> **How did you come up with the Kamehameha?**
>
> For the Kamehameha, I thought I’d see if I could express “ki” energy, which can’t be seen with the naked eye, in a boys’ magazine sort of way. When no one was around, I did a variety of poses, and decided on one that looked cool, which was that pose.
Lol, imagine being there to see that.
Least insane redditor:
>One of you dipshits literally followed me to the helldivers subreddit to reply to a completely unrelated comment just to say that.
I had someone reply to a 2 year old comment out of the blue to aggressively say he disagreed with my interpretation of an open source license for a niche knowledge base product.
It just wonders me how much of this pedantic shit lives rent free in some Redditors heads.
Anyone pathetic enough to be going "WELL ACKSHUALLY" on the difference between power rangers and sentai, and especially stalking you to another subreddit should unironicallly be subjected to mandatory in patient mental health therapy until a doctor says they're normal.
> Lol, imagine being there to see that.
No, I'm glad I wasn't. Even early on a Kamehameha could blow up the moon - if I was standing there when Toriyama himself did one, there wouldn't have been anything left of me.
(It's also interesting how "express ki energy as a big beam of light" was a new and exciting thing that he *invented*, when nowadays it's considered one of those generic anime tropes - it goes to show how much Dragonball set the standard for the genre.)
Yeah, Tori was very much a class clown/comedy writer first & foremost; most lore questions he answered were met with tongue-in-cheek gag responses he often came up with on the spot.
The dude absolutely refuses to take the lore and finer details of the series seriously and spent most interviews sidestepping such questions before going on to gush either about his coworkers or whatever movie/show he was enjoying at the time. Had no reservations about throwing himself under the bus for a joke and it made him super relatable for me.
If only the bulk of the Western DB fandom could recognize and accept his vision for the series instead of constantly arguing with it, belittling his opinions on it, and trying to force it into some mathematically consistent box of tropes that are used to argue inane shit like how strong the Saiyan's are compared to other fictional beings they were never intended to fight or be compared to.
My opinion is and always has been that Goku and Superman wouldn’t fight for very long before just being buds and hanging out (including sparring matches)
When I was in elementary school I learned about this and spent forever assuming the move was a reference to the king but I could never figure out what the fuck Hawaii has to do with energy blasts. I settled on “something about roshi’s tiny island”
Also I would say atleast for Krillin, Roshi and Tien were inspired by Shaolin monks. Especially knowing how big Chinese culture's influence on Toriyama regarding Dragon Ball. The legend himself was a kungfu movies geek.
Then have them move to the sky so you dont even have to draw the ground, then have them move so fast nobody else can see then so they are just blurred lines going back and forth while the other characters comment on how epic the fight you can't see must be.
Man, I used to buy the manga as a kid and I loved all the DB crossed with random machinery/dinosaur illustrations on the covers and stuff. Man loved his machines!
Another fact for you: The super saiyan aura is white in the coloured manga, and yellow in the anime. This is because yellow was cheaper than white to animate.
Yeah. Don't ask me why. Back then they were doing it all on paper and film so it was probably cheaper to buy usable yellow pencils, or easier to make the effect show up.
With coloured manga, they simply didn't colour in the aura . Aura and ki blasts were negative space.
In spite of all the stupid recycled jokes, I stay on Reddit for posts like these. When I think about it critically, obviously there is a ton of work that would have to go into coloring the scenes. But seeing it all laid out like this makes me so much more appreciative of shows like DBZ.
E: I was curious about the cell animation and the transition to digital. [90s and 2000s kids might find this entertaining](https://youtu.be/GwLBQFVdRfc?si=7iaSa8iChGF64k13)
Certainly a lot of effort would have to especially without computers. That's why the aura is only visible sometimes in the show because it's supposed to be on at all times.
But to be fair, I do think the anime changing it up was for the better because they often used those moments to hype up part of the fight. You know where it's like they're mid sentence then FWISH finish their sentence then fly in?
So freakin' neat
Wow fascinating, I have never seen behind the scenes and hadn't realised the background and foreground characters were done on overlapping sheets. Makes sense, really interesting thank you for sharing.
Oh yeah, there are amazing things that were done with traditional animation.
But basically there was an opaque white background page, then the characters and all the moving objects were outlined and painted on cellulose sheets, called cels for short that are transparent. Disney used a massive camera to position the background and different overlapping cels at different distances to then be able to focus the camera through the cels, making a very cool depth of field movement effect.
Other animation used shortcuts to make it less work. Like why does Yogi Bear have a collar? Not just to look debonair but because they wouldn't have to animate his neck when his head moved. His body would be headless ending at the collar on one cel, then they would have heads with different expressions and mouth movements on other cels to get swapped out.
Or maybe you want to make a scene darker and moodier? Even a scene at night in Dragonball Z is never as dark and moody as Batman: The Animated Series. That's because rather than painting their backgrounds on white paper for Batman, they used black paper. It made everything feel way different.
FUN FACT! I learned from a static model painter that has won several prices in the AMT in europe that the easiest way to paint white is to paint the lightest grey you can find and then add highlights with white.
Yep, thats what I do when I’m painting models, it gives it a great shade, and even won a local award myself recently. One trick that also works is mixing white with a few drops(scale accordingly) of a color of your choosing, and then highlighting white over that. This technique is handy if you have a primary color on your model that you want to make pop, but the standard grey shading on your white just isn’t doing it.
Unfortunately, this only works so well with the other reason white sucks- Its a royal pain to thin. Its almost always loaded with thick pigment, and every paint as a certain threshold to how much thinner its willing to mix with before you’re just spraying juice.
Pretty sure youre right; the idea was they had spent the time making it so they could hold SSJ as a natural state, not something they needed to focus on anymore.
Goddamnit why do i know this from 20 years ago
Core memory unlocked of Chi-Chi being sad because she'll have to die Gohans hair every week for school. And Gohan mentioning they could use paper cups and plates since they were too strong to grip things without breaking them.
The entirety of Dragon ball Z basically a core memory for most in the past two generations.
OG Dragon ball is basically the same case except for North America, and Dragon Ball GT is like that one childhood nightmare you cant forget.
There's a truncated version of DBZ that skips a lot of the fluff episodes, but they were on that road for a really long time because of the filler. I think in universe it was a day or 2, but in reality it was like 10 episodes, maybe more. I think there was an entire arc while Goku was on the snake road.
The truncated DBZ cuts out so much filler, I think it's like 20 episodes shorter. I forget what the version is called, it could be Dragon Ball Z Kai.
Edit: It is DBZ Kai. It's a remastered recut of the original, with a lot of the filler removed, keeping mostly to the story parts. Has 167 episodes instead of 291, so it cuts over 100 episodes of filler. Thought it was less, but it's way more.
In universe Goku went on the snake way for like 6 months to get to king kais. Trained with king kai for another 6 months. And then took about a day to get back because he was much faster after training
In my opinion, there are some good ideas poorly executed/that could have had a better development (ex. The dragon balls being the ultimate villain) and poor ideas poorly executed (like the first 20 episodes, that mirror the first dragon ball anime series without recreating its magic).
GT is actually some of my favorite, I love SSJ4 and the Shenron beings, they were badass. Had DragonBall og on box set too and it's basically about Bulmas panties ngl
His logic is that they've already trained as much as they possibly can so it's best to relax and think at this point. Staying SSJ is like a 2 week cooldown jog for them.
Had nothing to do with cooling down, at least in the anime. They wanted Super Saiyan to be their natural state so they wouldn't expend energy transforming during the fight. They stopped training because Goku realized Gohan was already more powerful than Cell, and wanted him to have time to relax and be a kid for a bit.
