egregious shame, as I write this in 2014, that this kind of orchestral score is a dying breed.
As is to be expected, not everyone is a fan of the Kikuchi score, an opinion they are of course entitled to. However, with the Dragon Ball series offering nearly a dozen different composers (which is outrageous, really), everyone has their own favorite.
What I always find whenever someone criticizes Kikuchi is that their argument unfailingly amounts to “but his style is so dated!” I might have been on board with this sentiment once upon a time, but it took getting the 5-CD set for me to realize that all this talk about “dated = bad” is hogwash, especially in these times, when film and TV scores have all but gone down the crapper. In fact, when I look at how all the composers since Kikuchi have been coming and going like clockwork (Norihito Sumitomo seems to be sticking around for a while, but it’s only a matter of time before he too packs his bags, as he’s not exactly Don Rosa to Kikuchi’s Carl Barks), I realize that “dated” is an outlandishly ignorant word to describe my favorite Dragon Ball score.
In all honesty, it’s timeless.
KENNETH (“kenisu3000”) documents Dragon Ball music at: kenisu.webs.com
The Inevitability of Filler
Garlic Jr. and the afterlife tournament…but…also the driving episode. So yeah. Filler.
Shonen fans more than anyone else are used to “filler” in their anime adaptations: material newly and usually exclusively added to the TV series to pad things out, stall for time, and generally wait for the manga to get further ahead.
By Heath Cutler
Whenever an anime adaptation of a concurrently produced manga series is being developed, it is almost inevitable that some anime-only material is created to “fill in” or buffer out specific manga events (hence it is often referred to as “filler”). For ages fans have questioned the necessity of filler material in the Dragon Ball anime series, especially when it comes in large doses, and the most consistent answer always given is that it was necessary to prevent the anime from catching up to the manga’s storyline. Considering that typically only one chapter was released per week and each weekly episode could cover material from multiple chapters, this answer makes sense.
However, unless you were lucky enough to follow the series during its serialization from 1984 to 1995 in Weekly Shonen Jump and the broadcast of its anime adaptation on Fuji TV, there has never been any solid evidence compiled to back up this response. Is it true? Is conceding to filler even a valid response? Did the anime adaptation of Dragon Ball really catch up with the manga’s storyline, and if it did, by how much and how quickly?
To get to the bottom of this quandary, we have to travel back to the very beginning of the anime, which debuted on 26 February 1986. At that point in time the manga had reached its 63rd chapter, having already been in serialization for over a year. Using each chapter’s sale date, it is possible to match up the manga chapter and anime episode released every week, comparing the difference in the amount of the manga’s storyline covered that given week.
The first true milestone reached by the anime series came in August 1987, just a year and a half after its premiere. At this point the anime staff had halved the initial backlog of available manga material from 62 chapters down to 31. Throughout the remainder of the anime series this gap never recovered much beyond this margin, remaining at either roughly equal to or less than 31 chapters. After September 1989, which marked the beginning of the Dragon Ball Z anime series, the chapter gap would never again come close to that and hovered somewhere between 10 to 20 chapters until the very end.
In June 1991 the series finally hit its smallest chapter gap between the manga and anime with only 10 chapters of material remaining. This coincidentally occurred with the broadcast of Dragon Ball Z episode 97, the now infamous episode where Freeza fires a blast into Planet Namek and declares it will explode within five minutes. Anyone familiar with the series will often make some sort of casual joke about it being the longest five minutes in history and proceed to blame the anime for making it even worse by stretching it out so much. However, did the anime really stretch it out?
Up until this point the series had been moving along rather consistently at an average rate of 1.3 chapters per episode, but following Freeza’s aforementioned statement, the point that the series hit its lowest chapter gap, everything slowed down a bit to an average rate of a single chapter per episode. So while it did take 10 episodes (DBZ 97-106) to cover this material, it also originally took 10 chapters (DB 319-328) in the manga. This change was no doubt done to ensure that the anime would not catch up with the manga any more than it already had. Immediately following the conclusion of the battle with Freeza, an anime-only arc featuring Garlic Jr. was created (bringing back the big bad from DBZ Movie 1), extending the gap back up to 22 chapters, the largest margin seen for the remainder of the series.
