Dragon Ball Z
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Dragon Ball Z, Japanese anime television series based on the Dragon Ball manga (Japanese comic) by Toriyama Akira. The story follows martial arts master Son Goku and his allies as they fight to defend Earth from a variety of aliens, androids, and mystical creatures. Originally airing in Japan from April 1989 to January 1996, the show grew to a global phenomenon after it was dubbed and released in other countries, becoming a television staple for decades to follow.
Origins
Dragon Ball Z’s origins lie in the pages of Weekly Shonen Jump, a weekly magazine anthologizing shonen manga (manga intended mainly for boys). Installments of Dragon Ball, written and illustrated by Toriyama Akira, began appearing in the magazine on November 20, 1984. The early story, a loose adaptation of the Ming dynasty novel Journey to the West, follows the adventures of 12-year-old Son Goku as he searches for seven dragon balls to summon forth the wish-granting dragon Shenron. Toriyama originally expected the series to last a single year, but it became so popular that he continued to produce it until May 23, 1995. Dragon Ball helped boost Weekly Shonen Jump’s circulation from about three million copies per issue in the early 1980s to a massive six million copies in 1995.
On February 26, 1986, Toei Animation debuted an anime adaptation of the comic, also titled Dragon Ball. The television show retold the events of the comic’s first 159 chapters—those dealing with Goku’s childhood—in 153 episodes. It concluded on April 19, 1989, and a week later Toei premiered Dragon Ball Z. This new anime series adapted the rest of the comic’s chapters, in which Goku, now an adult with a family, defends the planet alongside his allies. The “Z” was chosen by Toriyama to signify that the show would conclude Goku’s story. Dragon Ball Z ran until January 31, 1996.
Funimation and Dragon Ball Z
In 1994 Japanese-born American engineer Gen Fukunaga founded Funimation (now Crunchyroll), an entertainment company that then mostly adapted Japanese anime for the U.S. market. Through Fukunaga’s family connections in the Japanese entertainment business, Funimation soon obtained the rights to produce an English-language version of Dragon Ball and its sequel series Dragon Ball Z. The company initially worked with Seagull Entertainment to dub and distribute the earlier series, resulting in an ultimately unsuccessful run of the first 13 episodes of Dragon Ball.
Funimation then struck a distribution deal with Saban Entertainment, which had already found great success by dubbing and reediting the Japanese television series Kyōryū sentai zyuranger (1992–93) to make the successful children’s action series Mighty Morphin Power Rangers (1993–96). Saban decided to begin its run with the later series, Dragon Ball Z, in order to avoid repeating Funimation’s earlier experience with Dragon Ball, and enlisted the Ocean Group to do much of the dubbing. Saban’s version of Dragon Ball Z, generally known to fans as the “Ocean dub,” debuted with the episode “The Arrival of Raditz” on September 13, 1996. The series was immediately successful, leading Saban to green-light a second season. However, Saban’s need to reduce the number of programs it placed in 1998 resulted in the show’s cancellation.
Because of its proven ability to attract an audience, Dragon Ball Z soon found a new home on Cartoon Network’s Toonami block of programming, and the series started airing every weekday afternoon on Monday, August 31, 1998. After showing the two Saban-syndicated seasons, the network ordered additional dubbed episodes. Funimation had to produce these episodes with a new cast of voice actors, who attempted to sound as much like their predecessors as possible. The new installments aired on Cartoon Network from September 13, 1999, to April 7, 2003, and briefly in 2001 on Kids’ WB!
In 2005 Funimation redubbed the episodes originally distributed by Saban with the newer voice cast so that the characters would sound the same throughout the entire series. These redubbed installments also featured content that was originally cut because of U.S. broadcast standards, giving fans who had already seen the episodes a reason to watch. The episodes were made available on DVD as well.
In 2009 Toei used the 20th anniversary of Dragon Ball Z’s premiere as an opportunity to rerelease the series. The show was remastered and reedited to more closely follow the pacing of the comic, reducing the total number of episodes from 291 to 167. Funimation introduced this iteration of the show, Dragon Ball Z Kai (kai meaning “revised”), to the United States in 2010. It aired on the children’s programming channel Nickelodeon.
Beyond Z
In 1996 Toei Animation produced a 64-episode sequel series to Dragon Ball Z called Dragon Ball GT. Unlike other installments of the franchise, this series did not reproduce plot lines created by Toriyama Akira. Instead, Dragon Ball GT consisted of original content meant to continue from the ending of Toriyama’s story. The series follows Goku as he is transformed into a child by an accidental wish made by the evil Emperor Pilaf, travels the galaxy with his granddaughter, and saves Earth once more. In 2003 it was dubbed into English by Funimation and aired on Cartoon Network. Aware of negative fan reactions in Japan, Funimation opted to cut the first 16 episodes of Dragon Ball GT and to instead construct a flashback episode summarizing the events of the early series (although the company released dubs of these episodes on DVD starting in July 2004). The English dub, like its Japanese counterpart, ultimately received a mixed reception from fans of the franchise.
On July 5, 2015, Toei started a new television series called Dragon Ball Super, taking place within the 10-year time skip at the end of Dragon Ball Z. Funimation quickly produced an English-language version of the show, and the adaptation began appearing on Adult Swim’s Toonami block in 2017. The new show was shorter-lived than Dragon Ball Z, concluding on Japanese television in April 2018. A tie-in manga by the same name began on June 20, 2015, in the pages of the shonen manga anthology V Janpu (V Jump). The comic was also written by Toriyama but storyboarded and illustrated by a new artist, Toyotarou. Publication of new chapters of the manga were ongoing until Toriyama’s death in March 2024, at which point it was put on hiatus.
The global popularity of Dragon Ball Z led to a host of additional products for the franchise, including films (essentially extra-long episodes no longer than an hour), television specials, video games, card games, and collectibles. Memorable moments from the show, such as the phrase “It’s over 9,000,” became Internet memes. As recently as 2023, Goku was featured as a float in the annual Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in the United States. More significantly, the series gave anime an early major success in the West, heavily contributing to the embrace of other Japanese animation exports in the future. It also had a major influence on popular culture: it inspired other manga and anime such as One Piece and video game characters such as Mario and has been referenced in media as diverse as the American animated series South Park, the 1999 movie Fight Club, and Jay Rock and Kendrick Lamar’s “Hood Gone Love It.”