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Originally posted by: ricarleite
Yes DragonBall was a manga/anime, altough not a very good one, a huge success during the late 80s early 90s.
Akira Toryama actually had decided to end Dragon Ball at the end of the Freeza saga, killing Goku. His publisher did not like it at all, as DB was a huge success, and demanded him to continue the series - which got very silly after that, with robots, time travel, and magic powers and body fusions. After the ending of DBZ, they tried to continue the anime series (not the manga) with Dragon Ball GT (stands from "Grand Tour"), with 56 episodes.
64 episodes, actually, plus one special.
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It's horrible, and almost didn't envolve Toryama at all, who was "busy" with other projects.
Dragon Ball was not a good manga/anime, altough Toryama can be funny and creatived when he wants to. I'd recomend it to 10-15 year old kids.
Personally, I liked GT much more than I liked Z... at least at first, and then only the Japanese subtitled versions (FUNimation, who does the English version, for some reason really likes to screw the show up when they play it in English... in GTs case, they even skipped the first fifteen episodes).
The original Dragon Ball was also a fun, lighthearted adventure. It's DBZ where the problems are... it has a ton of characters who basically sit around and stare in shock while two people go head to head, the fights last way too long... and the last two villains (Cell and Buu) were practically the same, concept-wise (That is, they were both villains who become stronger by absorbing their enemies).
I do agree, however, that there are better manga out there that unfortunately are mostly overlooked by the American public because they associate it with crap like DBZ.