With Goku, Akira Toriyama Created a Hero Who Crossed Generations and Continents
“It’s over 9,000” is perhaps the most popular line in the English dub of the “Dragon Ball Z” series. The line is beloved for its drama; it’s an exclamation referring to the unmatched power level of the main character, Son Goku. It was an ongoing joke in my middle school and became one of the internet’s most enduring memes.
But Goku was always an exemplar of staying power, back from his beginnings in the “Dragon Ball” manga created by Akira Toriyama, whose death was confirmed on Friday.
Toriyama is the creator of the manga “Dr. Slump” and “Sand Land” but is best known for “Dragon Ball,” which first published in 1984 and for years ran in the popular Japanese magazine Weekly Shonen Jump. It was successful from the start, but as more people around the world learned about it, “Dragon Ball” attained such levels of popularity that it became one of the standard-bearers of anime.
Despite the prominence of greats like Hayao Miyazaki and the recent surge of live-action adaptations in the United States, it’s still fairly rare that a manga or anime — even given the massive scope, breadth and history of the art form — achieves crossover appeal to mainstream Western media. There have been a few big exceptions. “Pokémon.” “Naruto.” And “Dragon Ball.”
“Dragon Ball” is the story of an alien boy named Son Goku who ends up on Earth. He teams up with a brilliant blue-haired teen named Bulma, and they search for seven dragon balls to summon the powerful wish-granting dragon Shenron.
The worlds and images Toriyama created combined the kung fu-inspired fight sequences of old martial arts flicks with science-fiction and a fantasy-style reimagining of space and technology. The characters burst off the page and the screen: A wild-haired boy in an orange gi flying on a cloud; a whiskered green dragon whose serpentine body coils in Gordian knots in the sky; and seven orange orbs, speckled with small red stars, that when combined offer their collector infinite power.
