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News Breaking news Akira Toriyama has passed away March 1st

Even Jackie ffs

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Jackie Chan was a big inspiration for Toriyama after all. I mean, Master Roshi literally fights under the pseudonym Jackie Chun in one of the tournaments 👀
 
RIP (and only 68... man, that's way too soon). It's the end of an era, but his legacy will be eternal.

It's weird how things work. Just a few days ago, I started remembering about how Dragon Ball first became a phenomenon here in Spain (because it was quite a unique thing, I think). I even considered making a thread here about it; I didn't because I wasn't sure people would be interested.

Anyway, Dragon Ball first aired in Spain in February of 1990 with little fanfare; it was aired by three regional broadcasters (TVG, TV3 and ETB) and it wasn't aired in Spanish, but in the co-official languages of those regions (Galician, Catalan and Basque, respectively), only the first 26 episodes were commissioned and there was no merchandise or any sort of tie-in product to speak of (which was the way things were done at the time in Spain for cartoons that weren't toyetic to begin with).

Almost immediately, word-of-mouth made the popularity of the show explode; the people in charge of those broadcasting channels recall that as soon as the initial 26 episode run ended, they were bombarded with telephone calls from mainly kids and teenagers, but also plenty of adults, urging them to get the rest of the episodes ready ASAP.

So what happens when a show suddenly becomes THE thing and there is no merchandise (official products did come out eventually, but that didn't happen until around late 1991-early 1992) available? Well, I'm going to copy a couple of snippets from this article which I think does a very good job explaining it:
Within the following weeks and months, TV journals and weekly magazines sold thousands of copies because of the inclusion of color pictures and centerfolds of Dragon Ball, overwhelming the market while stunned Spanish comic publishers attempted to understand the phenomenon all of them had failed to anticipate
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In the early 90s, fans were selling black and white photocopies of Dragon Ball illustrations and even pictures they drew themselves. They exchanged or sold them as collectibles in schools, copy shops, newsstands or public markets, gathering thousands of people on the weekends who were drawn by these unofficial goods. Most of these copies were of poor quality as a result of being photocopied from a previous photocopy and so on.
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The whole thing is fascinating, and there is a lot more about it that I didn't even mention (hell, there literally are documentaries about Dragon Ball-mania in Spain during the 90s), but I think what I wrote does a good enough job in illustrating what a special thing Dragon Ball was (and still is).
 
Aurc said:
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Tezuka and Toriyama truly are the greatest minds in the manga and anime industry. Heck, in entertainment in general. They've influenced so many people and great works, and those influences are still visible today and I imagine always will be.
 
I'm seeing a lot of comparisons here and there with Stan Lee and George Lucas, and while I definitely agree that they are all brilliant creators (and am a fan of Lee myself), I've been thinking it's not quite comparable really.

I'd say Toriyama's success is even more impressive because american media has been extremely prevalent in a global scale since the 20th century, so Stan Lee and George Lucas' success relied a lot on their culture already being disseminated and ingrained around the world, as well as having teams supporting them and a huge and far reaching industry like Hollywood behind him, in Lucas' case.

Akira Toriyama has singlehandedly and all by himself created a work that relied only on its own quality to break through the domestic market and take the world by storm despite the global society knowing shit about what manga was and being completely unfamiliar with the sensibilities of japanese media. Dragon Ball managed to speak an universal enough language that it became a cultural behemoth wherever it went, and has become part of the pop culture in NA, LatAm, Europe and Asia alike. I don't think we even fully grasp how monumental of an achievement that was, especially considering the staying power of the franchise to remain relevant thought several generations of people with the same global reach as it ever had.

Without Toriyama, it's entirely possible that anime and manga would still be mostly restricted to the japanese audience these days. The man was pivotal in bringing out of obscurity and popularizing one of the biggest entertainment industries of the current world.
 
Leo said:
I'm seeing a lot of comparisons here and there with Stan Lee and George Lucas, and while I definitely agree that they are all brilliant creators (and am a fan of Lee myself), I've been thinking it's not quite comparable really.

