

But suddenly, there was incontrovertible proof: an early leak from the upcoming issue of Weekly Shonen Jump. A new Dragon Ball Z movie announced, slated for the end of March 2013, and—get this!—heavy involvement from Akira Toriyama himself. We scrambled to translate it and get it out there before it was overtaken by rumors. Traffic skyrocketed. The site crashed at least once. Little did we know that this was just a taste of what was to come.

By the weekend, the cat was already out of the bag, and so the official reveal passed without much fanfare. Still, the surge of interest from overseas was enough for Toei Animation themselves to put out an official English version of their website a few weeks later, just to appease the masses. But just a few days after the initial movie announcement, comments by the film’s scriptwriter and publicity director added fuel to the fire, confirming that the movie would take place in the “blank decade” spanned by chapter 517, and that it was a part of the franchise’s “official history.” The atmosphere was electric. We all scrutinized their words, picking apart the official press release and the scriptwriter’s Twitter posts, trying to find some hidden insight.

A teaser trailer, revealed at Saikyo V-Jump Festa and soon added to the official site, gave us one more thing to analyze frame-by-frame, even as we were pretty sure it wouldn’t have anything to do with the finished product. But wait! Do those rocks mean something? What about dodgy CG Goku? What is he looking at over there?! The potential meaning in its minutiae was as tantalizing as it was irrelevant.

The fandom worldwide was awash in speculation and rumor. We stood in the middle, trying to keep things on an even keel with accurate information, even as we tried to contain our own enthusiasm. But for the time being, we would have to wait: we were at the beginning of a long information drought. There was a trickle of tidbits here and there: the film would be receiving funding from the Japanese government for its promotion abroad; the art director, in charge of the backgrounds and other animated scenery, was announced. But that was it for three agonizing months. Naturally, the fandom rushed to fill in the gap. “Could Broli be appearing again?! Please say it’ll be Broli! His power is MAXIMUM!!” cried one half of the fandom, even as the other half desperately pleaded, “ANYTHING but Broli! Besides, he wasn’t created by Toriyama!” On it went.

In early November, the drought finally broke, and we got our first tease of new info: images of tie-in figures for the new movie, including the Pilaf gang! “Wait, PILAF?!” cried the Broli fans in confusion, though it threw pretty much everyone for a loop. A poster was then leaked to the Internet, sporting a title in both Japanese and English. What did this “Battle of Gods” mean? Who were the “gods” in question? Was that lady with the staff the fabled “Makaioshin” from the Super Exciting Guide books? Was that purple cat-rabbit-thing her lackey? The possibilities were endless.

Within a few days, we had confirmation of both the poster and the title, and before the month was out, our first piece of official merchandise (a limited-edition “Collaboration Ticket” with One Piece Film: Z, dutifully purchased at the crack of dawn on a rainy Labor Thanksgiving holiday), and also our first proper glimpse of the new characters, God of Destruction “Birusu” (not the “lackey,” apparently) and “Uisu” (voiced by Masakazu Morita, so not a woman). Who were these mysterious new individuals? And more importantly, how the heck did you spell their names in English? Our attempt to confirm alcohol-based puns (as “Pilsner” and “Whiskey”) with the scriptwriter on Twitter was met with the coy reply that “That’s not the source~” while almost the entirety of the Anglophone fandom leapt on the spellings “Bills” and “Wiss” because…well, we really have no idea.

Once December hit, the trickle of news became a steady stream. The movie’s storyline was discovered by Heath on a randomly-guessed, unlinked URL on the official site, then reported across the internet as “officially revealed” (which it wouldn’t be for over a week afterward). FLOW were announced to be doing the movie’s theme, a cover of Hironobu Kageyama’s “CHA-LA HEAD-CHA-LA.” A trailer was premiered, ominous and action-y, and setting the fandom alight once more with the fires of speculation...and also heated arguments over the meaning of Gohan’s hair color. We thought we had things pretty well under control, but we had barely dipped our feet into the abyss.

After that, the stream of news turned into a deluge. It really is a blur after that point. Is that Vegeta with a stupid grin on his face? Are the Pilaf gang children?! Is that Buu setting the God of Destruction off over pudding? What’s this whole “Super Saiyan God” business, anyway…? We were working a 24-hour news cycle, picking up where each other had left off, using whatever spare moments we could muster in between jobs, new babies, sleep, and other elements of this “life” business. It was enough for us to stay afloat, but only barely.

The barrage continued. New products were announced, as were new tie-ins. I bought things at Lawson for the sake of Dragon Bowls, and ate more KFC than is reasonably healthy for the sake of glow-in-the dark Dragon Bottles. Books came out by what seemed like the score. Hey, is that the manga in full color? Oh, and it’s available digitally, too? Wait, did they just say they’re going to re-release the Daizenshuu?! Good thing I could at least lighten the load in my wallet as everything else piled on.