While there were numerous instances of short filler story arcs being created at previous points in the series, at no other point was it so paramount to truly avoid catching up with the manga. If the Garlic Jr. story arc had not been inserted at this point, the anime storyline would have entirely closed the gap with the manga within at most two and a half months and the series would more than likely have gone on hiatus. Think of it from the anime staff’s perspective. There would have been no way for them to plan ahead, especially with an author like Akira Toriyama, who typically created the story on the fly, often the very week he drew the chapter. While Toriyama would draw a chapter two weeks prior to it being published, the anime staff would begin planning an episode at minimum a month ahead of time. As you can imagine, they had no other choice but to insert filler material and double up the amount of available manga material.
While this quite definitively answers our question about filler material playing an essential role in preventing the anime from catching up with the manga, there is another unsung hero that plays quite a significant role in preventing this: syndication breaks. While television series in Japan don’t run in season formats, at least not as typically seen in counties like the United States, they do sometimes take weeks off due to special broadcasts covering various sports, news, or national events. Believe it or not, even with the use of filler material as was originally produced for the series, the anime would have caught up to the manga by Dragon Ball Z episode 48 if not for having spent roughly 20 weeks on break by that point. Conversely, if not for these breaks, it is more than likely that even more filler material would have been produced for the series. We would not just have Garlic Jr. and the afterlife tournament, but something else entirely added into the mix!
This does also make one wonder how fast the anime would have actually caught up without the use of any filler material. To figure that out it is a simple matter of subtracting out the full episodes of filler material. Up until that point 31 filler episodes had been created between Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z. Therefore one can assume that with no filler material and no syndication breaks, the series would have caught up to the manga by Dragon Ball Z episode 17, putting the series somewhere around Chiaotzu’s suicide attack against Nappa.
In the end, filler is an inevitable part of the anime industry that doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon. For the companies involved, it is their solution to avoiding the loss of syndication time and advertising revenue. For the fans, it helps ensure that a new episode of their favorite long-running series airs each week, whether they like it or not.
HEATH (“Hujio”) is one of the co-founders of Kanzenshuu. He documents a lot of stuff there.
Homages…in Filler?! Journey West!
Fan of Dragon Ball? You need to read the original journey!
By Mike LaBrie
Many fans are at least vaguely familiar with Journey to the West, if only in concept, Toriyama’s original inspiration for some of the characters in the Dragon Ball series. The 16th century novel tells the tale of a wandering priest accompanied by a collective of beastly disciples working to atone for their sins. Their
ultimate goal is a series of holy scrolls located in India, and thus their journey westward from China.
Son Goku’s name is literally just the Japanese reading of the Chinese name “Sun Wukong,” and the other carryovers in the character should be obvious: he’s a monkey with an extending pole that uses his “somersault cloud” to transport himself far and wide through the sky. Zhu Bajie, or “Pigsy” as he is often called, should be another obvious parallel; the lecherous Oolong is his clear cousin. The priest Xuanzang is the last of the more obvious parallels; his search for the scrolls mirrors Bulma’s search for the Dragon Balls as she collects her own friends along the way.
Once we get past these surface level similarities (and the occasional other reference, such as the Ox Demon King taking his name directly from the early chapters of Journey to the West as well), Toriyama heads in his own story-telling direction with the Tenka’ichi Budokai, the Red Ribbon Army, and onward from there.
But that’s not it for Journey to the West in the Dragon Ball series. Enter: filler material.
The Original Story
Two monsters conspire to kidnap Xuanzang; eating his flesh will grant them long life. Silver Horn (the younger brother)