I'd say Toriyama's success is even more impressive because american media has been extremely prevalent in a global scale since the 20th century, so Stan Lee and George Lucas' success relied a lot on their culture already being disseminated and ingrained around the world, as well as having teams supporting them and a huge and far reaching industry like Hollywood behind him, in Lucas' case.

Akira Toriyama has singlehandedly and all by himself created a work that relied only on its own quality to break through the domestic market and take the world by storm despite the global society knowing shit about what manga was and being completely unfamiliar with the sensibilities of japanese media. Dragon Ball managed to speak an universal enough language that it became a cultural behemoth wherever it went, and has become part of the pop culture in NA, LatAm, Europe and Asia alike. I don't think we even fully grasp how monumental of an achievement that was, especially considering the staying power of the franchise to remain relevant thought several generations of people with the same global reach as it ever had.

Without Toriyama, it's entirely possible that anime and manga would still be mostly restricted to the japanese audience these days. The man was pivotal in bringing out of obscurity and popularizing one of the biggest entertainment industries of the current world.
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Big damn agree
 
Leo said:
Without Toriyama, it's entirely possible that anime and manga would still be mostly restricted to the japanese audience these days. The man was pivotal in bringing out of obscurity and popularizing one of the biggest entertainment industries of the current world.
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Don't forget, Dragon Ball Z was probably the least edited anime and manga to hit mainstream channels. (The scripts were pretty faithful for the period, despite the cut episodes, and the changed music. That's just how anime was back then unless you were VHS exclusive.)

It was arguably the first proper anime to become popular on its own merits as a story without another product backing it up. (I.E Pokemon) Toriyama's work reached U.S audiences pretty much as untarnished as they come.
 
Leo said:
I'm seeing a lot of comparisons here and there with Stan Lee and George Lucas, and while I definitely agree that they are all brilliant creators (and am a fan of Lee myself), I've been thinking it's not quite comparable really.

I'd say Toriyama's success is even more impressive because american media has been extremely prevalent in a global scale since the 20th century, so Stan Lee and George Lucas' success relied a lot on their culture already being disseminated and ingrained around the world, as well as having teams supporting them and a huge and far reaching industry like Hollywood behind him, in Lucas' case.

Akira Toriyama has singlehandedly and all by himself created a work that relied only on its own quality to break through the domestic market and take the world by storm despite the global society knowing shit about what manga was and being completely unfamiliar with the sensibilities of japanese media. Dragon Ball managed to speak an universal enough language that it became a cultural behemoth wherever it went, and has become part of the pop culture in NA, LatAm, Europe and Asia alike. I don't think we even fully grasp how monumental of an achievement that was, especially considering the staying power of the franchise to remain relevant thought several generations of people with the same global reach as it ever had.

Without Toriyama, it's entirely possible that anime and manga would still be mostly restricted to the japanese audience these days. The man was pivotal in bringing out of obscurity and popularizing one of the biggest entertainment industries of the current world.
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Definitely agreed. I respect what both Lee and Lucas achieved but I've always thought they were better bussinessmen than artists (Or in Lucas' case, still are).
 
Mer.Saloon said:
Don't forget, Dragon Ball Z was probably the least edited anime and manga to hit mainstream channels. (The scripts were pretty faithful for the period, despite the cut episodes, and the changed music. That's just how anime was back then unless you were VHS exclusive.)
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ehhh, except for in the USA, where it was so notoriously edited (not just weird scripts but also to the lengths of digitally painting stuff out of or into frames) that it helped foster the big anti-Funimation and subs>dubs sentiment in the anime fandom.

DBZ was long used as an example of how badly mangled anime tended to be by western localization, to the point where it was a big deal when Funimation eventually began releasing "uncut" DVD sets of the series where they went back and simply dubbed the original episodes with more faithful scripts and no edits. And even then I'm pretty sure those never made it to American television.

Granted it wasn't as bad as, say, changing Cardcaptor Sakura into Cardcaptors, but it was definitely considered by the fanbase to be one of the "bad" ones at the time. Especially as it was airing in the same era as the fantastic Cowboy Bebop dub.
 
