How Dragon Ball, DBZ, & GT Turned the Passage of Time Into Its Greatest Quality '

Few anime franchises can claim to have remained as popular and relevant as Dragon Ball for as long as it has. Created in 1986, Dragon Ball became an international phenomenon shortly after its inception and has captured the popular imagination for nearly four decades.

The Dragon Ball series is almost forty years old, which is significant because Goku, the iconic hero of the series, is just under forty years old at the start of Dragon Ball Super, the latest installment in the series. a bigger plot. This closeness between the age of the franchise and the age of the show's main protagonist has played an interesting and crucial role in fan perception of the show over the years. As Goku grew and experienced the changes and maturation that come with any human life (despite the fact that he's not actually human), the fans grew with him, giving them the perfect foundation to prepare them for the struggles that lie ahead. go through; none of them can be as difficult as fighting alien demons with the power to destroy Earth at will.

How Goku Aging with the Audience Makes Him Different From Other Anime Heroes

While it would seem like a pretty natural thing for Goku to age over time, it's actually not the rule in the anime. Other hugely popular series like Pokemon and Case Closed are notorious for keeping their recognizable young heroes relatively the same age throughout their decade-long runs.

Keeping Ash Ketchum the same age has the added benefit of keeping him a familiar face, as well as allowing him to hang with the same age group throughout. However, it has the potential to alienate older fans who can no longer identify with the hero of the series. Goku's age actually had the opposite effect. His journey through life mirrors that of his audience, making him the perfect hero who exemplifies a person's growth and maturation throughout life.

Dragon Ball and Goku's Early Shonen Life

Goku started the Dragon Ball series at the tender age of 10. This made him slightly younger than the target audience of shonen anime and manga, which tends to target teenage boys. However, Dragon Ball's themes, running gags, and action have always appealed to the target audience, not missing out on young adults. This made it natural for Goku to see a significant change during the time jump at the end of the series that definitively brought him into his late teens.

Dragon Ball was first serialized in 1984, and the second part of the series, which became Dragon Ball Z, ran from 1988 to 1995. During those four years between Goku's adult life and his pre-teens, Dragon Ball used several methods to bring him . to the twenty-four-year-old man standing at the start of DBZ. First, the series took place over the course of several years, often giving Goku periods of training during times of peace. The two most significant time jumps come before the 22nd and 23rd Tenkaichi Budokai Tournaments. The first one ages Goku for three years, from thirteen to sixteen, while the second one takes another three years, making him nineteen years old. Nineteen is a suitable final age for Goku in this period, as it means he has officially passed the target age range of shonen anime, which is somewhere between nine and eighteen. Dragon Ball followed Goku throughout his prime until he was old enough to start a family and have a son of his own.

DBZ Follows Goku's Maturation to Adulthood

At the start of DBZ, Goku is in his early twenties – around twenty-four to be exact. This makes him not too far from the target shonen age group in age, while also giving him some leeway to make him an idealized character that kids can look up to. At the same time, as the older fan base that grew up with him ages, they can probably begin to see parallels in how Goku's life has changed alongside their own.

Goku is married to Chi-Chi and has a son named Gohan. He has grown from a naive boy to a man who approaches every match with hope and even excitement, knowing that it will only make him stronger. He also became the champion of the 23rd Tenkaichi Budokai Tournament, signifying that he had reached a milestone and grown into someone he could be proud of. Still, Goku never stops training and working hard, which keeps him ready for the future struggles that life has to throw his way.

At this point, fans who were fourteen when Dragon Ball first started would now be nineteen and well into their twenties by the time DBZ ends. The DBZ anime adaptation ended in 1996, a full ten years after the series began. During that time, Goku reached a new level of strength, raised and guided his son to become even stronger than him, and even had another son, Goten. While Dragon Ball taught lessons of courage and learning through experience, DBZ provided a blueprint for protecting those one loves and raising a family. Goku wasn't perfect as a father or husband, but fans could learn as much from his mistakes as from his successes. The end of Dragon Ball Z ends with one final time jump, leaving Goku forty-one years old at the end of the series. He ends the series as a mature martial artist who has saved the world many times and takes on a student to pass on the lessons he has learned to the next generation.

Dragon Ball GT was an Appeal to Nostalgia For Longtime Fans

The next step in Goku's story would be Dragon Ball GT, released in 1996 just a week after the end of the DBZ anime. The story picks up right after the previous series ended, with Goku, who is in his forties, training his student Uuba. When it comes to Goku's personal development, Dragon Ball GT occupies an interesting place in his development. For many fans, instead of being a real period of growth alongside them like the rest of the series had been up to this point, it was almost like a step backwards.

In a way, Goku had something of a mid-life crisis in GT. After being turned back into a child by a wish in the dragon balls, Goku returned in a way to the glory days of early Dragon Ball when he went on an adventure with his granddaughter and the teenage son of his lifelong friend. GT definitely tried to appeal to nostalgia and made Goku a kid again like he was at the beginning of the series, but it undermined the sense of him maturing over the years. In the same way that Dragon Ball and DBZ appealed to fans by having Goku grow up next to them, GT had the opposite effect - alienating fans. While Goku's adventures in GT were fun and exciting, they were also shallow in a way that treated Goku's journey more as an escape than an important step in his self-realization.

Mythology, Religion, and Dragon Ball Super

Dragon Ball Super moves the clock forward a bit from GT and picks things back up where the Buu Saga DBZ left off. In Super, Goku is well over thirty, but not as old as he was at the end of DBZ. He had gone through numerous transformations throughout his life up to that point, literally as a Super Saiyan and psychologically as an adult. He fought in great battles that taught him valuable lessons and emerged as a martial arts master respected by all who knew him. After he had achieved everything he had set his sights on on the mortal plane, his gaze began to move on.

As Goku aged and gained new levels of power, he achieved supernatural feats of strength that in many ways mirror those of the actual mythological gods of antiquity. These gods were created to help explain the unknown in simple terms that the common man could understand and to help people reconcile the mysteries of life with their everyday existence. In a way, Goku's literal journey, from being a strange child to uniting with the unknown, mimics the journeys of all humans from childhood to adulthood. Ultimately, each person must face the very unknown mysteries that religious myths were created to solve.

Dragon Ball's cosmology has grown exponentially in Super, much like the human understanding of the universe in real life. There are divine beings powerful enough to wipe the entire universe out of existence with the snap of a finger, like Zeno, and beings who can literally grant any wish, like Super Shenron. Goku's final step in Dragon Ball Super is about learning to face these unknown mysteries head on in order to become one with those divine beings when it's his turn to leave Earth behind.

Dragon Ball Super is still being serialized, although some speculate that the series may end in 2024 or 25. If the series ended in 2025, the entire franchise would be thirty-nine years old - almost the age Goku was at the end of DBZ. Fans of the original Dragon Ball series, who were there at its birth, continue to grow with the franchise, so they begin to try to study and understand the unknown mysteries of the world, just like Goku. No matter what the next phase of Goku's adventure in Dragon Ball Super might be, fans will be right there taking the next step in life's journey by his side.