There were magazines, too. The official site had a page keeping track of “media exposure,” and every new article was subtly different, introducing new tidbits about the film that had not been revealed elsewhere. Turns out that Battle of Gods was a much different film from where it began, and the scriptwriter was mostly in name only after Toriyama came on board. More importantly, the name puns of Beerus and Whis (as we had come to call them) actually were alcohol-based…with a catch. The more we learned, the more there seemed to be to find out, and the translation backlog grew and grew. Even Akira Toriyama, not normally known as the most outgoing of creators, had his own media blitz, with interviews in what seemed like every publication around. Some information from the author’s mouth is nice, once in a while, but really…once it reached a certain point, we were starting to hope he’d clam back up for a while.

Somewhere in there, I even found the time to go to Tokyo and audition for a special Dragon Ball edition of the show HokoTate alongside fellow forum-members Kei17 and Peking Duck. Kei and I didn’t make it in, but we were able to cheer on Peking Duck and the other contestants as they went head-to-head with actual Shueisha and Toei staffers over Dragon Ball trivia, and I even got three seconds of exposure on national TV in there. Not bad, all things considered.

Amidst all this, we had some unsavory encounters with a new beast in the age of social media: the realm of zero effort and zero scruples known as clickbait. Sites ostensibly run by other fans would repost translations verbatim, but the surrounding context would somehow be misreported in the process. I seriously considered taking my ball of translations and going home, just to spite them.

More puzzling, but no less vexing, was the variety I’ll call the “Toxic YouTuber.” With rumors flying left and right, these enterprising folks would take to videos that “CONFIRMED!” whatever the latest speculation was, no matter how it contradicted the previous round of hearsay. Golden Super Saiyan 4? Super Saiyan 3 Vegeta? Broli returns?! Sequel greenlighted before the movie even came out? Sure, why not?!

In the hands of such self-interested and self-serving “fans,” posts to DeviantArt became “official” overnight, and the fevered imaginations of 12-year-olds everywhere were entirely validated…all for the sake of views, of course. If you listened closely to the actual videos, they would mention (in passing) that the rumors were “not yet 100% confirmed,” not that they were ever close to being factual in the first place. One particular “channel” was so persistent that he actually posted up a “review” of the film based on such fan predictions, trying to cover up the fact that he hadn’t actually seen the thing. It was probably even believable to those who hadn’t been paying close attention to all the reveals we’d gotten in the lead-up to the film. The high comedy-to-action quotient took a lot of people by surprise, none more so than those who’d been living in the alternate reality supplied by the Toxic YouTuber.

Back in the real world, Kei17 (who was becoming something of a “fifth Kanzenshuu-er,” by this point) managed to finagle his way into two different preview screenings in Tokyo. Thanks to his amazing memory, we now had a full plot synopsis at our fingertips, which only needed to be posted on opening day. All we had left to do was to wait...

Finally, it was March 30th. Once again, I was up before dawn to get to the movie theater in Tennoji for the first showing. I was not alone. Adults, young couples, and parents with children were all waiting to be among the first to see the movie. We all congregated around the entrance, until finally we were let up to the doors to the auditorium proper. Bonus “Dragon Ballpoint pens” and Dragon Ball Heroes cards were handed out. One of the parents threw a minor tantrum because his precious snowflake was overlooked for said card. And then, at long last, we were let in, the screen lit up, and...bliss. While I had been spoiled about the plot, seeing it firsthand was a complete breath of fresh air. Whatever reservations I might have had about the animation or the plot were lost in the completely natural dialogue and comedic beats. It was classic Toriyama.

After that, things relaxed somewhat. It didn’t truly end; there were still new book releases, and then the home release, an extended version, and the eventual international premiere. And magazine articles. I’m still not done with those. And now we’re on the cusp of doing it all over again. But whatever the aggravation, the sleepless nights, the “donations” to clickbait sites making money off our work, I know that with my fellow Kanzenshuu-ers, we’ll get through it. And we’ll have fun the whole way.

Kanzenshuu Fun Fact

Kanzenshuu wasn’t supposed to debut until December 2012, complete with a wiki, when I jokingly suggested that we bring the date forward in order to pull a pretend April Fool’s prank. We all pulled long hours getting it ready in time, but in hindsight, it was more than worth it: we wouldn’t have survived the news onslaught without the pooled resources and modern backend the new site provided. And to think we were only prepared for the sake of a gag. Toriyama would be proud.

JULIAN (“SaiyaJedi”) is one of the translators for Kanzenshuu. He lives with his family in Japan.