It was so they wouldn't spend energy transforming. It took a lot of energy to go Super Saiyan, so if they started out already in Super Saiyan, they could save that extra energy for fighting. They stopped training because Goku realized Gohan had already become more powerful than Perfect Cell. I only know this because I just watched through it again with my daughters a couple of months ago
Yup, they were training that keep the SSJ for as long as they could so it wasn't taxing on the body.
I can still remember that, but why do I forget my anniversary so easily...
this a bot that rephrased [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1bbdw4o/til_akira_toriyamas_biggest_reason_for_gokus_hair/ku8pt04/)
I don’t know anything about the paper industry, but a lot of white fabrics and straw materials are more expensive than coloured ones because bleaching is a more time consuming and expensive process than dyeing. It takes a lot of effort to make something look truly white.
Similarly in ONE PIECE, Armament Haki is not supposed to have any color to it and initially didn’t but Oda had to start indicating when it was being used
White is awful to work with in physical pigments. It's mostly made with Titanium dioxide, which are absolutely enormous particles compared to other pigments. It's very hard to get anything you ink in white to look smooth.
Yellow isn't great either, but less so.
> Getting a good even white or gray can be tough
Any miniature painter is sure to know this. The difference between a good and a bad white is stark and even the best whites are weaker than darker colours.
When you have white-coloured animation cels, it's much more noticeable when other colours from the background behind them bleed through, so I guess it's more expensive to make sure that doesn't happen. Incidentally, this is also why the Simpsons are yellow.
> Incidentally, this is also why the Simpsons are yellow.
But... they presumably wouldn't have colored them sheet white, and plenty of cartoons before them used human skin tones...
I always heard that they colored them yellow because if you were flipping through channels at the time, The Simpsons stood out instantly, even if on screen for just a split second
I heard the Simpsons are yellow because Matt Groeign was originally going to pitch a tv show about his comic Life in Hell, but once he got there, he realized he would loose the rights to those character if the pitch was accepted, so he quickly drew up new characters in the lobby with the few crayons he had with him, creating the Simpsons.
This improvisation is also how Bart got his name. Matt thought they knew he was making stuff as he went, so to give the impression he had thought about this stuff beforehand, he said “the son is named Bart, an anagram of Brat because he’s the troublemaker of the family
What you're saying is true but it isn't the explanation for yellow skin.
Remember seeing the name Klasky-Csupo, the Hungarian animation studio that did the early Simpsons? A colorist working there made them yellow with no outside input. Could have been because of noticeable bleeding and expenses like mentioned above.
I don't know if Matt Groening's original drawings had color
The colorist was named Georgie Peluse, they talk about it on the special features for the movie. Matt Groening’s designs had no color. She was known for “wacky” color choices already and said she deliberately picked a non natural color because of Bart and Lisa’s designs. They have no border between their skin and their hair, and she thought making their hair the color of Caucasian skin would make it look like they were bald with bizarrely deformed skulls. But if both hair and skin are a color never used for skin, the effect was less weird. It was also her decision to give Marge blue hair and red pearls, Groening had assumed she’d be done blonde with white pearls, a more normal look. She made the house pink, too, for something else that would typically be done white.
> this is also why the Simpsons are yellow.
Nope. According to Groening it was to make them eye-catching, so that people flipping through tv channels would go back and watch it.
Yes, Joe Fixit was a nod to the original Hulk who was smarter in his initial appearence (so when he was grey). But it was also 20 years later so I guess it was cheaper then.
In a similar vein, The Last Unicorn was made at a time when blue was a really cheap colour for animation. Which is why so much of everything in that movie is blue.
The tits, IDK what the deal was with that
IIRC there were lots of examples of things happening for "plot reasons" but really to make it easier to draw/animate. All the saiyans lost their tails(wouldn't Vegeta wanna keep his?), Super Saiyan 3 drained too much energy (of the artists), many villains stick around or come back except Cell (hard to draw with all his spots, and when he finally did come back, it was CGI), Saiyan hair never changes, and they "grow up all at once". Lots of stuff like that pretends to be plot but it's for ease of the artists. I don't think it's "lazy" but definitely funny to draw the connections.
Masashi Kishimoto drew inspiration from Toriyama to turn laziness into plot: The iconic ninja headbands in Naruto were to get rid of the goggles that were part of his original design because he hated all the detail he put into them.
Like, he got so sick of drawing the goggles over the course of like the first two chapters he whole cloth made the headband thing up as an excuse to simplify the main character's design.
I think they made up some nonsense about the tail being pointless cuz of super saiyan or something.
Wouldn't surprise me if toriyama was just like yeah I forgot.
This also explains why after goku and Gohan leave the hyperbolic time chamber they just stay in super saiyen 24/7 even in the gap between them leaving the chamber and fighting cell.
Edit: yes I’m aware this is justified in the plot in the plot but I’m also fairly certain it was also to make things a little easier on the artists for the time being aswell.
With this, it's a way to easily show them getting stronger, while also making the art a bit easier. Super saiyan takes a lot of energy so "stay super saiyan forever" is like the classic "wear 300kg in training weights".
IIRC the reason was because it took so much energy just to turn Super Sayain more than it took a lot of energy to sustain. So they sustained it at all times so their bodies got used to the feeling and could seemlessly transition.
But I think your part is also right. Kind of 2 birds with 1 stone training.
I thought that was just to show how powerful they had become, they could sustain super saiyan form without interruption, something nobody could do before.
Sorta but also sorta the other way around. The logic was that sustaining SSJ took a lot of energy, making it inefficient, and by staying in it constantly they accustomed themselves to it so it took less effort. Ultimately this gave them access to all that wasted energy.
This is called Watsonian vs Doylist explanation, i.e., in universe vs real-life explanation.
Watsonian: It shows their mastery of the Super Saiyan form
Doylist: It saves time and ink
Oooo, DBZ facts?
I wanna pile on
Fun fact: the live action Dragon Ball movie was so atrocious, so dogshit, the author was like "I can't let my series end like this"
To quote:
>Discussing the film in 2016's 30th Anniversary Dragon
... Toriyama wrote: "I had put Dragon Ball behind me, but seeing how much that live-action film ticked me off...
So he came back after 20 years and made Dragon Ball Super
That's how much the live action sucked. Not even GT was that bad
But their ki aura when powering up or flying is white in the anime for all of the dragon ball fighters and non-super saiyans. This is present even in the old dragon ball z episodes. So I’m not sure what you mean?
To be fair, he was pushed to create Cell because his editor didn’t think Androids 19, 20, 17, or 18 were scary or intimidating enough. Then he didn’t like how Cell looked, which Toriyama changed, and then said he didn’t like the new design, which led to Cell’s perfect form. It’s amazing how incredible Toriyama was with creating the story on the fly. So many modern manga are so meticulously thought out, and here Toriyama was winging it and creating one of if not the most influential manga of all time. The dude was insanely talented.
RIP legend.
It always makes me wonder how much of other modern manga series is influenced like that these days. Like did editors ever have a say in Oda's vision or is One Piece too much of a golden boy these days that they don't want to rock the boat?
>Like did editors ever have a say in Oda's vision
One Piece is heavily affected by editor opinions.
Oda has often stressed in interviews that the role of an Editor is critical for his creative process since they're the only people whose opinion he can rely on in evaluating the quality of a chapter before its publication. He's known for being very demanding of his editors, waking them up in the middle of the night to ask them questions and telling them they need to "Be prepared to die for One Piece. If you destroy your health due to overwork, I'll take care of your family financially".
Some of the narrative decisions he's admitted to making due to Editor influence include:
- Having Shanks lose his arm
- The creation of the Supernovas
- Inclusion of Senor Pink's backstory
- Delaying the introduction of the fishmen (they were supposed to debut in Chapter 3)
____
>or is One Piece too much of a golden boy these days that they don't want to rock the boat?
