The Impact of Dragon Ball Z: The Series that Changed Everything

everyone has that anime the one that takes you from a place of not knowing anything about japanese animation to one way you do one that lets you know that the rules are different here that these don't work the same way as western cartoons and for a lot of people that anime was dragon ball z dragon ball z is without doubt one of the most influential properties on the planet at 240 million volumes sold it's the second most successful manga in history losing it only to a series it directly inspired but it's also the defining moment in shonen anime and manga a series that shaped nearly everything that followed it and to which every popular series today still owes a large death dragon ball z's success and influence have been monumental and constant i first encountered dragon ball z nearly two decades ago and coming home and watching it every day after school was a massive part of my teenage years these characters their battles their struggles i was fascinated by it all and the series left a mark on me in a way that no other show ever really has it's because of dragon ball z i started exercising i took up martial arts and developed an interest in shonen anime in general which eventually led me to other shows like yu hakusho hajimeno ippo and hunter x hunter the experience of watching each i wouldn't trade for anything dragon ball z was such a big part of my life that i have my doubts if this channel would even exist at all without it and to this day i still have a fondness for the series i have for maybe only a handful of others so if you want a purely objective breakdown of this series i am not the person to give it to you i'm not blind to the serious flaws but they're also not my goal here nostalgia is a huge part of what dragon ball z is to me and more than perhaps any other show i cannot separate my feelings of it from what my life was like when i first viewed it and so this will be even more so than any of my other videos a nostalgia gleaned personal look at what dragon ball z is and was both to me its many fans and the industry it defined and to do that i think we need to go back back to the time that dragon ball z first touched foreign shores we need to go back to the 90s the late 90s were a glorious era to be a young teenager who was first discovering your love of anime pokemon had been on television just long enough to acclimatize an audience at large to the idea the japanese animation existed and the success of the sony playstation popularized japanese role-playing games among a mainstream gaming audience with generation defining titles like final fantasy vii being the breakout hits of the system and perhaps most importantly the perforation of consumer-grade 56k modems meant that by the end of the decade the vast majority of households were now equipped to explore the internet meaning niche interests didn't need to be quite so niche anymore if you were so inclined you could now connect with other anime fans give and receive recommendations or in my case spend days and days downloading amvs set to linkin park but even then for a lot of people of that era anime was still confined to the box art of games or obscure titles that would play on the barren tv slots that haunted the early hours of the morning and if anime was to truly explode in the west there would need to be an easily consumable constant source of it and that source came during the final breath of the 90s when sean atkins and jason demarco relaunched their toonami serialization block in 1999. toonami was nothing less than a revolutionary siren call for a generation of young anime fans replacing the older more traditional power zone slot with a block filled nearly entirely with eastern properties such as gundam wing outlaw star and sailor moon up until now the only real way to consume these shows was through trading vhs tapes or downloading low quality fan subs online but now anime was being broadcast directly into our living rooms and it was mind-blowing and at the center of this movement and toonami's most popular show was dragon ball z keep in mind that this was late 90s american television where the most popular animated shows were family-friendly titles like doug and rugrats and by comparison dragon ball z was shocking the show felt like a gateway into an entirely different world a violent and even dark place one of insanely powerful villains that committed genocide with barely a second thought and horrific alternate futures where our entire cast of heroes as well as the vast majority of the human race had been wiped out by malevolent psychopathic androids it was a series where people could suffer grave bodily injury and heroes could die it felt like a show you shouldn't be watching one that couldn't possibly be airing on children's television and yet it was it also felt bizarrely unknowable and even a little mysterious dragon ball z was of course based on the akira toriyama manga dragon ball and what we know as dragon ball z is actually just the latter 325 chapters of dragon ball z was only added when the original anime was rebooted with a new staff this rebooted anime was then localized first by ocean dubbing and then by funimation and this version that aired on toonami in the late 90s and early 2000s and so what we essentially got was the second half of an ongoing story unless you caught the very first episode in the 100 plus episode cycle you had no real context for what a saiyan was who the red ribbon army were or what in the name of dear sweet chocolate christ was going on with choutsu but this lack of information was also kind of tantalizing adding greatly to the show's already palpable sense of mystique and a lot of the fun of watching dragon ball z on toonami was slowly piecing together the details of this world and learning how it all tied together and when you did what you got was the story of goku and these z fighters a group of supremely powerful martial artists who would have to defend the earth from even more supremely powerful villains in battles that would play out as bombastic violent showdowns and these encounters were the centerpieces of dragon ball z the first thing that's going to hit anyone unfamiliar with dragon ball z is the show's unrelenting