U.S. Theatrics

The “Battle of Gods” North American Premiere

Josh covers the red carpet theatrical premiere of the film “Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods” in Los Angeles in July 2014.

By Josh Christopher

2014 was huge for Dragon Ball! A lot of stuff, both awesome and awful, happened this year in regards to our favorite space people. One of the biggest events of all was the red carpet premiere of Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods in the US!

It wasn’t enough that Dragon Ball got its own limited theatrical run for the very first time in a long while, but this movie wasn’t just any ordinary Dragon Ball flick: this was the first original Dragon Ball feature film since the ‘90s and it’s the first made-for-theaters Dragon Ball Z release that was dubbed by FUNimation’s DBZ cast!

At the premiere event in Los Angeles, we got to see a lot of celebrities from both movies and television make their way across the red carpet on their way to go see (of all things) a new DBZ movie! Of course, for the Dragon Ball fans on hand, the real stars were guys like Sean Schemmel and the ever-friendly Chris Sabat, who never even dreamed that a day like this would come when they started recording Dragon Ball Z on the cheap back in the late 1990s at FUNimation HQ in Ft. Worth, Texas.

Fans were in the same boat as him, too, many of whom were cosplaying as their favorite characters, electrifying the theater with so much energy that it would destroy even a new model scouter! The event may have only been for one day, but time seemed to slow down for us as the movie finally started. You could’ve sworn that a year had passed inside the screening rooms.

After the event, fans and press alike were invited to a nearby bowling alley and tavern for a few drinks and to chat it up with each other or with cast, crew, and other FUNimation employees such as Justin Rojas, who was gracious enough to let Kanzenshuu send us as representatives to the event to capture everything for its readers, listeners, and forum members.

With an event like the Battle of Gods premiere in LA during the weekend of Anime Expo, 2014 is destined to go down in history as a huge year for Dragon Ball Z fans in the US!

JOSH (“Kendamu”) produces videos on YouTube, enjoys training in martial arts, and hangs out at Kanzenshuu. Check out some of his work, including video coverage from the Battle of Gods premiere, at: youtube.com/BGPawesome

Battle Review

How does “Battle of Gods” actually stack up for fans?

By Chris Niosi

The Dragon Ball franchise is one of those “special” cases in it that it has many different types of fans—with very different tastes—depending on how they grew up with the series and in what country. With that in mind, it’s safe to say that Battle of Gods is a product where all fans have a reason to be excited like never before. Through video games, merchandise, remastered home releases and even the presence of Kai there’s nothing that tops a full-length feature film…except maybe a feature film with direct involvement by Dragon Ball’s original manga artist and author, Akira Toriyama.

Battle of Gods takes place at a perfect period of time in the DBZ timeline: just after Majin Buu was defeated but before the final timeskip that leads to the finale of the story in the manga…and of course, before GT occurred. Seeing that the “Z” era was clearly the most successful piece of the franchise worldwide, Toei made a brilliant decision in where to chronologically place the events of this movie. This placement allowed Toriyama to treat the story of Battle of Gods as if it were continuing where the manga would have “left off” had he not ended the series in the mid-‘90s. The overall feel and theme of the movie retains that signature mix of being able to take itself just seriously enough, but not to the point where Toriyama’s expected sense of humor is lost.

The biggest piece of evidence on this is our new “enemy,” Beerus. He not only continues the tradition of Goku and his friends meeting progressively-stronger and more-challenging opponents; in this case Beerus is a God of Destruction, and Beerus being originally based on Toriyama’s housecat speaks volumes. He, along with his classy assistant Whis, fits right in with the rest of the cast, yet still adds a fresh and interesting dynamic. Not to mention, some of their comedic moments are major highlights of the film. They’re not alone though; the regular cast of the series—the Z-Fighters included—get some amazing gags showing sides of our heroes we’ve never seen before…including Goku doing an impression of Vegeta and Vegeta himself singing a song about bingo to calm Beerus’ nerves to prevent Earth’s imminent erasure.

The most satisfying thing about the movie overall is the handling of Goku’s new “Super Saiyan God” transformation sequence. This concept, which, along with the God of Destruction, were the original ideas set in place for the movie’s creation, could have been easily done in all of the worst possible ways. In past DBZ movies produced by Toei we’ve had new “transformations” for various villain characters and the like…and with how DBZ’s fandom in America has grown in particular, it’d be easy to assume that this new form could be the closest thing to a stereotypical “Super Saiyan Insert Number Higher Than 4 Here” sort of thing. Quite the opposite occurred. Goku achieves this new form through a very clever (and cute!) method, and upon facing off against Beerus in the big fight scene the audience hypes themselves for the entire experience, Goku has the most perfectly, well, “Goku” kind of reaction imaginable. Obtaining the power of a God disappoints and aggravates him, in line with his perpetual desire of wanting to become stronger by his own hard work and not through the assistance of others.