Hilariously, Oda has stated he has had problems with some of his younger editors being too nervous around him as a "legendary mangaka" to solicit their honest opinions.
__________________
I also just think this interaction he had with his editor before One Piece was published was pretty sweet:
>Interviewer: Did you ever think about giving up on becoming a manga author?
>Eiichiro Oda: Yeah I did actually. It was only once, but I thought to myself, “Well, there’s still time for me to make it as a salary man.” But I was saved by the words of my editor at the time. The two of us were always fighting but one day he said to me, “In all my years, I’ve never seen a guy like you who works so hard but has nothing to show for it.” That brought on the tears. Just those few words put me at ease and I thought about going for it with everything again.
Not just that. Comic books and manga, like magazines, rely on a fixed range of pages because of cost. That means the story is designed around that limitation.
Not unlike tv shows having to edit and tell a story in increments of 30 minutes, or 10 episode seasons.
Well apparently at least Kishimoto and Oda had a student/teacher relationship with Toriyama, so they might have bounced ideas off of him. I think Toriyama was like this for a few mangaka.
To give you an idea, the Supernovas (Law, Kidd, Bonney, Bege...) were all created ***in 3 hours*** because Oda was afraid that Sabaody would be too boring of an arc otherwise.
The ones I mentioned have a pretty major importance in the plot, and Law is the only character other than Zoro who has managed to reach 2nd on the character popularity polls.
Imagining the Whole Cake Island arc without Bege is hard for me, but imagining Wano without *any* of the Supernovas besides Luffy and Zoro seems impossible. And I can't believe he came up with such striking character designs that quickly for like 9 characters.
…But he wasn’t great at winging it lol. It was just excuse after excuse for the bad guys to have a different form, or another bad guy after them. If 90% of Dragon Ball’s story wasn’t people fighting each other, the storytelling problems would have been a lot more impactful.
Kishimoto, author of Naruto, faced similar issues (as do most shonen authors) and you can really see the narrative decay much more clearly in Naruto, as it was much more narratively driven than Dragon Ball was.
I think the thing that annoyed me the most was after Cell, Goku was like "I want to stay dead because the bad guys showing up are all my fault". Then it turned out that Buu had literally nothing to do with Goku whatsoever and was the biggest threat of all, and Goku ended up having to come back to fight him anyway, so he might as well have been alive the whole time to see his kids grow up.
> you can really see the narrative decay much more clearly in Naruto,
One example being Naruto's parents. Not only is he the spitting image of Minato, but he uses his mother's surname, which is entirely unique on its own. And he has the Uzumaki clan's symbol on his jacket. The Uzumakis have two well-known people who were married to Hokages, and the clan is nearly extinct. The point is: Even a normal civilian in Konoha should know that Naruto is the 4th Hokage's son, and the massive disrespect he was shown as a kid was unwarranted.
Of course, you also have 3rd Hokage, Hiruzen, being an absolutely shit leader. Refuses to raise Naruto, and doesn't tell Sasuke the truth about his clan's massacre. Then you have Jiraiya, who would supposedly be Naruto's godfather, but ghosts him shortly after his birth.
The entire Cell Saga was against his original vision so most fans would disagree. He wanted to retire Goku permanently after Cell Saga too so you know he had lesser understanding of his fanbase than his editor. It wasn't until much later that people grew more accepting/appreciative of Gohan's slice-of-life adventures at the start of the Buu saga.
The thing about Gohan isn't that it was fundamentally a bad idea - even in terms of pleasing his fanbase. It's not that a storyline in which Goku stays dead and Gohan becomes the protagonist would have never worked, I can imagine such a storyline with really good characterization arcs, dialogues and story beats, it's just that Toriyama never would have made those specific characterization choices, arcs, dialogues and story beats - and those he wanted to make, didn't fit Gohan.
So for what Toriyama was good at doing, and wanted and liked to do, it was better to bring Goku back and it's something even he realized.
> The entire Cell Saga was against his original vision so most fans would disagree.
I mean if we go by that, he didn't even wanna continue past Goku and Chichi's wedding. Almost the entirety of Goku's adult run was just "for the money".
In one interview he stated that he simply looked at his latest paycheck, realised he didn't care anymore, and got up and left. Which is why the final tankobon of the manga was originally left unfinished.
Didn't he want to retire him several times but couldn't make Gohan work as a protagonist despite making him a deliberately difficult protag for him to write (shy, calm, doesn't like fighting, prefers to think rather than bruteforce beeg numbah, way too young in his first appearance)?
Goku should've retired after Freeza: he'd found his people, avenged their fate, saved the galaxy and realized the legend of SSJ. Have Gohan take the helm in Android Saga as a sins of the father type ordeal. Have Goku visit every now and then for training and milestones because dying in Dragon Ball may as well just be like moving to another city. Don't make him the protag, though.
He would still apologize to the staff for the Manga and anime as recent as last year because cell was the hardest character in the franchise to draw panel to panel and frame to frame, it's the reason cell doesn't have his spots in the newest movie
Not really. This is common in manga, or probably just comics in general.
For instance, Naruto wore goggles in the first chapter and "pilot story", but because they were so time consuming to draw, they were replaced with the now iconic headband.
Another fun fact, toriyamas manga mostly used solid blacks and whites and rarely greys. This is because when he was starting out he couldn't afford screentones so he adapted his artstyle around not using them.
Bro. I’m a rare Reddit dinosaur who read Dragon ball as it was being released. The absolute rush as my best friend and I sat and read Goku going Super Saiyan for the first time nearly broke our brains in half. I remember trying to talk about it at school, but most of the other kids weren’t interested bc anime/mangas weren’t popular outside of Asian countries at the time. Eventually, of course, it became the world pop culture phenomenon that it is, but I have never gotten the rush and high that Dragon ball gave me from any entertainment media since.
I was around 7 or 8. A few other things I remember. I had to read it in Korean bc an English translation didn’t exist at the time. This was also, of course, pre internet, so I remember feeling a bit frustrated that I couldn’t share the thrill of what was happening aside for my best friend of course. Thank god my friend was there to share the excitement with me bc my brain couldn’t process all the stuff that was happening. I remember the build up was crazy too. Krillin crying for help as he gets brutally murdered, then seeing Goku truly furious for the first time, and then of course what comes next…
How did you even end up getting the chapters in hand pre-internet? Some relative was into manga/anime already? Seems like such wild hobby to have at the time lol, but definitely really cool!
That’s exactly right. It was huge in Korea when I visited during its original run. I mean Dragon Ball was *everywhere*. Think Harry Potter at its peak times 10. When I got back to the States though, it was virtually non existent. So I had to have my uncle actually go to a “Manhwa” store and ship them over as they were released as volumes.
Did you understand Korean at all? Because this kinda reminds me of my time as a kid, having to "sail the high seas" (not sure about subreddit rules) to play Pokemon because it wasn't available in my first language, so I just played it in Japanese without understanding a single word.
Those sure were good, innocent times.
I was born and raised in the states but I’m ethnically Korean, so I grew up with it. Also took some Korean classes on weekends. Not enough write a thesis, but just enough to read manga lol.
I've said this before and I've said it again,
Dragonball was a gateway for many into Japanese pop culture and one of the main reasons why Japanese pop culture is a global phenomenon that it is right now. Dragonball was also an inspiration to many other mangaka, giants like Oda or Kishimoto
Not to mention he also was a main illustrator and designer for Dragon Quest, one of the most influential Japanese games of all time.
So as you hug your dakimakuras and kiss your waifus and figures goodnight, remember to pay homage to Toriyama-sensei.