Look y'all, this is a thread about honoring Akira Toriyama's legacy. You do not want me going on a rant about how bad the American DBZ dub is. Don't do it!

So instead I'm gonna post this.

 
chocolate_supra said:
The animation was so good ugh

ugh, I say!!
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The episode was supervised by Katsuyoshi Nakatsuru. He only worked on two episodes of the TV show. All his other work as an animator is on movies and specials, so it was a very big deal to get him to work on this episode. He's also the designer of Super Saiyan 4. An absolute legend in his own right.
 
chocolate_supra said:
ehhh, except for in the USA, where it was so notoriously edited (not just weird scripts but also to the lengths of digitally painting stuff out of or into frames) that it helped foster the big anti-Funimation and subs>dubs sentiment in the anime fandom.

DBZ was long used as an example of how badly mangled anime tended to be by western localization, to the point where it was a big deal when Funimation eventually began releasing "uncut" DVD sets of the series where they went back and simply dubbed the original episodes with more faithful scripts and no edits. And even then I'm pretty sure those never made it to American television.

Granted it wasn't as bad as, say, changing Cardcaptor Sakura into Cardcaptors, but it was definitely considered by the fanbase to be one of the "bad" ones at the time. Especially as it was airing in the same era as the fantastic Cowboy Bebop dub.
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I meant the US. Think about what anime aired on TV prior to DBZ, you had Sailor Moon, both ridiculously edited and rescripted. Robotech which is an insane can of worms to this day. Voltron, which you'd barely recognize as anime with the way it was completely destroyed. All other anime that was left uncut, like Slayers was relegated to the VHS market.

But in 96, when DBZ was originally airing, followed by it's 1999 Re-debut on CN, it was as close to uncut as you could get at the time. Heck, when Funimation took the reigns from Saban they went out of their way to make an uncut and cut dub for TV. Not even Pokemon got that treatment in 97, and that's DBZ's closest compatriate.

Whether it was a good dub or not... well... it wasn't. But it speaks to the quality of Toriyama's story that kids still could see past the bad acting. And Viz brought Toriyama's awesome manga uncut!
 
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Mer.Saloon said:
I meant the US. Think about what anime aired on TV prior to DBZ, you had Sailor Moon, both ridiculously edited and rescripted. Robotech which is an insane can of worms to this day. Voltron, which you'd barely recognize as anime with the way it was completely destroyed. All other anime that was left uncut, like Slayers was relegated to the VHS market.

But in 96, when DBZ was originally airing, followed by it's 1999 Re-debut on CN, it was as close to uncut as you could get at the time. Heck, when Funimation took the reigns from Saban they went out of their way to make an uncut and cut dub for TV. Not even Pokemon got that treatment in 97, and that's DBZ's closest compatriate.

Whether it was a good dub or not... well... it wasn't. But it speaks to the quality of Toriyama's story that kids still could see past the bad acting. And Viz brought Toriyama's awesome manga uncut!
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Okay compared to Robotech I see what you mean. 😅 Repainting and changing frames/scenes in DBZ does pale in comparison to that ridiculousness. I was thinking of how they did that to Cardcaptor Sakura but forgot they did something similar/worse with Macross.
 
Mekanos said:
Look y'all, this is a thread about honoring Akira Toriyama's legacy. You do not want me going on a rant about how bad the American DBZ dub is. Don't do it!

So instead I'm gonna post this.

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This scene is one of those "you had to be there" moments. People these days just can't understand HOW HYPE it was.

Trunks looking cool af, wielding a freaking sword, revealing himself as another SSJ and Freeza having PTSD flashbacks of Goku and pissing his pants. So fucking badass.
 
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Leo said:
This scene is one of those "you had to be there" moments. People these just can't understand HOW HYPE it was.

Trunks looking cool af, wielding a freaking sword, revealing himself as another SSJ and Freeza having PTSD flashbacks of Goku and pissing his pants. So fucking badass.
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I first saw this scene as part of a 240i AMV probably two or three years before the US even got the android saga

When we finally, finally got Trunks on TV I was freaking out
 
Leo said:
This scene is one of those "you had to be there" moments. People these just can't understand HOW HYPE it was.