focus on combat and action scenes go to any random episode or chapter and you'll likely find two overly muscled men beating the soul out of one another or very occasionally a slightly muscled girl i love you so much 18. but it was the nature and scale of the combat that was so fresh and exciting characters could fly had the strength and durability to both punch and be punched through mountains as well as the ability to let off massive planet shaking energy blasts and in the process of these catastrophic showdowns entire countrysides would be torn apart and cities would buckle and burst under the strain of attacks that could be measured on a galactic scale it was violent it was destructive and it was deeply cathartic it was easy to get lost in the sheer chaos of it whatever problems you had whatever difficult realities you faced it all faded away in the blistering light of such raw destructive escapism and this was one of the main qualities that made the show stand out against a sea of its more everyday western counterparts and this aspect was only heightened by the very specific way the show handled its villains each arc of dbz was defined by the appearance of a new more powerful foe and it was around these characters that the events of the story unfolded what's interesting about how dragon ball z uses its villains is how dramatically differently they were framed compared to the standard villains that were popular in both western and eastern children's media of the time most children's entertainment of this era was structured to be highly episodic with entire plot lines developing and concluding in a single episode and so if there was a villain they were usually designed to be introduced fought and defeated in the same 22-minute span and for decades this was how children's television worked clinging rigorously to the monster of the weak formula as seen in shows like the teenage mutant ninja turtles he-man and thundercats this kind of villain had actually been around even longer on japanese television coming to prominence in the mid-70s with classic sentai shows like kamen rider and eventually permeated its way into the power obsessed anime and manga of the 80s where underpowered disposable villains were routinely obliterated by hyper-powerful heroes like kinshiro the advantage of these disposable replaceable bad guys was that it was a simple repeatable episodic formula one that wouldn't alienate new viewers but would constantly introduce new opportunities for merchandise while also consistently framing our heroes in the most powerful and victorious possible light but then came the villains of dragon ball z ultra powerful near-invincible demi-gods beings whose mere existence was so cataclysmic that they would dominate entire story arcs committing atrocities on a mass scale and forcing our heroes into tense desperate battles where survival seemed unlikely and victory felt impossible no longer monsters of the week these were just monsters routinely and soundly defeating our heroes ones that shattered the 22-minute structure and planted their feet deep in the story staying there for dozens and dozens of episodes during which the entire plot would center solely around their existence the story framed these villains in a way that made them feel so dominant and powerful that the idea of their defeat seemed genuinely impossible but this created an exhilarating tension as you really felt every blow every energy blast as our heroes inched our way forward in the face of such monstrously overwhelming odds so when victory did occur it felt profound and earned one of the reasons goku's victory over frieza feels so monumental is that at this point in the story you've watched frieza decimate our heroes for dozens of episodes defeating nail gohan piccolo vegeta krillin in a climate where 22 minute villains reigned supreme frieza felt like nothing less than a god and watching goku putting everything he had into battling frieza and eventually surpassing him it was nothing short of inspirational it really felt like this character had gone through a monumentally punishing ordeal and somehow come out the other end and survived this aspect of dragon ball z is one of the main qualities that would come to define what shonen battle manga is and be echoed in many classic arcs that followed throughout the years one piece is enos lobby yuyu hakusho's dark tournament saga hunter x hunter's chimera ant arc these are some of the greatest arcs in shown in history and each one uses the same fundamental villain-centric structure that was defined and popularized in dragon ball z with everything we've talked about up until now it could be quite easy to boil dragon ball z down as a consecutive series of one-on-one fights and you know what it totally was all of dragon ball z's major plot points center around the idea of combat but i also don't view that as an objective flaw either and the reason for that is that these characters are all written around the concept of fighting and to explain what i mean here let's take a little look at this scene from early on in the android saga goku and company receive a cryptic warning from the future that in three years evil androids will rise up and devastate civilization and bulma suggests that by using the dragon balls they could stop the androids before they ever activate but goku and the rest of the z fighters outright refuse they want to face the incoming android threat they want to test themselves against these new more powerful foes despite reliable confirmation that they and most of humanity will be wiped out in the process the takeaway from this scene is that combat wasn't actually a way to solve problems to these characters rather it was justification for why they exist at all these were all proud fighters who put an immense amount of personal weight into their physical strength and skill or to put it a different way dragon ball z wasn't a story about fighting it was a story about a group of characters who really loved to fight conflict was how these characters define themselves whether it's vegeta's identity as the prince of all saiyans goku's pride in being the strongest under the heavens or frieza's belief that he is the most powerful being in the universe you could see this both in