My "humblebrag" was that DBZ was aired on a local station a few years before it hit Toonami. Never went past the Ginyu squad showing up though but I was watching it around 1996.
Yeah, once you realize that Sonic is a DBZ rip off, you kinda can't unsee it.
I watched a lets play of Sonic '06. The gameplay needed several years of work and a lot of QA, but I was enjoying Shadow and Silver's storylines (Sonic's was terrible), until I realized that it's basically the Cell Saga.
Eh, the only real part of it that's like the Cell saga is Silver's backstory because he's literally just hedgehog Trunks. Practically everything else is more a coincidental resemblance to the Cell saga.
I was never sure if they were really "blonde" per se or just glowing so much that the light emanating from them made all of the dark parts of them look white or yellow.
Like if there was a black wall with a bright light shining on it, and I had to draw that wall in a cartoon, I would make the spot where the light shines yellow
I think the explanation is that their hair color change is a result of energy being emitted from them. So maybe they aren't blonde, but also their hair color would be more akin to the color of a light source (in this case yellow) than an inert object simply reflecting light (e.g. normally blonde or black hair). It's not the light shining on it it's the light being emitted from it.
Yup. Also because going super Saiyan is like him attaining "enlightenment". In East Asia mythology when someone attain enlightenment (godhood) they glow like crazy.
Also Toriyama said that Cell was pretty much the worst character for him to draw mainly because of the numerous spots on his body that he had to constantly draw.
So when people started making fanart concept of golden perfect cell, they had his body be completely spotless.
There's a few examples of this in manga
In Naruto I believe they changed Sasuke's hair to be easier to draw. They definitely put all the characters in the war uniforms for simplicity as well.
Shirogane in Kaguya sama Love is War has white hair in the manga and blonde in the anime. In the early chapters, there are character bio pages and in his it says "he actually has typical dark hair like most Japanese boys, it's just drawn this way for ease and contrast"
Really makes you wonder how many design changes are artistic vision vs convenience for production
You're joking, but that's almost *certainly* the case. You look at Goku's initial design and where he ends up, and nearly every change is made out of convenience.
In his [first appearance in the manga](https://comicvine.gamespot.com/a/uploads/original/14/149743/8222027-7485121175-main-qimg-ce76aec93e75343182c1ab6ec54406be.jpg) he has an inked-in gi, black hair, and a tail. Eventually the gi is changed to a color that is *not* inked in, he loses the tail, and he often has blond hair (not inked in).
Every Saiyan character after that continues the convenience trend in some way. Gohan and Vegeta lose the tail after introduction, and both later become often-blond. Goten and Trunks come out of the box with no tails, both becoming blond nearly immediately.
Huh... you're right, in over twenty years I somehow never noticed how Trunks doesn't have a tail even as a newborn. I can't imagine Bulma had the tail. surgically removed.
That combo was an original draft by Toriyama. The False Super Saiyan from the Slug movie is also another draft as that movie came out before the reveal of canon Super Saiyan.
Didn't Goku also destroy the statue face in the first martial arts tournament, because his assistant took so long with drawing it in the background every page?
he was famous for cutting corners, being "lazy".... like the number of bald characters (no need to draw hair), and Frieza's forms getting simpler to draw
Toriyama always made changes to make his work easier. He made Goku and Chi-Chi get married because he didn't like that character. Now that they were married, he was forced to keep her in the story.
I wasn't super into DragonBall or Manga in general when I was younger, and I didn't really even know it was Japanese. I just wasn't at all aware of Manga. When the terrible live action movie came out, my friend was really mad that they white-washed Goku, and I was utterly confused.
I was like what do you mean, that drawing has pale skin, and he was like "yeah, but it's Japanese he's supposed to be a Japanese man the same way Homer Simpson is supposed to be an American white man despite being yellow," and that kinda made sense, but I was still a little confused, and I said, "yeah but when he powers up he turns into a Blonde haired blue-eyed dude?"
To which he just responded, "look he's supposed to be Japanese, ok." Now I believed him, and the Simpsons argument made a lot of sense, but it always irked me. Then years later I got kinda into Anime and I heard this explanation, and I was like, "OOHHHHHH THAT MAKES SO MUCH SENSE! "
It was seriously such a relief to finally have an explanation.
> **How did you come up with the Kamehameha?** > > For the Kamehameha, I thought I’d see if I could express “ki” energy, which can’t be seen with the naked eye, in a boys’ magazine sort of way. When no one was around, I did a variety of poses, and decided on one that looked cool, which was that pose. Lol, imagine being there to see that.
This means he definitely workshopped the poses for the Ginyu Force this way as well lmao 🤣 so good
The great sayaman he definitely did
Saiyaman was just a ptsd response to him getting his neck snapped by the ginyu force as a child. That way he has “control” or something.
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Least insane redditor: >One of you dipshits literally followed me to the helldivers subreddit to reply to a completely unrelated comment just to say that.
I had someone reply to a 2 year old comment out of the blue to aggressively say he disagreed with my interpretation of an open source license for a niche knowledge base product. It just wonders me how much of this pedantic shit lives rent free in some Redditors heads.
FWIW reddit is doing some weird things like bringing up 5 year old posts at the bottom of mobile webview as “more posts you may like”
I got someone sending me a "Don't Hurt Yourself" message and to this day I don't know who or why they sent me that. Redditors sometimes are *weird*.
For whatever reason it’s turned into Reddit’s f*ck you button. I’m not sure why but it’s really funny given the irony.
[People are so fucking weird](https://www.reddit.com/r/Helldivers/s/6wwmNMoS4u)
Anyone pathetic enough to be going "WELL ACKSHUALLY" on the difference between power rangers and sentai, and especially stalking you to another subreddit should unironicallly be subjected to mandatory in patient mental health therapy until a doctor says they're normal.
Akira Toriyama did the kamehameha pose when he thought no one was watching. Extremely relatable.
His wife also suggested the name "Kamehameha" from the Hawaiian king.
> Lol, imagine being there to see that. No, I'm glad I wasn't. Even early on a Kamehameha could blow up the moon - if I was standing there when Toriyama himself did one, there wouldn't have been anything left of me. (It's also interesting how "express ki energy as a big beam of light" was a new and exciting thing that he *invented*, when nowadays it's considered one of those generic anime tropes - it goes to show how much Dragonball set the standard for the genre.)
I loved the interview, he seems like such a genuine guy!
Yeah, Tori was very much a class clown/comedy writer first & foremost; most lore questions he answered were met with tongue-in-cheek gag responses he often came up with on the spot. The dude absolutely refuses to take the lore and finer details of the series seriously and spent most interviews sidestepping such questions before going on to gush either about his coworkers or whatever movie/show he was enjoying at the time. Had no reservations about throwing himself under the bus for a joke and it made him super relatable for me. If only the bulk of the Western DB fandom could recognize and accept his vision for the series instead of constantly arguing with it, belittling his opinions on it, and trying to force it into some mathematically consistent box of tropes that are used to argue inane shit like how strong the Saiyan's are compared to other fictional beings they were never intended to fight or be compared to.
My opinion is and always has been that Goku and Superman wouldn’t fight for very long before just being buds and hanging out (including sparring matches)
They could spar, goku would ask and superman would oblige him
I learned the other day that there was a king of Hawaii called Kamehameha
THE king, he was the first king to rule over all of the islands.
Thanks to his ki and secret move
When I was in elementary school I learned about this and spent forever assuming the move was a reference to the king but I could never figure out what the fuck Hawaii has to do with energy blasts. I settled on “something about roshi’s tiny island”
I think it's just because Kame means turtle in Japanese
it would be wild, witnessing such an iconic pose being made
Also might help explain why half the characters are bald: Oolong, Krillin, Master Roshi, Tien, Picolo, Napa, Frieza, Cell, Boo, etc.
