Dragon Ball is the one anime that reigns supreme in the enormous empire of the anime world. The fights in the series are arguably one of the main reasons why the anime is so popular with Manga fans. Dragon Ball Super is the series of the Dragon Ball franchise that has created the most buzz after Dragon Ball Z. But this would never have happened if Akira Toriyama, the creator of the series had ended the series when he originally meant to.
Toriyama originally meant to end the series way before it developed into a franchise and became one of the biggest anime series of all time. Fans could never have witnessed Goku turning Super Saiyan.
Dragon Ball Was Meant to End Way Earlier
Dragon Ball is a Japanese media brand founded in 1984 by Toriyama. The series has been running for nearly four decades. Toriyama’s first manga, written and illustrated by him, was serialized in Weekly Shonen Jump from 1984 to 1995, with the 519 individual chapters collected into 42 Tankōbon volumes by Shueisha. Dragon Ball was inspired by the classic 16th-century Chinese tale Journey to the West. In an interview with Kanzeshuu, Toriyama while explaining the relation between Dragon Ball and Journey to the West said:
“Bulma was Tripitaka, Oolong was Zhu Bajie, and Yamcha was Sha Wujing. I initially thought that I’d end it after they finished collecting the Dragon Balls.”
Toriyama stated that he would end the series after the main characters finished collecting the Dragon Balls and asked Shenron for the wishes. However, the popularity and the hype regarding the series motivated him to keep working on it.
Akira Toriyama’s Reason For Continuing The Story
Toriyama explained that the series was not as popular as he expected it to be because the characters were too plain for a fighting story so he decided to make some changes. He said:
“Up until the Tenka’ichi Budōkai began, the series hadn’t been all that popular. That’s what Torishima-san had told me. “Your protagonist is rather plain. That’s why it’s not popular.”, he said. Personally, since I was doing a fighting story for this series, I had intentionally made the protagonist’s clothing excessively plain. So this annoyed me, but then I figured it out. “Well, let’s increase its popularity,” I thought. I temporarily withdrew the other characters besides Goku, brought back Kame-Sen’nin, and added Kuririn as a new character. From there it got popular before I knew it.”
After the story became immensely popular and the fans started loving the series, Toriyama decided to take it further and introduced more characters and villains and the rest is history. Dragon Ball has become one of the most successful manga and anime series of all time, with the manga being published in over 40 countries and the anime being shown in over 80. Over 160 million copies of the manga’s 42 collected Tankōbon volumes have been sold in Japan, and 260 million copies have been sold internationally.
Source: Kanzeshuu