Despite all this, the movie’s namesake ends in a way you’d probably expect, but not at all in a bad way. As it’s been recently revealed, another new DBZ movie, this time written and conceptualized entirely by Toriyama himself, will be hitting Japanese theaters during Golden Week of 2015. Battle of Gods gives longtime fans of all kinds a fantastic and fun new story with all of their old friends, but yet again, in true Dragon Ball style, leaves things open for more…things bigger and better. That’s exactly what it sounds like we’re going to get in the years to come and Battle of Gods is a great start to a whole new universe worth of DBZ-related excitement to be had. If you grew up with the series in any capacity, do yourself a favor and check it out.

CHRIS (“Kirbopher”) is a professional voice actor & long-time fan. Watch “TOME” and “Did You Know Voice Acting?” at: youtube.com/Kirbopher15

Super Saiyan God

Skinny with red hair…but that was not the original plan

By Sean Gallagher

Any attentive Dragon Ball fan should be familiar with “Super Saiyan God” by now. Introduced and used by Son Goku in 2013’s Battle of Gods film, it was certainly a departure from the norm as far as new “power-ups” for the characters go. Achieved by a multi-person ritual rather than training, dependent upon righteous character rather than rage, and even making use of a different quality of ki than what’s normally used, it was unlike anything fans were expecting.

Perhaps the greatest surprise was the form’s appearance. Instead of building upon the exaggerated and flamboyant looks of the original comic’s three Super Saiyan levels, or the animation-only Super Saiyan 4, the Super Saiyan God form went in a totally different direction. It was intentionally designed to appear less visibly “flashy” than its predecessors. Super Saiyan God Goku mostly still resembled his normal un-transformed state, save only for a hair and eye color change from black to red, and becoming even skinnier than usual. This “less is more” design, we eventually learned, was the work of franchise creator and original author Akira Toriyama, who was heavily involved in the film’s production.

What fewer Dragon Ball fans may be aware of is that, before Toriyama gave it his magic touch, Super Saiyan God was quite different in its earliest prototype stages. Tadayoshi Yamamuro, the animation supervisor for Battle of Gods and quite a handful of other animated Dragon Ball works before it, originally envisioned a design quite different from the final one by Toriyama.

Information on this early design is scarce, but a few interviews with Yamamuro himself have revealed bits and pieces about it. He described a few key traits: bulky and muscular, a hairstyle “between Super Saiyan 3 and 4,” and—finally and bizarrely—a cape. There’s really not much else to go by, aside from the assumption that Toriyama’s use of the “strong looking color” red wasn’t originally part of Yamamuro’s version. If we put it all together, and inject a little creativity, we can come up with something that doesn’t look too shabby, if not a bit less “unique” than the final Toriyama-crafted design.

SEAN (“Kaboom”) can be found hanging out at Kanzenshuu. He doesn’t like to wander too far.

The Excitement!

The announcement for a new movie in 2015 = insanity

By Lauren Costantini

I was stunned. I had taken Beerus going back to sleep for three years to mean we wouldn’t see another film until 2016. And yet here we are! New Dragon Ball movie in May 2015! Sequel to Battle of Gods! With reportedly even more action! My biggest excitement so far came from the mention that this new movie’s story has the approval of Toriyama’s notoriously hard-to-please former editor, Kazuhiko Torishima. My hopes are high.

Riding the waves of leaks and official news is fun because it places you in a position to play detective. V-Jump’s website has become a go-to place for updates—with two Dragon Ball games in arcades and no manga running in Weekly Jump, it’s understandable why Shueisha uses V-Jump as their DB movie news vehicle—so I find myself checking their site the week leading up to the magazine’s monthly release date to see their “Next Info” page with mini-previews.

Recent hints include listings on the Shonen Jump website of five untitled DXF tie-in figures to be released over the course of next spring. There were four of these released with Battle of Gods (Goku, Vegeta, Beerus, & Whis). If you theorize two of DB15’s will once again be Goku and Vegeta, could this mean there are three antagonists this time? Or perhaps a new hero character who ties into the plot plus two bad guys? There’s also a Master Stars figure on the way in June related to the movie (Battle of Gods didn’t even have one of those); will that be a Super Saiyan God Goku figure, or one of the big bad?

