For all of the anime industry’s recent leaps and bounds towards the global mainstream, there’s something particularly poetic about the trajectory of Dragon Ball, one of its earliest worldwide success stories. It’s a series that, much like its protagonist, repeatedly came back from the brink of defeat, overcoming several failed syndication stints to help transform a relatively fringe medium outside of Japan into a cultural force that fronts blimps at the Macy’s Day Parade and causes parents to have meltdowns at school librarians (these are the two telltale signs that something has really made it in America). While the show was still finding its footing overseas when it wrapped up in Japan 30 years ago today, it would eventually pave the future for anime viewership worldwide, setting a template that, for better and worse, still informs what anime “is” to global audiences: spikey-haired dudes with superpowers beating the tar out of each other.
Beginning as a manga, Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball comic was a massive hit in Japan. It ran from 1984 to 1995 in Weekly Shōnen Jump for a total of 519 chapters, helping this deeply influential magazine reach its all-time highest circulation (6.53 million copies a week in 1995). This success meant that an anime adaptation was all but inevitable, and in 1986, Toei Animation started producing the Dragon Ball TV series.
It ran for 153 episodes and adapted the first section of the manga, which follows the protagonist, Son Goku, as a child. Here, this alien child with a monkey tail masters martial arts and befriends a growing band of weirdos, while going on a series of adventures centered around seven magical orbs—the Dragon Balls—that can be used to grant any wish. Initially inspired by the Ming dynasty-era folktale Journey To The West, the series drew on an increasingly wide hodgepodge of myths, architecture, and martial arts from across several Asian cultures—Japan, China, India, the Middle East, Indonesia, and so on. While it never fully lost its lighthearted charm, the show grew more serious over time, culminating in character deaths and an increased focus on fisticuffs.
In 1989, Dragon Ball Z began and took this action focus to an extreme. While the original manga lacked a distinction between “Dragon Ball” and “Dragon Ball Z,” as it was all a single continuous story, the Dragon Ball Z anime picks up after the manga’s five-year time skip, where Goku goes from a diminutive child to a post-growth-spurt adult. Now, the threats were bigger and the stakes were higher, as our hero and his buddies faced an escalating lineup of alien invaders, world-destroying superorganisms, and magical beings.
The basic formula was as follows: a new big bad appears, Goku’s allies are forced to fight a seemingly hopeless battle, they get beaten up and/or die, and then Goku appears and also gets beaten up before miraculously turning things around at the eleventh hour. It was “predictable,” but this never felt like a detriment because the follow-through was always so satisfying, consistently building suspense and a sense of imminent defeat before Goku pulled off a wrestling-inspired comeback. When combined with the lovable cast and an art style that wavered between Toriyama’s playful designs and ’90s edge, it all made for the kind of thing that both younger viewers and seasoned action aficionados could get behind.
By the time Dragon Ball Z wrapped up in January of 1996 with the culmination of the Majin Buu Saga, Goku had already become a national icon who inspired countless future mangaka to craft their own battle epics for Weekly Shōnen Jump: One Piece, Naruto, Bleach, and dozens more would follow in its footsteps. While Dragon Ball certainly wasn’t the first action romp in Shōnen Jump, it’s easily among the most influential alongside others like Fist Of The North Star and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure.
Despite the ascendancy of this Super Saiyan in his home country, the TV series hadn’t caught on in the United States when it came to a close in Japan. In 1989, the same year Dragon Ball Z began, the American production company Harmony Gold did a dub for the first five episodes of Dragon Ball. It failed to find an audience and was cancelled. Funimation handled another version that was distributed by Seagull Entertainment, which made it to 13 episodes before also getting canned.
Eventually, though, the tide began to turn. In 1996, Saban Entertainment, which was known for localizing anime and tokusatsu shows into Westernized equivalents (it turned Super Sentai into Power Rangers, Kamen Rider into Masked Rider, Gatchaman II into Eagle Riders, and so on), grabbed Dragon Ball for its animated programming block. However, they did something different than the previous localization attempts: instead of beginning with Dragon Ball, they started with the more action-packed Dragon Ball Z. Whether it was this specific choice that won over fans or Saban’s existing pipeline for transforming American TV audiences into weebs, the show finally gained some traction Stateside, running for several two seasons until it fell victim to programming cuts in 1998.
Lastly, there was one more important stop, the one that most U.S. fans are familiar with: Toonami. As Cartoon Network shored up its new, edgy programming block, it began airing reruns of Saban’s version of Dragon Ball Z. The show’s popularity prompted the network to dub additional episodes past where Saban stopped, a process that continued for half a decade (1998 to 2003) until every episode was available in English. The network even doubled back and did the same for the original Dragon Ball TV series.
It’s hard to overstate the impact the show had on those growing up in that era, planting a seed among millennials that would fully bloom with Gen Z; a study from National Research Group and Crunchyroll found that over half of Zoomers describe themselves as anime fans. Dragon Ball certainly wasn’t the only show that contributed to this phenomenon—for instance, Sailor Moon, which also aired on Toonami, had a similarly massive influence during that era.
But even with fans jumping on at different entry points, Dragon Ball undeniably built a foundation, popularizing a particular brand of action-oriented anime (commonly referred to as battle shōnen) that still remains at the forefront of the space. It set the table for Weekly Shōnen Jump’s “Big Three” that would come after—Naruto, One Piece, and Bleach—which would go on to inspire future generations and so on. Even now, this kind of action series remains popular inside and outside of Japan, and it’s no mistake that Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle became the highest-grossing anime film ever last year in its home country and at the global box office. This type of series left such a psychic imprint that, throughout the aughts, 2010s, and sometimes even now, the word “anime” immediately conjures images of flying martial artists shooting ki blasts.
However, even if Dragon Ball contributed to creating somewhat limiting preconceptions about what anime is, you have to start somewhere. In the years since, streamers like Netflix have diversified their offerings, while specialty services such as Crunchyroll have given devotees a deep catalog for diverse tastes. Dragon Ball can’t claim all of the credit, but it’s hard to think of many shows that have done more to get us to where we are now, a time when a movie sequel to an anime TV show can outdo the MCU at the global box office.
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