the delight these characters took while fighting as well as the rigorous and often grueling training they would put themselves through between battles and it was here in these scenes that you could really witness the character's passion for both combat and self-improvement as they'd struggle to surpass their limits and achieve new plateaus of strength and as a teenager hell as a grown ass adult these scenes were incredibly influential you were watching characters who were extremely passionate about something and who poured everything they had into it and it made you want to work hard as well you wanted to feel the same rush that they did this also gave the fight scenes a more personal and intense emotional edge these characters had sweat and bled to reach their current level of strength they carried an intense amount of pride in their abilities and it made combat feel personal victory felt monumental and validating while defeat was emotional and devastating a loss to these characters didn't just mean a loss it was a deep personal affront to how they saw themselves and something they may not recover from for years to come this also meant that when protagonists stepped out to face one of the show's immensely powerful villains there was a real emotional way to it like it was more than just a battle of good versus evil but something that really personally mattered to both characters so the plot of dragon ball z revolved around a shifting power balance between its heroes and villains and so when a character did hit a new level of power it was a major turning point in the story and these moments were conveyed through dragon ball z's now iconic transformation scenes because of how the show framed its heroes and villains the transformations of both archetypes felt drastically different when a villain transformed it was a nightmare the worst possible case scenario as the gap in power now widened into an abyss a villain's transformation was also something they either always had access to or could only be achieved through external means such as cell consuming the androids or boo absorbing other fighters and this worked very differently to how the heroes transformed hero's transformations for the most part were internal something that could only be achieved through massive amounts of the aforementioned training or having to push through some deep emotional barrier that would then allow them to unleash their true potential and because of how these moments were framed they felt monumental both because the heroes finally had a ray of hope in the face of villains as well as being deeply significant to the personal narratives of these characters and the reason for this is that these scenes represented major moments in our characters lives the culmination of months years or even lifetimes of training and struggle instances where a character's entire existence is changed and they finally become what they were meant to be and as a teenager where you were constantly unsure of every aspect of your physical and emotional identity these transformations were a powerful fantasy to believe in the idea that we all had a massive amount of lightning potential inside us that could be unleashed in an instant and change everything this is also yet another aspect of the series that would come to define what shonen battle titles were with major moments of even modern titles still featuring these same kind of transformations that were defined and popularized in dragon ball z so what you had with dragon ball z was an animation that felt more violent dark and exciting than anything even close to its time slot where passionate combat driven characters face down invincible villains in impossible battles to a western teenager who was raised on the family-friendly cartoons of this era the concepts being introduced by dragon ball z were not only fresh but mind-blowing and the reason the show shook the west like it did and created a generation of young anime fans hungry to discover more series like it i should note that at this point i've mainly been talking about dragon ball z from a mostly western perspective but in japan unlike the west it was the manga that came first the manga is probably the purest way to experience dragon ball z as well as being brilliant in some ways that only mango really can but given the scope and length of this video i think to do that topic justice we need to return to it another day what i would like to concentrate on though is the production of the anime and in particular some of the aspects it both added to and changed about the original manga and to be clear i'm talking about the original 291 episode version that aired on toonami way back when and not the 167 episode recut dragon ball z kai that released in 2008 but more on kind a little bit the reason the anime of dragon ball z was seen as a reboot and not just a continuation was the addition of two new key staff members kozo murashita as director and taka okayama as writer both of whom contributed a great deal to shaping the look and feel of the anime the reason morishita was brought on board was that kazuhiko torashima the former editor of the series was dissatisfied with how the anime of dragon ball looked feeling that it was failing to capture the more serious tone of the manga and so morashida was brought on board at the launch of zee starting at the ratata and what's cool is you can actually see the look of the anime evolve and shift over the course of its run with the ratted saga still having a lot of the soft and imprecise line work that was inherent to the original all the way up to the finely honed razor-sharp drawings of the buu saga and i really love how the show looks at this point there's a real energy and solidity to how these characters move murashida was also the one responsible for a lot of the more interesting art direction in z he wasn't afraid to take a scene from the manga and drench it in a searing neon color palette and it gave a lot of the fight scenes this unrestrained nearly surreal edge murashita would also drastically increase the level of destruction and chaos of these fights adding in brand new stages and taking the time to animate and accentuate the damage to the surroundings which really helped communicate the magnitude