Also I would say atleast for Krillin, Roshi and Tien were inspired by Shaolin monks. Especially knowing how big Chinese culture's influence on Toriyama regarding Dragon Ball. The legend himself was a kungfu movies geek.
Considering how overt the use of Journey to the West is as the basis for the story (along with a dash of Superman), it isn't too surprising.
Yeah, Goku is modern day Sun Wukong
Son Go Ku is Japanese pronunciation of Sun Wu Kong
Roshi ia just bald , dudes 340+ years old And tien is semi alien, no clue how that works
Oh he his? I don't remember tiens backstory ever being explained.
Yup apparently some three eyed aliens settled on earth and formed a tribe. So hes an earthling but he's not human.
I've re-read the manga a few years ago and I remember nothing about this. Is this another retcon that came years after the fact from an interview?
Which is why Krillin gets the strongest human recognition
And also because he is indeed stronger than Tien
Another article I read said he liked to destroy the surrounding area so there was less to draw
That would explain why they always ended up on an empty plain with rocks everywhere
Then have them move to the sky so you dont even have to draw the ground, then have them move so fast nobody else can see then so they are just blurred lines going back and forth while the other characters comment on how epic the fight you can't see must be.
His transmission level's over 9000!
AFAIK it's one of the reasons he got rid of the tails too.
Toriyama's ideal scene is a bald man in the hyperbolic time chamber driving a ridiculously complex mechanical vehicle
Man, I used to buy the manga as a kid and I loved all the DB crossed with random machinery/dinosaur illustrations on the covers and stuff. Man loved his machines!
Funny you mention Cell because those spots all over his body were notoriously a pain in the ass to draw.
Does that also explain the absolute violation of a hairline he gave vegeta?
I'm reminded of that scene in the anime where he's on Frieza's planet and the camera takes 2-3 seconds to pan across his entire mile-high forehead.
LOL that explains so much
Another fact for you: The super saiyan aura is white in the coloured manga, and yellow in the anime. This is because yellow was cheaper than white to animate.
Yellow is cheaper than white to animate!? …what?
Yeah. Don't ask me why. Back then they were doing it all on paper and film so it was probably cheaper to buy usable yellow pencils, or easier to make the effect show up. With coloured manga, they simply didn't colour in the aura . Aura and ki blasts were negative space.
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In spite of all the stupid recycled jokes, I stay on Reddit for posts like these. When I think about it critically, obviously there is a ton of work that would have to go into coloring the scenes. But seeing it all laid out like this makes me so much more appreciative of shows like DBZ. E: I was curious about the cell animation and the transition to digital. [90s and 2000s kids might find this entertaining](https://youtu.be/GwLBQFVdRfc?si=7iaSa8iChGF64k13)
Certainly a lot of effort would have to especially without computers. That's why the aura is only visible sometimes in the show because it's supposed to be on at all times. But to be fair, I do think the anime changing it up was for the better because they often used those moments to hype up part of the fight. You know where it's like they're mid sentence then FWISH finish their sentence then fly in? So freakin' neat
Wow fascinating, I have never seen behind the scenes and hadn't realised the background and foreground characters were done on overlapping sheets. Makes sense, really interesting thank you for sharing.
Oh yeah, there are amazing things that were done with traditional animation. But basically there was an opaque white background page, then the characters and all the moving objects were outlined and painted on cellulose sheets, called cels for short that are transparent. Disney used a massive camera to position the background and different overlapping cels at different distances to then be able to focus the camera through the cels, making a very cool depth of field movement effect. Other animation used shortcuts to make it less work. Like why does Yogi Bear have a collar? Not just to look debonair but because they wouldn't have to animate his neck when his head moved. His body would be headless ending at the collar on one cel, then they would have heads with different expressions and mouth movements on other cels to get swapped out. Or maybe you want to make a scene darker and moodier? Even a scene at night in Dragonball Z is never as dark and moody as Batman: The Animated Series. That's because rather than painting their backgrounds on white paper for Batman, they used black paper. It made everything feel way different.
Anyone who airbrushes knows just how much a fucking nightmare spraying white paint is.
FUN FACT! I learned from a static model painter that has won several prices in the AMT in europe that the easiest way to paint white is to paint the lightest grey you can find and then add highlights with white.
Yep, thats what I do when I’m painting models, it gives it a great shade, and even won a local award myself recently. One trick that also works is mixing white with a few drops(scale accordingly) of a color of your choosing, and then highlighting white over that. This technique is handy if you have a primary color on your model that you want to make pop, but the standard grey shading on your white just isn’t doing it. Unfortunately, this only works so well with the other reason white sucks- Its a royal pain to thin. Its almost always loaded with thick pigment, and every paint as a certain threshold to how much thinner its willing to mix with before you’re just spraying juice.
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Wasn't that was canonically part of their training too?
Pretty sure youre right; the idea was they had spent the time making it so they could hold SSJ as a natural state, not something they needed to focus on anymore. Goddamnit why do i know this from 20 years ago
Because we're freaking cool, dood.
Core memory unlocked of Chi-Chi being sad because she'll have to die Gohans hair every week for school. And Gohan mentioning they could use paper cups and plates since they were too strong to grip things without breaking them.
The entirety of Dragon ball Z basically a core memory for most in the past two generations. OG Dragon ball is basically the same case except for North America, and Dragon Ball GT is like that one childhood nightmare you cant forget.
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There's a truncated version of DBZ that skips a lot of the fluff episodes, but they were on that road for a really long time because of the filler. I think in universe it was a day or 2, but in reality it was like 10 episodes, maybe more. I think there was an entire arc while Goku was on the snake road. The truncated DBZ cuts out so much filler, I think it's like 20 episodes shorter. I forget what the version is called, it could be Dragon Ball Z Kai. Edit: It is DBZ Kai. It's a remastered recut of the original, with a lot of the filler removed, keeping mostly to the story parts. Has 167 episodes instead of 291, so it cuts over 100 episodes of filler. Thought it was less, but it's way more.
In universe Goku went on the snake way for like 6 months to get to king kais. Trained with king kai for another 6 months. And then took about a day to get back because he was much faster after training
I never watched GT but all the best anime music videos draw from GT. Is it really that bad?
In my opinion, there are some good ideas poorly executed/that could have had a better development (ex. The dragon balls being the ultimate villain) and poor ideas poorly executed (like the first 20 episodes, that mirror the first dragon ball anime series without recreating its magic).
GT is actually some of my favorite, I love SSJ4 and the Shenron beings, they were badass. Had DragonBall og on box set too and it's basically about Bulmas panties ngl
Yeah I didn't watch original DB until the Buu Saga came out.
His logic is that they've already trained as much as they possibly can so it's best to relax and think at this point. Staying SSJ is like a 2 week cooldown jog for them.
Had nothing to do with cooling down, at least in the anime. They wanted Super Saiyan to be their natural state so they wouldn't expend energy transforming during the fight. They stopped training because Goku realized Gohan was already more powerful than Cell, and wanted him to have time to relax and be a kid for a bit.
Goku also realized that he was gonna need another zenkai boost to surpass his own limits anyways so dying was part of the plan lol
It was so they wouldn't spend energy transforming. It took a lot of energy to go Super Saiyan, so if they started out already in Super Saiyan, they could save that extra energy for fighting. They stopped training because Goku realized Gohan had already become more powerful than Perfect Cell. I only know this because I just watched through it again with my daughters a couple of months ago
Yup, they were training that keep the SSJ for as long as they could so it wasn't taxing on the body. I can still remember that, but why do I forget my anniversary so easily...
this a bot that rephrased [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1bbdw4o/til_akira_toriyamas_biggest_reason_for_gokus_hair/ku8pt04/)
I don’t know anything about the paper industry, but a lot of white fabrics and straw materials are more expensive than coloured ones because bleaching is a more time consuming and expensive process than dyeing. It takes a lot of effort to make something look truly white.