I can’t wait until DB15’s title and poster are revealed and we begin deciphering the meaning behind it all. I fondly recall the speculation about who Whis was; is he a Makaioshin, is he good, is he evil, is he even a he? And if he was a Makaioshin, was he some sort of puppet-master feeding Beerus false information? And what of Beerus, whose accidental-dual-name-pun spelling was an even more hotly debated topic than if he was a cat or a rabbit (those ears)? If you were on Kanzenshuu’s forum for Battle of Gods speculation, you probably remember “Bills,” not to mention Gohan’s hair. Things like that photo of what turned out to be likely a prototype of Super Saiyan God Goku on a door at Toei Animation and the use of blocked-out artwork near the tail end of the pre-release (which hinted at the appearance of the second “kami” mentioned in the film’s title) fueled the big Battle of Gods thread on the forum.

Taglines can be even more interesting to examine. Battle of Gods’ “A God of Destruction who Violates the Common Sense of ‘Z’ Descends!!” was fascinating. It set off all kinds of thoughts on Beerus being a reality-warper. I connected that to the reveal of the tie-in WCF mini-figures of irritated green Pilaf and eerily-cheerful Vegeta to a theory that Beerus had body-swapped Pilaf and Piccolo and cast a spell on Vegeta for being a grump. None of that came true of course; Pilaf was green because they were going off of coloring Toriyama had used in his character designs and Vegeta’s false cheerfulness did end up in official Toei character art, but whatever scene it went with—most likely him trying to keep Beerus content—never made it to the final cut. Exercising your imagination as you try to piece together the mystery of “What’s this movie about?” while conversing about it on forums, exchanging theories with other members...it’s something that can almost-only happen on the journey to a theatrical release.

DB15 continues after Battle of Gods left off, but how long after? A few days or more like a few years? Will Beerus and Whis return? Will Goku learn more about his new god-powers and will we even see his god form again? Has Super Saiyan 2 and 3 been retired by Toriyama, and will this hold true? Will DB15 be “The Vegeta Movie” as hinted at by comments made prior to the film’s announcement? Will we get to visit any of those other universes Beerus mentioned near the end of Battle of Gods?

It’s been so long since we’ve had this much fresh Dragon Ball plot from the author; this feels like the closest you can get to what I imagine theorizing on the manga’s plotline during serialization must have felt like. Since November 2012’s V-Jump was the issue that revealed the title and poster for Battle of Gods, I’ve put my hopes behind this November’s issue for the next big DB15 reveal. And if it’s not there, there’s always Jump Festa!

LAUREN (“Chuquita”) enjoys drawing and can be found hanging out at Kanzenshuu.

Homages in U.S. Television

Gintama, Bo-bobo…Sure, lots of Japanese series pay homage to Dragon Ball, but in the U.S.?

By Mike LaBrie

It can be a little difficult these days to remember what it was like when Dragon Ball Z episodes were airing for the first time on Cartoon Network in North America. Walking through the mall you would be hit with merchandise all over the place before stumbling onto the Score collectible card game Hummer Tour featuring English voice actors. It was absolutely massive for quite a few years! While Dragon Ball clearly influenced Japanese creators, the series’ influence started to make its way to creative and production staff on American shows as well. Here are just a few of the significant homages we’ve been treated to.

THE GRIM ADVENTURES OF BILLY & MANDY - “CHICKEN BALL Z” (Season 2, Episode 9B)

·         Originally Aired: 15 August 2003

·         Summary: Mandy enters a tournament in hopes of its $50,000 grand prize. An ancient “Chicken Ball” from shopkeeper Kuan Ti allows her to become a great fighter, which in turn causes her to abandon her dreams of the cash prize and simply aim to become the greatest combatant. It turns out Kuan Ti was Eris in disguise causing chaos. Grim turns Billy into a hero as well, and they fight until the arena is destroyed. Mandy still wants the prize, though.

·         Other notes: Released shortly after the peak of Dragon Ball Z’s popularity on Cartoon Network, it’s no surprise to see one of the channel’s own shows bring in the clear homages. Very funny, and very well worth watching.

CODENAME: KIDS NEXT DOOR - “OPERATION: R.E.P.O.R.T.” (Season 2, Episode 9A)

·         Originally Aired: 05 December 2003

·         Summary: A task to retrieve “the goods” is interrupted by the “Devious Villains From the Consortium of Crime.” Each sequence follows another KND Sector and their ultimate mission failure, each animated in a different style. It turns out “the goods” was a pizza.

·         Other notes: Similar to Billy and Mandy, this was released while hype for DBZ was still massive. The parodies are obvious with “Numbuh 4” (Wallabee) being Goku, the Super Saiyan hair, gigantic Super Saiyan 3 hair, the villains taking on variations of Freeza’s forms, and claims about needing to use their “full power” to win.

ROBOT CHICKEN - “ROBOT CHICKEN CHRISTMAS SPECIAL” (Season 2)

·         Originally Aired: 22 December 2005

·         Summary: Three legendary kung-fu masters are on a rampage up at the North Pole (including the little drummer boy, a DB-esque character who conjures villains by playing his drums). Santa recruits Goku to help battle the villains, but it turns out that the ultimate foe plotting behind the scenes is someone Santa knows all too well.

