Akira Toriyama is...well, it's hard to say what he is. To say he is an artist is an understatement. Akira Toriyama has done things that could arguably earn him the status of a kami or god in Shinto worship. If no actual Shinto shrine is ever dedicated to him, rest assured his fans have shrines of some sort dedicated to him somewhere. Akira Toriyama created a manga titled Dragon Ball, which evolved into the anime Dragon Ball Z. Some people know this already and if you are a fan of Akira Toriyama and DBZ I hope you will be fans of mine as well. For those of you who do not know, Dragon Ball Z began the modern era of anime in America. Anytime you meet anyone who expresses any love of anime, most likely they will say their first anime was Dragon Ball Z in the '90's. I call these people late to the game. Dragon Ball Z is the later portion of a series that started simply as Dragon Ball in the '80's. The major difference that requires the "Z" added on was that the main character Goku grew up and became a father and a total badass, whereas the original run was about Goku as a child and was mostly ridiculous. Akira Toriyama probably wouldn't say there is really any significant difference as he wrote the entire series as one manga with one name, but reviewing the series it's clear he found his footing later on. Dragon Ball was inspired by Journey to the West, one of the four classical Chinese novels which tend to inspire anything and everything great in Southeast Asian media. For those familiar with the story, it's fairly obvious what transferred over, however, there were some characters that just made more sense when they were introduced. In Journey to the West, the Monkey King, named Son Goku in the Japanese translations, befriends an effeminate traveler, a shapeshifting pig, and a rogue from the desert, who become Bulma, Oolong, and Yamcha in Dragon Ball. Over time, some of these characters become less important and Oolong is the first to fall by the wayside, but his existence generates one of the oddest quirks about the Dragon Ball universe, anthropomorphic animals. To make Dragon Ball work as an adaptation of Journey to the West, anything went, Goku was a were-monkey, people could learn to shoot energy beams from their hands through sheer discipline, and dinosaurs and other monsters of unknown origin would come out of the woodwork to harass our heroes. It really didn't make a whole lot of sense which is why you'll hear more about DBZ than DB, because The other major difference about DBZ was that Akira Toriyama started to actually try to make sense of the story. Goku and his nemesis Piccolo were revealed to be aliens, a saiyan and a namek respectively, and the series shifted focus to this new alien cosmology. Everything about these characters that seemed to have been pulled out of nowhere were suddenly explained as being integral parts of these alien races. Meanwhile, everything else like anthropomorphic animals and other little monsters faded into the background. For the sake of consistency, Akira Toriyama brought back some of them every now and then just to remind everyone he hadn't forgotten what he had established in the past, but the main cast became focused on humans and aliens that had thorough background checks. And so once DBZ settled in as a hardcore action series with heavy metal background music, a standard was set for all the anime to come afterward.
However, as I said, those who know DBZ as the beginning are late to the game. For me, by the time I started watching Saban's syndicated English dub in the '90's it was already nostalgia to me. Back when Nintendo started in the '80's, there was one game that made an impression on me called Dragon Power. It was not a great game, the mechanics were pretty screwy and it wasn't clear what we were trying to do. However, it was one of the few games that featured a martial artist and the first one with any kind of decent story. The alternatives were Kung Fu and Kung Fu heroes, neither of which had any story worth remembering. But the story of a boy looking for balls that could summon a wish granting dragon stuck in my mind even though I only played it for a weekend and could never get past the desert bandit because back then most games didn't save progress and you actually had to play through an entire game in one sitting and if you hit game over you had to start over at the very beginning. Yes, Dragon Power was the import of the first Dragon Ball Nintendo game. But it wasn't the only influence that Akira Toriyma, Nintendo and Saban would have on my impressionable young mind, there was also Dragon Warrior. Akira Toriyama did the character design for Dragon Warrior, which was another game that came out in the first days of Nintendo and also featured some problems that came from programmers who were working with a brand new format and did not really know what they were doing. For better or worse, Dragon Warrior was my first RPG. I struggled with that stupid game for years before I finally beat it and it almost turned me off to RPGs but I can't help but love anything that ties together video games and cartoons, something which I would later learn the Japanese excel at. There was an anime series that was imported under the title Dragon Warrior which I watched on channel 8, my local CBS affiliate. Some time after it went off the air, I found that it was tied to a sequel video game, Dragon Warrior 3, sharing the villain Baramos and a number of other monsters, most notably the mascot slimes. A lot of other things may have been mere coincidence, but the slimes Chichi and Coco and the theme music(yes that theme music, if you are a Dragon Warrior fan, you know what I'm talking about) that ended every episode let me know this was genuine Dragon Warrior. I can't say I'm a huge fan of Dragon Warrior, honestly, Final Fantasy 6 would teach me what to expect from an RPG and reset my standards, but as an impressionable child, Akira's dragons would set me up for a lifetime dedicated to anime and video games.
Of course, it would be years before I realized that I was not alone and that this was only the tip of the iceberg. Anime and video games have been tied together for my whole generation, and we had no idea when DBZ came around we were already set up for the new wave coming. There are some parts of Dragon Ball Z that directly influenced 7th Moon, particularly Android 16 and Gohan and their iconic scene when he turned Super Saiyan 2 for the first time, which led to Kichiku and Douji and the Golden Dragon Shinryuu which was itself inspired by the Eternal Dragon Shenron and looks exactly the same in my mind when I write about it.
Well, I think that's enough for this installment, thanks for reading. I will have more next time on a (slightly) different subject. If you are a fan of anime and/or video games, I highly recommend my book 7th Moon, and try to keep some of this in mind when reading because it is much better when you read it as an anime in the making.
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