Dragon Ball: Fight Son Goku, Win Son Goku (1990)

Interesting facts

• Based on: Dragon Ball
• Filmed in: South Korea

Dragon Ball is a Japanese media franchise created by Akira Toriyama. The series follows the adventures of protagonist Son Goku from his childhood through adulthood as he trains in martial arts. Along his journey, he makes several friends, becomes a family man, discovers his alien heritage, and battles a wide variety of villains, many of whom, like him, seek the mystical orbs called the Dragon Balls in order to summon a wish-granting dragon.

Production

Akira Toriyama was an avid fan of Hong Kong martial arts films, particularly Bruce Lee films such as Enter the Dragon (1973) and Jackie Chan films such as Drunken Master (1978), and wanted to create a manga inspired by the films of the genre. This led to Toriyama creating the 1983 one-shot manga Dragon Boy, which he later redeveloped into Dragon Ball.

Toriyama originally thought the manga would last about a year or end once the Dragon Balls were collected. He stated that although the stories are purposefully easy to understand, he specifically aimed Dragon Ball at readers older than those of Dr. Slump. He also wanted to break from the Western influences common in Dr.

During the early chapters of the manga, Toriyama's editor, Kazuhiko Torishima, commented that Goku looked rather plain. Although the series debuted with an unusually high-profile launch, including five consecutive color pages, it was not initially very popular. At the beginning of its serialization, the series benefited from readers' expectations following Toriyama's previous hit Dr. Slump and strong editorial support.

To combat this, he added several characters such as Kame-Sen'nin and Kuririn, and created the Tenkaichi Budōkai martial arts tournament to focus the storyline on fighting. It was when the first Tenkaichi Budōkai began that Dragon Ball truly became popular, having recalled the races and tournaments in Dr. Slump.

Once Goku and company had become the strongest on Earth, they turned to extraterrestrial opponents including the Saiyans (サイヤ人, Saiya-jin); and Goku himself was retconned from an Earthling to a Saiyan who was sent to Earth as a baby. Frieza, who forcibly took over planets to resell them, was created around the time of the Japanese economic bubble and was inspired by real estate speculators, whom Toriyama called the "worst kind of people".

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