·         Other notes: The sequence’s random turn into an Akira parody sells it, with Goku teaming up with Rudolph to fight the overgrown monster. We also got the great (nonsensical) line: “The Tenka’ichi Budokai is finally complete!”

SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE - HOST: ALEC BALDWIN (Season 32, Episode 5)

·         Originally Aired: 11 November 2006

·         Summary: The animated TV Funhouse segment tells the story of Japanese competitive eater Takeru Kobayashi as he saves the day. Villains set houses on fire and create a flood, so it’s up to Kobayashi to rescue the women and children and teach them valuable lessons along the way...about eating hotdogs.

·         Other notes: FUNimation’s subtitle style is matched, while some of the Faulconer Productions replacement score is occasionally intermixed with the footage. The ending theme is a musically-accurate parody of DBZ Movie 13’s original Japanese closing theme (“Ore ga Yaranakya Dare ga Yaru”) complete with some of the same lines (such as “passion” right before the final “Kobayashi!”). Someone on the production staff was clearly a huge fan.

TONS OF OTHER REFERENCES ON TV

These four shows are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Dragon Ball homages in American television. They are the most obvious ones, but there are plenty other one-liners and subtle nods here and there across a wealth of other shows.

A Fairly OddParents movie contains a few cameos, while Andrew equates himself to Vegeta (with the whole “reformed” thing) in the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

MIKE (“VegettoEX”) is one of the co-founders of Kanzenshuu. He enjoys documenting Dragon Ball’s influence on authors and creators across the world. He also still likes poop jokes.

The Rise and Fall of an Era…and the Rise Again: Dragon Ball Fansites

Wuken. JKwok44. SREDBZ. Carddass. Daimao. Ramza. UltimateDBZInfo. Meri. VegettoEX. MrE. CastorTroy. SkitzZero. Do these names a ring a bell? You experienced what many consider the “Golden Age” of DBZ websites. How about today?

By Ryan Molina

It was the year 1998. Dragon Ball Z had just started its run on Cartoon Network after failing to become a hit in regular syndication. Its fame and popularity on Cartoon Network led to a rise in the fandom with folks who wanted to express their love for the series by making websites. Popular sites like Suushinchuu, DBZ Uncensored, and VegettoEX’s Home Page were the so-called standards of what a “good” DBZ site was back in the day.

DBZ fansites usually had news, character bios, a series synopsis, episode guides, etc...but the heart of each and every website was its owner. Each webmaster had their own take on what their love for the series was like, so much in fact that the draw of the websites was starting to become the webmaster instead of the regular content on the site. Names like Wuken, Chris Psaros, and VegettoEX seemed as well known as the series itself as these webmasters injected their own personalities into their sites with both jokes and serious discussion.

However, the fandom was divided between the people who had only seen DBZ on Cartoon Network (known as “dubbies”) and people who had seen the original Japanese version from its original broadcast or fansubs. Terms and spellings constantly clashed from “Special Beam Cannon” vs. “Makankosappo,” “Tien” vs. “Tenshinhan,” etc. You could easily tell the webmaster’s alliance based on their spellings alone. Back in the day, using “dubbie” terms was a big no-no and younger webmasters took quite a bit of flak for it. Debates and “wars” erupted between the dubbies and Japanese fans saying “You’re not a true fan if you haven’t seen the original Japanese DBZ!” or “Goku’s voice sounds like a girl in Japanese!”

In the fall of 1998, which was my senior year in high school, I had wanted to get into the DBZ website gig in order to express my own love for the series. Looking up to sites like DBZ Uncensored and VegettoEX’s Home Page, I wanted to create something unique rather than trying to copy every other site posting the same episode guides based on the dub airings. Before we had fancy WordPress templates and YouTube, we had to either write out our pages with HTML or use a drag-and-drop editor like Dreamweaver. After two previous failures, I had a random spurt of inspiration and created Vegeta Insane, a humor site based around Vegeta; DBZ humor-dedicated sites didn’t exactly exist back in 1998. After completing Vegeta Insane in five days, I sent the link out to various webmasters to see if they would link it on their own sites. I was lucky in that the majority of the sites I sent to linked me back on their sites, thus starting my road to DBZ Internet fame which would change my life forever.