Trunks looking cool af, wielding a freaking sword, revealing himself as another SSJ and Freeza having PTSD flashbacks of Goku and pissing his pants. So fucking badass.
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This is the scene that got me into the series. When I was younger I would watch DBZ with my brother but I was a little too young to “get” it. I think it was so dialogue heavy and the big story was hard to follow. When I was older, 10 years old, I had absorbed enough secondhand knowledge to understand some things but I still never really watched it outside of channel surfing. Then one day I sat down, nothing else on TV, and caught the beginning of this arc in reruns. I saw this mysterious cool guy show up. He had a sword AND he was a Super Saiyan?! I had to keep watching to understand what was gonna happen next.

And from there I was hooked. Kept watching both reruns and new episodes, and it became an obsession that lasts decades later. Without DB, I wouldn’t have fallen in love with anime and manga as art forms. I wouldn’t have learned how to browse the internet, frantically googling DBZ fansites to learn about all the cool stuff that hadn’t aired yet in America. I wouldn’t have made so many friends, friends I still talk to today. I wouldn’t have spent a decade training in martial arts. I wouldn’t have gone to film school in hopes of making art 1/100 as inspiring as Toriyama’s. I wouldn’t have began studying Japanese. I could go on.

It’s not hyperbole to say Akira Toriyama’s presence on Earth radically changed my life. I only hope somehow he knew how impactful his art was in his last days.
 
It's funny, long before I was invested in DBZ, I was drawn to Toriyama in another way.

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This game right here came out during the tail end of Pokemania here in the states, but I was immediately drawn to Toriyama's awesome monster designs. I mean, you see all these colorful characters just staring at you through the box and just can't help but be fascinated at how many there are, how different they all look. A mixture of weird, agressive, but cute and silly.

This was the first Dragon Quest game aside from VII that actually used Toriyama's art for the front cover in North America. After years of obfuscating his designs behind awful CGI or generic fantasy art. It's just kinda hilarious to me that the first game to actually have his art on the front cover was the one to draw me in. But I was just a wee bab, so I guess the colors just popped for me.

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And what a game to be drawn into. Toriyama's monsters were pretty much the enduring legacy of the Dragon Quest series, but the Monsters games were the first to really highlight how integral they were to the charm of the series. Even if 2 was following some of the Pokemon trends, these monsters had been a big deal for years, and it was all thanks to Toriyama's amazing designs that breathed in life into these creatures that you wouldn't see until arguably Pokemon.

(God, I continue to think about it, and how much I STILL reference these monsters when I draw, how much Toriyama's sensibilities rubbed off on me. I would not be even close to the same person without him.)
 
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I just found a super saiyan Goku Funko pop today.

Dragon ball will always be a part of me. I would tune into it all the time when it aired.
 
Leo said:
This scene is one of those "you had to be there" moments. People these days just can't understand HOW HYPE it was.

Trunks looking cool af, wielding a freaking sword, revealing himself as another SSJ and Freeza having PTSD flashbacks of Goku and pissing his pants. So fucking badass.
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Yeah. I think it's something that a lot of folk were really young when first exposed to, so the impact was lost on them or since forgotten. But just imagine if you were going through Dragon Ball for the first time, what a huge fucking shock that moment would've been

Like for example, most people outside of Japan started with Z so they take Goku being an alien completely for granted. But objectively that is such a holy shit out of nowhere moment that if I were reading Dragon Ball weekly at the time, I'd probably consider it a shark jump lol

I'm completely used to final form Freeza now, and he fits right alongside what I picture nowadays when I imagine Dragon Ball art style, but when I was first watching the show weekly as a kid, his design looked so completely alien to me. Especially compared to prior forms
 
Tite Kubo(of Bleach fame) also came out with a statement:



It would be strange to write a diary without mentioning this, so I'll just talk about something serious.

Personally, I don't feel any loneliness or pain. I'm not saying there aren't any at all but there aren't as many as I thought.
It's the death of someone I've read since I was a child, someone who works in the same magazine as me, and someone I'm deeply influenced by, so it feels different than when I deal with death in general, but that's why I feel like it doesn't exist.

