Dragon Ball 1986

 Story

Now when you think of Dragon Ball I bet what you start thinking of is yellow haired flying men screaming for 20 episodes straight and being outrageously over the top while playing patty cake at the speed of sound but what if I told you that there was a wholesome simple slice of a life but an unusual and strange one backstory. Well you probably already know about the prequel but some of you might not know what’s in store on this adventure, well strap in and sit back because I’m about to tell you. This anime is a genuine wholesome adventure of a young boy going throughout the world with naive innocence doing what looks fun and enjoyable without a care about anything except his having fun. Dragon ball is supposed to be about this, a wholesome innocent adventure throughout Earth fighting and training and not taking itself too seriously unlike its successors. That is what shounen should be about. There’s never a dull moment in this anime because it consistently develops this journey while having a good pace of story to create one of the best shounen’s of all time. The main goal of this anime is to find the dragon balls hence the anime, the story starts out with the dragon balls already being found and after they are found by Emperor Pilaf’s gang but oolong wastes his wish by wishing for sweet sweet pantsu so the dragon balls are separated and spread across the globe and not active for some years. If you want light-hearted fun, then this is the anime for you

Mai being evil she is also one of my favourite characters as well as she is not actually evil but just someone who applied for an ad and got caught in an evil trio. Her style is very reminiscing of old spy films. Mai being seen as smart on the outside she can be quite thick skulled and clumsy which when they team fail is usually funny as they try to be this menacing presence but are not, Pilaf’s crew are team rocket before team rocket they are the original evil trio which is what makes this anime great because it influence mostly every shounen in one way or another. With most old anime I tend to recognise a pattern that arises different from newer which is the dubbed version of older shows are way better and actually not cringe inducing with high pitch weeb voice acting in new anime but actually professional or “real” voice acting, the dub is arguably better than the sub as I grew up on the dub and voice just sound so iconic in my head but not only that they actually changed some small details like launch’s name to lunch because of some comedy that happens with Goku to make the audience understand it better for the English speakers which is a great production choice unlike Pokémon dub “Jelly filled (onigiri) donuts”

Chibi Goku

In my opinion I like the young Goku way more than the adult version and when he grows up in the anime, I was extremely disappointed as I wanted him to stay as a small cute chibi best boy. Young Goku best traits in the anime are his lack of knowledge of how to be a human and his innocence, like him not knowing you have to wear clothes or his knowledge of the female body demonstrate on Bulma of course, she is always the catalyst of a lot of the comedy in the show. This show in my eyes is deemed as a slice of life even slice of life’s are usually what we all do in our regular life but I don’t think it because that but because that is an accurate representation of what boys are like when very young which is showed by Goku well going on cool adventures which is why this anime is amazing to grow up with and show younger audiences as it even teaches value life lessons like always try your hardest but also don’t take everything so seriously, have fun! Also, Goku’s voice is done by a woman which did shock me when I first found it out like why older females make the best shounen voices, it’s one of life greatest mysteries.

Launch-san

Like all old anime prequels there’s always that one character that gets cut from the future parts as the story develops because the creator don’t feel like they needed them anymore or just straight up forget about them and launch or lunch-san as the dub likes to call her as one of them, she is probably the most forgotten about characters in anime ever, I’m not even kidding. I’m guessing she was cut because the creator wanted to develop Bulma more and basically combine both them into one character taking things from lunch san and putting into Bulma or/and Toriyama Akira just forgot about her while expanding his universe. Launch was used mainly for comedy with Master Rochi when she would sneeze she turned into a yellow haired angry woman with super human strength some believe that Launch san was the first true Saiyan as she transformed into having yellow just like dragon ball z, hmmmm this must be a conspiracy theory; spread it around guys!

Opening

Now to my favourite part of this blog, the opening!!! The best part about the anime is the opening at the beginning especially the English I prefer; this opening show encompasses the whole essence of the anime. A fun wholesome adventure with an amazing whole to explore, when this opening played, I would never skip it and sing every single word of the opening because it’s just too good to miss. If you still don’t know either to watch it or not then listen to this opening and I’m sure it will change your mind from hesitance to hell yeah I’m going to watch the whole thing in two weeks because you know I do even now I listen to the opening and still have that joy I once had I think this anime has great morals and stick within us the rest of life Dragon Ball makes us better people because of Goku, truly a masterpiece of an anime.

Thanks for reading!