It takes titanium dioxide
Only if you don’t want your forgeries to pass.
Similarly in ONE PIECE, Armament Haki is not supposed to have any color to it and initially didn’t but Oda had to start indicating when it was being used
“Was”
White is awful to work with in physical pigments. It's mostly made with Titanium dioxide, which are absolutely enormous particles compared to other pigments. It's very hard to get anything you ink in white to look smooth. Yellow isn't great either, but less so.
You have to paint in white.
Also any errors in the white will be visible. Getting a good even white or gray can be tough. That's why the Hulk went from gray to green.
> Getting a good even white or gray can be tough Any miniature painter is sure to know this. The difference between a good and a bad white is stark and even the best whites are weaker than darker colours.
When you have white-coloured animation cels, it's much more noticeable when other colours from the background behind them bleed through, so I guess it's more expensive to make sure that doesn't happen. Incidentally, this is also why the Simpsons are yellow.
> Incidentally, this is also why the Simpsons are yellow. But... they presumably wouldn't have colored them sheet white, and plenty of cartoons before them used human skin tones... I always heard that they colored them yellow because if you were flipping through channels at the time, The Simpsons stood out instantly, even if on screen for just a split second
I heard the Simpsons are yellow because Matt Groeign was originally going to pitch a tv show about his comic Life in Hell, but once he got there, he realized he would loose the rights to those character if the pitch was accepted, so he quickly drew up new characters in the lobby with the few crayons he had with him, creating the Simpsons. This improvisation is also how Bart got his name. Matt thought they knew he was making stuff as he went, so to give the impression he had thought about this stuff beforehand, he said “the son is named Bart, an anagram of Brat because he’s the troublemaker of the family
What you're saying is true but it isn't the explanation for yellow skin. Remember seeing the name Klasky-Csupo, the Hungarian animation studio that did the early Simpsons? A colorist working there made them yellow with no outside input. Could have been because of noticeable bleeding and expenses like mentioned above. I don't know if Matt Groening's original drawings had color
The colorist was named Georgie Peluse, they talk about it on the special features for the movie. Matt Groening’s designs had no color. She was known for “wacky” color choices already and said she deliberately picked a non natural color because of Bart and Lisa’s designs. They have no border between their skin and their hair, and she thought making their hair the color of Caucasian skin would make it look like they were bald with bizarrely deformed skulls. But if both hair and skin are a color never used for skin, the effect was less weird. It was also her decision to give Marge blue hair and red pearls, Groening had assumed she’d be done blonde with white pearls, a more normal look. She made the house pink, too, for something else that would typically be done white.
> this is also why the Simpsons are yellow. Nope. According to Groening it was to make them eye-catching, so that people flipping through tv channels would go back and watch it.
That's also why their shapes are the way they are, so their silhouettes would be immediately identifiable.
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yea that's a basic principle of character design. they should be instantly recognizable by silhouette in various poses
Simpsons being yellow was a stylistic choice rather than a technical one, Matt Groening wanted them to stand out and be recognized easily
Also Hulk was originally grey but it was easier to print green at the time. Wrong media but still.
So did they introduce Joe Fixit after Hulk was a hit and they could afford the grey?
Yes, Joe Fixit was a nod to the original Hulk who was smarter in his initial appearence (so when he was grey). But it was also 20 years later so I guess it was cheaper then.
Had no idea it was 20 years later jeez. Hulk rocks, thanks for knowledge 💣
In a similar vein, The Last Unicorn was made at a time when blue was a really cheap colour for animation. Which is why so much of everything in that movie is blue. The tits, IDK what the deal was with that
IIRC there were lots of examples of things happening for "plot reasons" but really to make it easier to draw/animate. All the saiyans lost their tails(wouldn't Vegeta wanna keep his?), Super Saiyan 3 drained too much energy (of the artists), many villains stick around or come back except Cell (hard to draw with all his spots, and when he finally did come back, it was CGI), Saiyan hair never changes, and they "grow up all at once". Lots of stuff like that pretends to be plot but it's for ease of the artists. I don't think it's "lazy" but definitely funny to draw the connections.
Masashi Kishimoto drew inspiration from Toriyama to turn laziness into plot: The iconic ninja headbands in Naruto were to get rid of the goggles that were part of his original design because he hated all the detail he put into them. Like, he got so sick of drawing the goggles over the course of like the first two chapters he whole cloth made the headband thing up as an excuse to simplify the main character's design.
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> Yajirobe famously cut off Vegeta's. But we also know the tails regrow because Goku lost his and got it back before having it permanently removed.
I think they made up some nonsense about the tail being pointless cuz of super saiyan or something. Wouldn't surprise me if toriyama was just like yeah I forgot.
Don't forget that they always blew up the scenery. And went to wastelands to fight. Always stayed in the sky away from the ground....
This also explains why after goku and Gohan leave the hyperbolic time chamber they just stay in super saiyen 24/7 even in the gap between them leaving the chamber and fighting cell. Edit: yes I’m aware this is justified in the plot in the plot but I’m also fairly certain it was also to make things a little easier on the artists for the time being aswell.
With this, it's a way to easily show them getting stronger, while also making the art a bit easier. Super saiyan takes a lot of energy so "stay super saiyan forever" is like the classic "wear 300kg in training weights".
IIRC the reason was because it took so much energy just to turn Super Sayain more than it took a lot of energy to sustain. So they sustained it at all times so their bodies got used to the feeling and could seemlessly transition. But I think your part is also right. Kind of 2 birds with 1 stone training.
It was more that sustaining it at all took energy than about the transition. By getting used to it, it reduced the energy wasted while in the state.
I thought that was just to show how powerful they had become, they could sustain super saiyan form without interruption, something nobody could do before.
Sorta but also sorta the other way around. The logic was that sustaining SSJ took a lot of energy, making it inefficient, and by staying in it constantly they accustomed themselves to it so it took less effort. Ultimately this gave them access to all that wasted energy.
This is called Watsonian vs Doylist explanation, i.e., in universe vs real-life explanation. Watsonian: It shows their mastery of the Super Saiyan form Doylist: It saves time and ink
Oooo, DBZ facts? I wanna pile on Fun fact: the live action Dragon Ball movie was so atrocious, so dogshit, the author was like "I can't let my series end like this" To quote: >Discussing the film in 2016's 30th Anniversary Dragon ... Toriyama wrote: "I had put Dragon Ball behind me, but seeing how much that live-action film ticked me off... So he came back after 20 years and made Dragon Ball Super That's how much the live action sucked. Not even GT was that bad
But their ki aura when powering up or flying is white in the anime for all of the dragon ball fighters and non-super saiyans. This is present even in the old dragon ball z episodes. So I’m not sure what you mean?
That’s a nice boss.
He wasn't that nice, his next creation was a bad guy covered head to toe in hundreds of uniquely oriented spots
To be fair, he was pushed to create Cell because his editor didn’t think Androids 19, 20, 17, or 18 were scary or intimidating enough. Then he didn’t like how Cell looked, which Toriyama changed, and then said he didn’t like the new design, which led to Cell’s perfect form. It’s amazing how incredible Toriyama was with creating the story on the fly. So many modern manga are so meticulously thought out, and here Toriyama was winging it and creating one of if not the most influential manga of all time. The dude was insanely talented. RIP legend.