of these battles and it was little touches like this that gave some of the story's biggest moments a far more grandiose and even emotional impact than they had in the original manga as for koyama he was not only the screenwriter of the show but he also wrote the first 13 dragon ball z movies and was the creator of popular technically non-canon characters like broly and kula he also wrote a rare dragon ball z side manga called prince vegeta a supplementary comic illustrated by minoru maeda that fleshed out vegeta's backstory and early life and to this day you can still see him giving interviews arguing that broly could kick anyone's ass in super i bring all this up because i think it shows one thing koyama was extremely passionate about these characters and you could see this especially in the additional scenes he'd add to the show which he'd used to flesh out these characters their relationships and backstories take this scene from trunks's battle with cell in the manga cell basically just curb stomps the young saiyan but in the anime the scene is given some much needed weight and context by fleshing out both fighters stories with individual flashback scenes the first is trunks explaining the hardships he had to endure in the android ravaged future including an especially tragic sequence where he actually watched the z fighters one by one being hunted down and wiped out by the androids and i really love this scene because it really helps communicate just how dire trunks's future was but then cell 2 shares his story how he awoke in the distant timeline after the androids and z fighters had wiped each other out and found himself trapped and alone in the broken future unable to evolve without his android counterparts it's a minor moment but it does add an ever so slight air of sympathy for cell as just like trunks he had to endure a ruined future and find his way back to the past and as a result even though the fight itself isn't especially memorable the way the characters narratives are intertwined through their backstories forms an odd kind of connection between the two it makes them both feel like they've really been through a lot to bring them to this point giving the encounter some much needed emotional context and this is what koyama brought to dragon ball z more more flashbacks more emotion more piccolo and gohan slowly forming the cutest friendship on the planet more vegeta being sad in the rain just more of these characters and who they were there were also other aspects that contributed to the show's success and particularly in the west one of which was bruce faulconer's incredible soundtrack which underlaid many of the show's scenes with a deliciously dark synthetic audio flavor while also bringing a good degree of heart to some of its more poignant moments and likewise with a lot of the voice work some of which was incredible in particular the performance of christopher sabbat who voiced both piccolo and vegeta and just listen to the emotion he brings to this scene as piccolo begs goku to stop the fight between gohan and cell do you want to know what he's thinking he's not thinking about strength or about competition he's wondering why his father is standing there letting him die and so your son may be the most powerful person in the world but he's also a scared 11 year old boy i mention all these individuals because while the manga is brilliant and singular many people responsible for the success of the dragon ball z anime and considering that's the version that brought the series to a global audience i felt like they deserved some credit here so up until this point in the video i've been trading dragon ball z as gently as i possibly could i haven't talked about any of the series faults i haven't spoken about the nearly absurd level of filler that pads out and bogs down nearly every part of the anime how the overuse of cost-saving animation techniques drags the quality of the fights down there's places in the manga where you can really feel toriyama's exhaustion as he at this point had been writing weekly manga for nearly two decades and his fatigue shows in the occasional drop in quality of the art or how contrived some of the writing feels especially later on around the buu saga the series suffers from basically every issue a long running shown in manga can power creep an underutilized supporting cast the piccolo effects these were all problems that i didn't see as a teenager but now years later they're impossible for me to ignore and even outside those criticisms it's hard not to see now how other shows have taken the foundation dragon ball z laid out and built upon it it's a far simpler story than titles like one piece or hunter x hunter and those series arguably took what dragon ball z did and built more interesting and creative worlds around it and fill those worlds with a more diverse and compelling cast of characters titles like you hakusho also took the themes of dragon ball z and expressed them in infinitely more relatable human and heartfelt ways and so the truth is i don't really know what it is for a person in 2018 to come to dragon ball z for the first time as much as i love the series i find it difficult to recommend anybody 291 episodes of anything and while kai certainly makes that a lot more digestible it's not the version of the show i grew up with having dropped the iconic bruce faulconer soundtrack and cutting a lot of the additional scenes including the two mentioned above and rewriting a lot of koyama's dialogue to better match the manga and in the process losing a lot of these subtlety and nuance as well as a host of other minor nitpicks that i'm sure very few people but me will actually care about and even then for me personally i don't know that i'm ever going to go back and re-watch dragon ball z in its entirety i don't know that i'll ever be at a place in my life again where i'd have the time or desire to make that possible but no way i think that's okay because what's more important to me than that is the memory the show has left me with and so it only feels right to end this video with the part of dragon ball z that stayed with me the longest and the character that affected me the most vegeta enters dragon ball z story as the main villain of its second arc