About six months into the DBZ website fandom in 1999, I began to notice that there were “tiers” of DBZ websites where people classified the most popular sites as the “elites.” DBZ Uncensored, VegettoEX’s Home Page, Temple O’ Trunks, and the newcomer Planet Namek were the clear leaders. The “2nd” level of DBZ sites were generally well-designed (nice looking Photoshopped images and table-based layouts), but incredibly bland with the same information, movie clips, episode summaries, character bios, etc. Most people didn’t seem to even know about these sites; I would get quite a lot of them as link submissions, but I couldn’t find anything unique in them to consider linking them from my own site. The bottom tier websites were all the Geocities, Tripod, Homestead, Angelfire, and other assorted free-hosted sites which weren’t exactly done well, but occasionally had a bit more heart than the “2nd” level sites. You could easily tell the webmasters of the bottom tier sites were dedicated to getting their names out there, but didn’t have the technical skill of the upper level folks. At the time, I felt incredibly proud to be considered among the “elite” and was happy my material had found a massive audience. It was kind of like waking up as a quasi-celebrity every morning.

Because of the massive curiosity and awareness that was spearheaded by these websites, more fans wanted to check out the Japanese version. Fansub distributors like Ctenosaur, DBGoten, Solidflux, and others began to make their own websites for the purposes of selling and distributing DBZ fansub tapes of the series and movies. Many of us were frequent customers of these fansub distributors. I even received several free tapes from distributors who were fans of my site!

The rise of the “full episode” sites like Super5—which contained poorly encoded and choppy RealMedia files of full episodes—also began to emerge around this time. These sites would be the first target of FUNimation’s on-going legal battle against illegal distribution of the series.

At this point in time, there were not large, “official” DBZ sites from Toei themselves and the FUNimation site only had basic synopses of the first 53 dubbed episodes and the first three movies. There were very few sites that actually covered every part of the series in detail, and so information slowly made its way online courtesy of fans with their subtitles tapes and guide books.

Out of all new sites, Planet Namek was quickly rising up to the top spot because it was the fastest site to gather DBZ news, had a massive clip archive from fansubs, and even ran its own fansub distribution for a little while. Several sites like my own eventually moved over to Planet Namek due to its dedicated hosting and it taking the top spot of being the most popular DBZ site on the web.

2000-2001 was the peak of DBZ’s popularity with the success of Seasons 3 and 4 on Cartoon Network. DBZ was #1 on the search engines, beating out Britney Spears and Pokemon. Planet Namek was doing 30,000 hits per day, while even I was pulling a modest 6,000 per day, peaking at 10,000. More people were becoming fans every day and were also starting new websites every day with the same information, character bios, episode lists, etc. I was still running strong by continuing to dedicate my site to comedy, although I had changed my site’s name from Vegeta Insane to Ginga GIRI GIRI.

FUNimation themselves had also began reaching out to DBZ webmasters to promote their work. I was contacted by several FUNimation voice actors and employees to help spread the word about events, signings, conventions, etc. and received admirable praise (along with a few goodies) from the actual company itself.

The releases of the bilingual DVDs were beginning to shorten the gap between the “dubbies” and the Japanese fans since now everybody had access to the original Japanese version. It seemed like DBZ on the web was ushering in a new Golden Age.

At this point, I felt like I was at the top of my game. My mindset was that if you were to measure my power level with a scouter, it would probably explode. I didn’t realize it was all going to come crashing down very soon.

With the increasing popularity of DBZ also came increasing problems online. The dot com bubble burst in March 2000, leaving advertisers to completely shut down their services and many DBZ websites unable to pay for their expensive hosting fees, along with many hosts fleeing the scene altogether.

Hosting fees got so expensive to the point where Planet Namek had to get rid of my site, forcing me to find hosting elsewhere. My situation got so bad to the point where a friend of mine knew a host and asked him if he could host my site…though that host was never heard from again. This was a common occurrence.

I jumped from host to host, only to be kicked off for excessive bandwidth consumption each and every time. Some people started a joke petition to prevent me from killing servers!

My site partner, Dr. Bond, and I eventually found a dedicated server that we were paying for out of our own pocket and we were hoping that all of our hosting problems would be put to rest. DBZ was already at Season 5 at this point with no plans of slowing down. In 2002, the fateful day happened again when I came home from class: I saw a “Bandwidth Limit” exceeded on my site which I was all too familiar with. We did everything to keep bandwidth down, but the massive popularity of DBZ was too much for even our $300 a month “dedicated” server. After getting incredibly sick of bandwidth problems and losing motivation to update the site because of them, it was finally time for me to call it quits and close Vegeta Insane/Ginga GIRI GIRI.

After my departure in 2002, while I stopped paying attention to the DBZ web, I never stopped being a fan of the series and still continued to collect the DVDs as they were coming out. I was surprised one morning in 2003 that Daizenshuu EX had come back and with the end of DBZ approaching on Cartoon Network, the U.S. fandom quietly died down. Many fansub and full episode sites had closed their doors long ago because of the DVD releases, many fans were already growing up and were moving on to other things, and the DBZ web had become a shadow of its former self.