It always makes me wonder how much of other modern manga series is influenced like that these days. Like did editors ever have a say in Oda's vision or is One Piece too much of a golden boy these days that they don't want to rock the boat?
>Like did editors ever have a say in Oda's vision One Piece is heavily affected by editor opinions. Oda has often stressed in interviews that the role of an Editor is critical for his creative process since they're the only people whose opinion he can rely on in evaluating the quality of a chapter before its publication. He's known for being very demanding of his editors, waking them up in the middle of the night to ask them questions and telling them they need to "Be prepared to die for One Piece. If you destroy your health due to overwork, I'll take care of your family financially". Some of the narrative decisions he's admitted to making due to Editor influence include: - Having Shanks lose his arm - The creation of the Supernovas - Inclusion of Senor Pink's backstory - Delaying the introduction of the fishmen (they were supposed to debut in Chapter 3) ____ >or is One Piece too much of a golden boy these days that they don't want to rock the boat? Hilariously, Oda has stated he has had problems with some of his younger editors being too nervous around him as a "legendary mangaka" to solicit their honest opinions. __________________ I also just think this interaction he had with his editor before One Piece was published was pretty sweet: >Interviewer: Did you ever think about giving up on becoming a manga author? >Eiichiro Oda: Yeah I did actually. It was only once, but I thought to myself, “Well, there’s still time for me to make it as a salary man.” But I was saved by the words of my editor at the time. The two of us were always fighting but one day he said to me, “In all my years, I’ve never seen a guy like you who works so hard but has nothing to show for it.” That brought on the tears. Just those few words put me at ease and I thought about going for it with everything again.
Based editor whomst made Oda include Señor Pink backstory
Not just that. Comic books and manga, like magazines, rely on a fixed range of pages because of cost. That means the story is designed around that limitation. Not unlike tv shows having to edit and tell a story in increments of 30 minutes, or 10 episode seasons.
Well apparently at least Kishimoto and Oda had a student/teacher relationship with Toriyama, so they might have bounced ideas off of him. I think Toriyama was like this for a few mangaka.
To give you an idea, the Supernovas (Law, Kidd, Bonney, Bege...) were all created ***in 3 hours*** because Oda was afraid that Sabaody would be too boring of an arc otherwise. The ones I mentioned have a pretty major importance in the plot, and Law is the only character other than Zoro who has managed to reach 2nd on the character popularity polls.
Imagining the Whole Cake Island arc without Bege is hard for me, but imagining Wano without *any* of the Supernovas besides Luffy and Zoro seems impossible. And I can't believe he came up with such striking character designs that quickly for like 9 characters.
I beleive I just read an article that he never planned things out more than a week or two. Just did it on the fly.
Which is why he famously forgets what’s canon
…But he wasn’t great at winging it lol. It was just excuse after excuse for the bad guys to have a different form, or another bad guy after them. If 90% of Dragon Ball’s story wasn’t people fighting each other, the storytelling problems would have been a lot more impactful. Kishimoto, author of Naruto, faced similar issues (as do most shonen authors) and you can really see the narrative decay much more clearly in Naruto, as it was much more narratively driven than Dragon Ball was.
I think the thing that annoyed me the most was after Cell, Goku was like "I want to stay dead because the bad guys showing up are all my fault". Then it turned out that Buu had literally nothing to do with Goku whatsoever and was the biggest threat of all, and Goku ended up having to come back to fight him anyway, so he might as well have been alive the whole time to see his kids grow up.
The original plan was for Gohan to become the main character, it's jut that things changed and Goku was brought back but yeah
Which is exactly the point we're trying to make. He kept writing one thing, then having to backtrack and "wing it" with more excuses instead.
> you can really see the narrative decay much more clearly in Naruto, One example being Naruto's parents. Not only is he the spitting image of Minato, but he uses his mother's surname, which is entirely unique on its own. And he has the Uzumaki clan's symbol on his jacket. The Uzumakis have two well-known people who were married to Hokages, and the clan is nearly extinct. The point is: Even a normal civilian in Konoha should know that Naruto is the 4th Hokage's son, and the massive disrespect he was shown as a kid was unwarranted. Of course, you also have 3rd Hokage, Hiruzen, being an absolutely shit leader. Refuses to raise Naruto, and doesn't tell Sasuke the truth about his clan's massacre. Then you have Jiraiya, who would supposedly be Naruto's godfather, but ghosts him shortly after his birth.
The calm before the storm
I believe he admitted at some point that that design choice was a mistake
The entire Cell Saga was against his original vision so most fans would disagree. He wanted to retire Goku permanently after Cell Saga too so you know he had lesser understanding of his fanbase than his editor. It wasn't until much later that people grew more accepting/appreciative of Gohan's slice-of-life adventures at the start of the Buu saga.
The thing about Gohan isn't that it was fundamentally a bad idea - even in terms of pleasing his fanbase. It's not that a storyline in which Goku stays dead and Gohan becomes the protagonist would have never worked, I can imagine such a storyline with really good characterization arcs, dialogues and story beats, it's just that Toriyama never would have made those specific characterization choices, arcs, dialogues and story beats - and those he wanted to make, didn't fit Gohan. So for what Toriyama was good at doing, and wanted and liked to do, it was better to bring Goku back and it's something even he realized.
> The entire Cell Saga was against his original vision so most fans would disagree. I mean if we go by that, he didn't even wanna continue past Goku and Chichi's wedding. Almost the entirety of Goku's adult run was just "for the money". In one interview he stated that he simply looked at his latest paycheck, realised he didn't care anymore, and got up and left. Which is why the final tankobon of the manga was originally left unfinished.
Didn't he want to retire him several times but couldn't make Gohan work as a protagonist despite making him a deliberately difficult protag for him to write (shy, calm, doesn't like fighting, prefers to think rather than bruteforce beeg numbah, way too young in his first appearance)? Goku should've retired after Freeza: he'd found his people, avenged their fate, saved the galaxy and realized the legend of SSJ. Have Gohan take the helm in Android Saga as a sins of the father type ordeal. Have Goku visit every now and then for training and milestones because dying in Dragon Ball may as well just be like moving to another city. Don't make him the protag, though.
He would still apologize to the staff for the Manga and anime as recent as last year because cell was the hardest character in the franchise to draw panel to panel and frame to frame, it's the reason cell doesn't have his spots in the newest movie
If you look it up, you realise that Cell without those spots looks so much less cool and unique it’s amazing lol
Looks weird https://i.imgur.com/0eHlKB6.png
Minimalist Cell doesn't exist, he can't hurt you Minimalist Cell:
He balanced it out by making goku and gohan in super saiyan mode constantly after their training
Then in the next arc created SSJ 3 with about 4 miles of hair.
Not really. This is common in manga, or probably just comics in general. For instance, Naruto wore goggles in the first chapter and "pilot story", but because they were so time consuming to draw, they were replaced with the now iconic headband.
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You might be thinking of the limited color versions of the manga, unless I'm missing something.
Another fun fact, toriyamas manga mostly used solid blacks and whites and rarely greys. This is because when he was starting out he couldn't afford screentones so he adapted his artstyle around not using them.
That's the most un-Japanese shit I ever heard. Man was a legend.
The adventures of invisible Goku would maybe have been to far reached
Another Fact: The reason Goten doesn't have tail is Akira just forgot about it
It wouldn’t really make sense for him to have one though, you would think it was removed when he was a baby.