born a warrior prince to the saiyan race vegeta's combat capabilities excelled from an early age fighting and winning alongside his father king vegeta defining his identity by his ferocity and strength declaring himself the elite of the elite the prince of all saiyans these times would not last however as one day vegeta watches his father defeated by the malicious space warlord frieza who takes vegeta as an indentured servant in exchange for sparing his life his father and his people only to go back on that agreement later as frieza destroys the saiyan home planet and wiping out nearly the entire race vegeta now one of only four remaining saiyans continues to battle under frieza in the hopes of becoming one day powerful enough to rise up and defeat him during which time he suffers a humiliating defeat on earth at the hands of goku a low-born saiyan commoner after much hardship the day finally comes when vegeta believes he has finally ascended to the level of the legendary super saiyan and faces off against frieza only to be crushed under the heel of the invincible warlord and then watches in disgrace as goku did what he never could becoming a super saiyan and finally bringing an end to frieza's reign vegeta now without purpose or direction goes to live on earth and trains relentlessly in order to surpass his rival and escape the shadow that goku has cast but as time marches on he finds himself slowly becoming a reluctant ally both to goku and the people of earth the years go by and vegeta awakens one day to a life he no longer recognizes he now has a human wife and half saiyan child whom he's actually grown to care for during which time the warrior prince he once was has started to feel like a distant memory this realization awakens within fujita a deep anger how could the prince of all saiyans be reduced to the common life of a family man and in that anger he trades his soul for the acquisition of greater power and turns on his former allies attacking and killing a crowd of innocent people in a bid to drag goku into one final terrible fight these actions would bring about the rise of majin buu an invincible monster that would wreak havoc across the earth and so vegeta faced with the destruction he is now wrought takes his son into his arms and hugs him for the first time before sending him away and stepping out to face the monster once again and in the first selfless act of his existence gives his life in one final brilliant attack like every character in dragon ball z death would only prove temporary for vegeta and he'd later return to aid goku in the final battle against buu finally letting go of his pride and accepting goku as both an ally and a friend vegeta's story hit me so hard in my younger years and i'd be lying if i said that that ever stopped being the case and the reason for that is that despite all his strength despite the fact that he existed in a universe of explosive spectacle and super powered showdowns he still felt so real and flawed someone with an intense amount of both pride and self-loathing who would measure themselves against everyone around them a person who would make disastrous self-destructive decisions and suffer crushing defeat after crushing defeat someone who would awaken one day to realize that life hasn't turned out like they planned that the person they thought they would become is now never going to exist and yet someone who at the end of everything was still able to find contentments and that is some heavy to put in a children's cartoon that i heard every day at 5 00 pm but in a broader sense vegeta also represents what i love about dragon ball z you'd watch these characters reach deep down inside themselves in order to face the overwhelmingly impossible and in the light of that getting up the next day and heading out into the world and dealing with whatever problems you faced there it made it feel a little more possible dragon ball z wasn't a story about getting what you want it was one about surpassing who you are and this to me is the legacy of the series the blast it led off the reverberations of which would be felt throughout the entirety of shonen storytelling for decades to follow and the resulting force of which would punch through global barriers and create entire continents of new anime fans it's a story about great characters doing impossible things and for me for an industry and for a generation this was the impact of dragon ball z the series that changed everything friends thank you once again for joining me today i apologize if the weight for this video was a little longer than usual this one took some doing i do have a little announcement to make and that is that crunchyroll were kind enough to invite me as a guest to their 2017 anime awards show in la on saturday the 24th of february so do spread the word as it's a great chance to get your favorite shows some much-needed exposure personally i'm pulling for maiden abyss for anime of the year land of the lustrous for best animation and my lesbian experience with loneliness for best manga thank you as ever to my amazing patrons who made this video possible and if you'd like to be among them you can do so for no more than a single dollar over at patreon.com super eyepatchwolf in particular this video i'd like to thank lulu lamperouge maura cassidrus magdalene macleod schmack95 jp arthur artberg ernesto centino professor harbinger american hoagie robb aka your boy boob surgeon and slush machine also i want to give a huge shout out to my friend sheamus who helped me out with the editing on that last favorite things video guy makes awesome independent films so do go check him out on twitter at seamus hanley where you can also find me at ipatchwolf where i'm ever so slightly more active nowadays and also find me on the let's fight a boss video game podcast where we recently talked about monster hunter and dragon ball fighter z friends take care of yourselves and i'll see you next time

Channel: Super Eyepatch Wolf

Views: 2,264,633

Keywords: Dragon Ball Z, Dragon Ball Fighter Z, Dragon Ball, Vegtea, analysis, Goku vs Frieza, Vegeta goes Super Sayain, Super Sayain Transformation, Goku Vs, Vegeta Vs

Id: tuvSwb5KM6Q

Length: 33min 21sec (2001 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 17 2018