Goku and his friends, reinforced by former enemies (a recurring theme) had to fight progressively more powerful villains. and a five year period of peace, it's revealed that Goku was not simply a strange boy with a tail but one of the last of an alien race called the Saiyans, sent into space shortly before the Saiyan planet was destroyed (with shades of Golden Bat, Prince of Gamma, and Superman).
At worst, it led to some of the most dragged out fights and storylines in anime history, the absolute low point being when a supposed five-minute countdown for a planet to explode took over ten 26-minute episodes note the series readily establishes that the "five minutes" thing was a face-saving lie on the part of the villain who revealed it, though that hasn't stopped fans from taking jabs at it.Īfter defeating Piccolo Jr.
At best, this allowed for zany, ridiculous episodes like Goku and Piccolo trying to learn how to drive.
This forced Toei Animation to create loads and loads of Filler in an effort to allow the manga to forge ahead. The anime is also notorious for running up against the manga at essentially all times by the second arc.
And since Z is easily one of, if not the most popular anime of all time, for better or worse it's become associated just about every anime stereotype in the west - absurd levels of screaming, constant Serial Escalation, Beam-O-War battles and a whole lot of standing around doing nothing are all prominent tropes in this series that have practically become synonymous with anime as a whole (at least, when they're not referencing Pokémon or hentai). While the original anime started out as a Supernatural Martial Arts comedy series inspired by Journey to the West, by the Demon King Piccolo Arc it had become more serious and featured violent and sometimes bloody battles, and this continued throughout Z ( with the partial exception of the Buu Arc). However Z represents Dragon Ball at its most popular, and so is often treated as its own entire sub-franchise due to the overall obscurity of the first third of the story (in America, ViZ branded all the manga volumes adapted by this anime with the Dragon Ball Z name). While Z is often considered a separate anime from the preceding one, in reality it's more of a marketing rebrand, since the production team was almost identical and it aired on the same schedule without missing a beat. While the manga kept its original name throughout its run everywhere in the world ( except in English), the anime's title was changed from Dragon Ball to Dragon Ball Z, which Toriyama suggested because he felt he would be ending the story soon, with the last letter of the Latin alphabet meaning to indicate this. ( For the proper reading experience, run the music from here, here, here, or here (or here, if you're really hardcore) while reading this page.)ĭragon Ball Z is Toei's anime adaptation of the latter two thirds of Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball manga, originally broadcast from 1989 to 1996.