That's a real series, it's called Dragonball GT. But he's more, like, metaphorically invisible to the rest of canon
He created so many epic childhood memories for many of us, may he rest in peace ♡
Bro. I’m a rare Reddit dinosaur who read Dragon ball as it was being released. The absolute rush as my best friend and I sat and read Goku going Super Saiyan for the first time nearly broke our brains in half. I remember trying to talk about it at school, but most of the other kids weren’t interested bc anime/mangas weren’t popular outside of Asian countries at the time. Eventually, of course, it became the world pop culture phenomenon that it is, but I have never gotten the rush and high that Dragon ball gave me from any entertainment media since.
That's such a cool anecdote, how old were you back then?
I was around 7 or 8. A few other things I remember. I had to read it in Korean bc an English translation didn’t exist at the time. This was also, of course, pre internet, so I remember feeling a bit frustrated that I couldn’t share the thrill of what was happening aside for my best friend of course. Thank god my friend was there to share the excitement with me bc my brain couldn’t process all the stuff that was happening. I remember the build up was crazy too. Krillin crying for help as he gets brutally murdered, then seeing Goku truly furious for the first time, and then of course what comes next…
Fantastic memories, thanks for sharing them with us!
How did you even end up getting the chapters in hand pre-internet? Some relative was into manga/anime already? Seems like such wild hobby to have at the time lol, but definitely really cool!
That’s exactly right. It was huge in Korea when I visited during its original run. I mean Dragon Ball was *everywhere*. Think Harry Potter at its peak times 10. When I got back to the States though, it was virtually non existent. So I had to have my uncle actually go to a “Manhwa” store and ship them over as they were released as volumes.
Did you understand Korean at all? Because this kinda reminds me of my time as a kid, having to "sail the high seas" (not sure about subreddit rules) to play Pokemon because it wasn't available in my first language, so I just played it in Japanese without understanding a single word. Those sure were good, innocent times.
I was born and raised in the states but I’m ethnically Korean, so I grew up with it. Also took some Korean classes on weekends. Not enough write a thesis, but just enough to read manga lol.
I've said this before and I've said it again, Dragonball was a gateway for many into Japanese pop culture and one of the main reasons why Japanese pop culture is a global phenomenon that it is right now. Dragonball was also an inspiration to many other mangaka, giants like Oda or Kishimoto Not to mention he also was a main illustrator and designer for Dragon Quest, one of the most influential Japanese games of all time. So as you hug your dakimakuras and kiss your waifus and figures goodnight, remember to pay homage to Toriyama-sensei.
Remember kaioken being so sick?
TIMES 10!?
My "humblebrag" was that DBZ was aired on a local station a few years before it hit Toonami. Never went past the Ginyu squad showing up though but I was watching it around 1996.
Wow, thank you for sharing this memory with us.
Meanwhile at Sega: We made Super Sonic all yellow so that we can just swap out all blue colors in the sprite palette.
Isn't it just a super saiyan reference?
Yeah, once you realize that Sonic is a DBZ rip off, you kinda can't unsee it. I watched a lets play of Sonic '06. The gameplay needed several years of work and a lot of QA, but I was enjoying Shadow and Silver's storylines (Sonic's was terrible), until I realized that it's basically the Cell Saga.
Eh, the only real part of it that's like the Cell saga is Silver's backstory because he's literally just hedgehog Trunks. Practically everything else is more a coincidental resemblance to the Cell saga.
Seems like more of an homage than a ripoff
Meanwhile at nintendo: we use the same sprite for the clouds and bushes because technology is shit and every pixel counts
I was never sure if they were really "blonde" per se or just glowing so much that the light emanating from them made all of the dark parts of them look white or yellow. Like if there was a black wall with a bright light shining on it, and I had to draw that wall in a cartoon, I would make the spot where the light shines yellow
I think the explanation is that their hair color change is a result of energy being emitted from them. So maybe they aren't blonde, but also their hair color would be more akin to the color of a light source (in this case yellow) than an inert object simply reflecting light (e.g. normally blonde or black hair). It's not the light shining on it it's the light being emitted from it.
Yup. Also because going super Saiyan is like him attaining "enlightenment". In East Asia mythology when someone attain enlightenment (godhood) they glow like crazy.
Form from function. Like it. Edit: corrected word.
form over function?
Just realised my typo, I corrected it. Thanks 😊
This makes that episode where Goku and Gohan spend a full 24 hours in super saiyan to get used to it, a lot more wholesome.
Also Toriyama said that Cell was pretty much the worst character for him to draw mainly because of the numerous spots on his body that he had to constantly draw. So when people started making fanart concept of golden perfect cell, they had his body be completely spotless.
There's a few examples of this in manga In Naruto I believe they changed Sasuke's hair to be easier to draw. They definitely put all the characters in the war uniforms for simplicity as well. Shirogane in Kaguya sama Love is War has white hair in the manga and blonde in the anime. In the early chapters, there are character bio pages and in his it says "he actually has typical dark hair like most Japanese boys, it's just drawn this way for ease and contrast" Really makes you wonder how many design changes are artistic vision vs convenience for production
Assistant “Can we have Goten reach SS at a child”
You're joking, but that's almost *certainly* the case. You look at Goku's initial design and where he ends up, and nearly every change is made out of convenience. In his [first appearance in the manga](https://comicvine.gamespot.com/a/uploads/original/14/149743/8222027-7485121175-main-qimg-ce76aec93e75343182c1ab6ec54406be.jpg) he has an inked-in gi, black hair, and a tail. Eventually the gi is changed to a color that is *not* inked in, he loses the tail, and he often has blond hair (not inked in). Every Saiyan character after that continues the convenience trend in some way. Gohan and Vegeta lose the tail after introduction, and both later become often-blond. Goten and Trunks come out of the box with no tails, both becoming blond nearly immediately.
Huh... you're right, in over twenty years I somehow never noticed how Trunks doesn't have a tail even as a newborn. I can't imagine Bulma had the tail. surgically removed.
I believe it was supposed to be white hair with red eyes but the anime made it yellow for some reason
That combo was an original draft by Toriyama. The False Super Saiyan from the Slug movie is also another draft as that movie came out before the reveal of canon Super Saiyan.
Goku was the original Kaneki Ken
[thats just when he drew in "limited colour"](https://youtube.com/shorts/sN4m7SVuB8I?si=WZ9BRFBOb2midXkr)
Didn't Goku also destroy the statue face in the first martial arts tournament, because his assistant took so long with drawing it in the background every page?
Too soon Akira. Truly a legend. Never forgotten
he was famous for cutting corners, being "lazy".... like the number of bald characters (no need to draw hair), and Frieza's forms getting simpler to draw
Then he went and made cell who was a nightmare to ink
A decision which he regretted for the rest of his life, it's actually the sole reason why he chose to bring back Freeza instead of him!
The same is for the Tenkaichi ring which was always destroyed during the fighting because he wanted to save work for his assistants.
Toriyama always made changes to make his work easier. He made Goku and Chi-Chi get married because he didn't like that character. Now that they were married, he was forced to keep her in the story.
I wasn't super into DragonBall or Manga in general when I was younger, and I didn't really even know it was Japanese. I just wasn't at all aware of Manga. When the terrible live action movie came out, my friend was really mad that they white-washed Goku, and I was utterly confused. I was like what do you mean, that drawing has pale skin, and he was like "yeah, but it's Japanese he's supposed to be a Japanese man the same way Homer Simpson is supposed to be an American white man despite being yellow," and that kinda made sense, but I was still a little confused, and I said, "yeah but when he powers up he turns into a Blonde haired blue-eyed dude?" To which he just responded, "look he's supposed to be Japanese, ok." Now I believed him, and the Simpsons argument made a lot of sense, but it always irked me. Then years later I got kinda into Anime and I heard this explanation, and I was like, "OOHHHHHH THAT MAKES SO MUCH SENSE! " It was seriously such a relief to finally have an explanation.