I've never really talked about this to anyone but I've always believed that creating things means expanding your sensibilities and expanding your life. This is because I believe that as long as the work exists, the author is not dead.
And I believe that being able to properly get used to this feeling is proof of the magnitued of the work's existence that remains in my heart. that's all.

From the next post, i will continue with my usual enthusiasm.
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I believe that as long as the work exists, the author is not dead.
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I really like that line of thought.
 
Seeing all the authors of the "big 3" talk about how much Toriyama influenced them really speaks to what a titan of manga he was. I hope Togashi can put out a statement as he's said before he considers Toriyama the god of manga.
 
Mekanos said:
I hope Togashi can put out a statement as he's said before he considers Toriyama the god of manga
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Honestly, most mangaka do practically consider Toriyama a god in the industry. Eiichiro Oda has also mentioned before that Toriyama considering him a friend is one of the crowning achievements of his life.

Ugh, it's been a few days since the news broke and I'm still getting hit with pangs of sadness.
 


I think this still might be the most novel thing about Dragon Ball as a narrative. How many series start out with the main character as a goofy little boy, and end with him being a grandfather? Goku matured as the story went on, yet never lost that childlike sense of wonder. One of my favorite pieces of trivia is Toriyama threatened to quit if he wasn't allowed to age Goku up, and his editor freaked out, saying "of course you can age him up, just don't scare me like that."
 
I'm slowly making peace with it, but now and then when I remember we will never again see an original character design by him, it hurts.

The cast of Dragon Quest XII will be the last we ever get of Toriyama characters and that just doesn't feel right.
 
The original creator of Tails shared this:



As I wrote in a previous Twitter post and in a series of columns, the relationship between these two in Sonic 2 was created based on the image of Piccolo and Gohan.Therefore, without the work Dragon Ball, the relationship between these two would not exist today.Thank you very much, Mr. Toriyama.
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Leo said:
I'm slowly making peace with it, but now and then when I remember we will never again see an original character design by him, it hurts.

The cast of Dragon Quest XII will be the last we ever get of Toriyama characters and that just doesn't feel right.
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What stage of production is Sandland in?
 


However, we do have his comments on winning the award revealed in the pamphlet of the award show.

Following is the translation:
"To be honest, I have never had much interest in anime, and even when my work was made into animated format, I feel embarrassed to admit that I did not watch much of it, apologies to the staff. About 10 years ago, out of the blue, I was asked to revise the script for the Dragon Ball animated film, and I drew some simple designs for the characters and backgrounds. I thought, 'I can leave the difficult parts for the staff' (laughs).Thus, it is truly embarrassing that I am the recipient of the Tokyo Anime Awards Festival's Lifetime Achievement Award. Thank you very much.
One of my most unforgettable memories in animation works is when I met the late animator, Toyo Ashida for an anime project called 'Kosuke-sama Rikimaru-sama,' which was produced for the Shonen Jump Original. This project did not have a manga, so a meeting was held. He was an amiable person and we quickly bonded, and every time I saw his drawing style, I was moved by his careful and swift touch.I thought, 'Alright, I guess this kind of touch I need to speed up the drawing process and make Dragon Ball look much smoother.' The drawing time was reduced to about two-thirds of what it used to be. We influenced each other in many ways, and I think it was a truly fulfilling time. I pray for the repose of Ashida-san's soul.
Dragon Ball DAIMA, which will be rolled out in 2024, was originally planned to be an original anime series without me, but as I gave advice here and there, I ended up getting deeply involved with the project without realizing it. I was not only involved in the overall storyline, but also in the worldview, character design, mechas, and other aspects. I hope you will enjoy watching the series, which I believe is not only intense and action-packed, but also full of plenty of substance.Finally, I would like to thank everyone who has supported me so far! I am not sure how much more I can do, as I am not very confident about my health, probably due to my lifestyle when I was younger, but I will try my best to create more interesting pieces of work, so please continue to support me!"
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He was supposed to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Tokyo Anime Award Festival 2024 life on stage between March 8 and 11 this year. :(
 
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