However, 2003 marked a new revival of the DBZ franchise starting with the Dragon Boxes, which was the first time the series had a legitimate release in its home country of Japan. Just when things were quieting down in the US, things in Japan started rising again. The manga had seen a re-release as the kanzenban and several new guide books were made, giving us information that was completely unavailable before. Daizenshuu EX was the #1 source that constantly kept up with it on a daily basis, even with a much smaller DBZ web community. With barely any competition, it wasn’t too long until Daizenshuu EX had finally taken the rightful spot as the #1 DBZ fansite.

Years later, in 2006, I was invited to be a guest on the Daizenshuu EX podcast and slowly began checking out what had become of the DBZ web. The days of Planet Namek were long gone and DBZ had been over in the US for a few years. The series was still going strong with its DVD releases and the recent revival in Japan. During this time, I had discovered Kanzentai and told myself: “This is the site that I wish existed back in the day.”

The DBZ web had shrunk down to a more village-like atmosphere with Daizenshuu EX and Kanzentai being the leaders in place of Planet Namek. I felt the smaller atmosphere made it much easier to come back to, along with the fact that I was much older which made me appreciate it more than I did when I was younger. There was no longer any desire for me to achieve fame and I could enjoy things from the sidelines. I eventually brought back Ginga GIRI GIRI in 2010 as Ginga GIRI GIRI Kai, but more as an archive of my old and new work without having to worry about bandwidth problems, since I was paying for it out of my own pocket now.

Today, Daizenshuu EX and Kanzentai have merged into Kanzenshuu and it is still the #1 DBZ fansite going strong with over 300 podcast episodes, constantly updated news, accurate translations from the guide books, never-before-seen material, and much more. Planet Namek at its peak didn’t even contain 1/5th of the information Kanzenshuu has available.

As a longtime observer and participant in the fandom for over a decade, I’m happy to see that DBZ is still going strong with the fans who are still expressing their love for the series via sites, YouTube videos, etc.

With Kai, games (especially Dragon Ball Heroes), and the upcoming movie, it looks like DBZ on the web is going strong, even with a much smaller community. That passion and heart from the older sites can still be felt. Those fans who grew up with the series have families of their own; when I re-opened Ginga GIRI GIRI Kai, I spoke with Dr. Bond for the first time in years only to find that he had already gotten married and started showing his kids the series!

While a lot has changed, it’s great to know that the fandom is as strong as ever and DBZ on the web is here to stay.

RYAN ran “Vegeta Insane / Ginga GIRI GIRI” and now produces videos as a part of Battle Geek Plus.

Thank You

Thank you for celebrating Dragon Ball’s 30th anniversary with us!

We hope you have enjoyed reading these memories, articles, reviews, and critiques as much as we enjoyed putting them together for you.

Dragon Ball is such a magical series and it is our deepest hope that a bit of that magic has shown through in this magazine.

Thanks you to all of the authors and contributors for making this magazine happen, thank you for reading it, thank you to everyone who has ever worked on the Dragon Ball series in any capacity...

And thank you to Akira Toriyama! Here’s to another thirty years with your masterpiece!

- Mike, Julian, Heath, Jake (www.kanzenshuu.com)

Table of Contents

DB 30 Years

The Biggest Fight

Super Dragon Ball Z

Look to the (Jump) Stars

10 Years: Budokai 3

A Game Not Forgotten

The Tale of Publication Dates

The Big Review

Cover Project

Tale of the One-Shots

Dr. Dragon Slump

Dragon Ball in Jump

Discovering DBZ

Memories of…DBZ

Get That Dream Job!

The Dragon Ball Series: Dividing it Up

Continuous Evolution: Viz Manga

Dragon Ball Heroes: Victory Mission

Who is Bardock?

Episode of Bardock: All the Copies

ドラゴンボール グッズの歴史

History of Dragon Ball Merchandise

Dragon Ball Fandom: A Personal Introspective

Animazement

Con Prizes + EXP

Neo-Shonen

鳥山ワールド

Toriyama World

The Essence of Son Goku

Crossover Madness: Cross Epoch

You Don’t Forget Your First Love

In the Mood for a Melody

The Inevitability of Filler

Homages…in Filler?! Journey West!

Dragon Ball Theology

The Unexpected Dragon Ball Prequel

Jaco: One Last Look

Dragon Ball Z Fandom in Ye Olden Days

Covering Battle of Gods

U.S. Theatrics

Battle Review

Super Saiyan God

The Excitement!

Homages in U.S. Television

The Rise and Fall of an Era…and the Rise Again: Dragon Ball Fansites

Thank You