Plot
A monkey-tailed boy named Goku is found by an old martial arts expert who raises him as his grandson. One day Goku meets a girl named Bulma and together they go on a quest to retrieve the seven Dragon Balls, mythical objects that can summon a dragon who will grant any wish. Along the way, they meet and befriend a plethora of martial artists. They also undergo rigorous training regimes and educational programs in order to fight in the World Martial Arts Tournament, a tournament in which the most powerful fighters in the world compete. Outside the tournaments, Goku faces diverse villains such as Emperor Pilaf, the Red Ribbon Army, a demon known as Piccolo Daimao and his offspring.
As a young adult, Goku meets his older brother, Raditz, who tells him that they come from a fictional race of extraterrestrials called Saiyans. The Saiyans had sent Goku to Earth to destroy it, but his ship crashes upon arrival. Goku fell into a deep ravine and lost all memory of his mission. Goku refuses to help Raditz continue the mission, after which he begins to encounter others who want to battle him, such as the Saiyan prince Vegeta. He also encounters Frieza, who is considered to be one of the strongest beings in the universe, after which Goku begins training his first child, Son Gohan, to be his successor. Years later, a group of soldiers from the Red Ribbon army known as androids appear to kill Goku. Another android, Cell, absorbs Androids #17 and #18 from the Red Ribbon army to increase his power, then fights Goku and Gohan, resulting in the former’s death. Goku is capable of returning to life, but decides to stay dead for seven years to train in the Other World. When he returns, he is drawn into a battle for the universe against an extraterrestrial named Majin Buu. Joined by Vegeta and Gohan, Buu is destroyed. Ten years later at a martial arts tournament, Goku meets Buu’s human reincarnation, Uub. At the end of the manga, Goku takes Uub away on a journey to train him as another successor.
Anime sequel
In the anime Dragon Ball GT, which is not directly based on the manga, Goku is turned back into a child by the Black-Star Dragon Balls and is forced to travel across the universe to retrieve them. While in space, he encounters the evil artificial Tuffle, Baby, who wants to destroy the Saiyan race. Goku fights him, but is defeated and his tail destroyed. After his tail is regenerated, he achieves the level of Super Saiyan 4 and destroys Baby, propelling him into the sun with a Kamehameha. After Baby’s defeat, Dr. Myuu, a combination of machine and human, creates a replica of Android 17, fuses it with the original Android 17, creating Super 17. Super 17 seems impervious to Goku’s attacks, but when Android 18 attacks him for killing Krillin, Goku is able to take advantage of the distraction to find a way to penetrate Super 17 and destroy it.
Due to overuse of the Dragon Balls, seven Evil Dragons were created. All but the most powerful, Syn Shenron, are defeated. When Shenron appears to be losing, he absorbs the Dragon Balls and gains enough power to become Omega Shenron, overwhelming Goku. Eventually, using the energy of every living being in the universe, Goku makes a Spirit Bomb powerful enough to destroy Omega Shenron.
Themes
At its core, Dragon Ball maintains the central tenets of the Weekly Shōnen Jump core philosophy of “friendship, struggle, and victory.” As the series shifts from a “heart warming” story into a more action-oriented piece, the protagonists go through an unending cycle of fighting, winning, losing, learning important lessons, then returning to the fight. As the series progresses, the heroes continue this cycle by using miraculous devices to achieve life after death while continuing their on-going battles with the dead heroes who continue to learn lessons as they defeat their challengers.[1]
Production
Wanting to break from the Western influences common in his other series, when Akira Toriyama began work on Dragon Ball he decided to loosely model it on the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West.[2][3] He also redeveloped one of his earlier one shot manga series, Dragon Boy, which was initially serialized in Fresh Jump and released in a single tankōbon volume in 1983.[3] This short work combined the comedic style of Toriyama’s successful six-year series Dr. Slump with a more action-oriented plot and paid homage to famous martial art actor Jackie Chan.[4][3] Toriyama notes that his goal for the series was to tell an “unconventional and contradictory” story.[5]
In the early concept of the series, Goku and Piccolo were from Earth. With the introduction of Kami, the idea of having fights from other planets was established and Goku and Piccolo were changed to alien species.[6] For the female characters, Toriyama felt it was not fun to draw “weak females” so he created women that he felt were not only “beautiful and sexy”, but also “strong”.[5] Going against the normal convention that the strongest characters should be the largest in terms of physical size, he designed many of Dragon Ball‘s most powerful characters with small statures, including the protagonist, Goku.[5]
![](https://i0.wp.com/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/0/05/Wiki_DragonBall_Earth.png/180px-Wiki_DragonBall_Earth.png)
The Earth of Dragon Ball[7]
The fighting techniques were initially unnamed, but the series editor felt it would be better to name them all. Toriyama proceeded to create names for all of the techniques, except for the Kamehameha which his wife named when Toriyama was indecisive about what it should be called.[6] When creating the fictional world of the series, Toriyama decided to create basing it from his own imagination to avoid referencing popular culture. However the island where the World Martial Arts Tournament is held is modeled after Bali. When having fights in the manga, Toriyama had the characters go to a place where nobody lived to avoid difficulties in drawing destroyed buildings. In order to advance the story quickly, he also gave most fighters the ability to fly so they could travel to other parts of the world without inconvenience. This was also the reasoning behind Goku learning to teletransport (thus allowing characters to move to any planet in a second).[6]
After the first chapters were released, readers commented that Goku seemed rather plain, so his appearance was changed. More characters (such as Master Roshi and Krillin) and martial arts tournaments were added to give the manga a greater emphasis on fighting. Knowing readers would expect Goku to win the tournaments, Toriyama had him lose the first two while continuing his initial goal of having Goku be the champion and hero. At the end of the Cell arc, he intended for Gohan to replace Goku as the series protagonist, but then felt the character was not suited for the role and changed his mind.[8]
Toriyama based the Red Ribbon Army from a video game he had played named Spartan X in which enemies tended to appear very fast. After the second tournament concluded, Toriyama wanted to have a villain who would be a true “bad guy.” After creating Piccolo as the new villain, he noted that it was one of the most interesting parts of the stories and that he, and his son, became one of the favorite characters of the series. With Goku established as the strongest fighter on Earth, Toriyama decided to increase the number of villains that came from outer space. Finding the escalating enemies to be a pain to work with feeling it was too simple, he created the Ginyu squad to add more balance to the series.[8] During this period of the series, Toriyama placed less emphasis on the series art work, simplifying the lines and sometimes making things “too square.” He found himself having problems determining the colors for characters and sometimes ended up changing them unintentionally mid-story.[4] In later accounts, Toriyama noted that he didn’t plan out the details of the story, resulting in strange occurrences and discrepancies later in the series.[9]
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