Although it may seem incredible now, Dragon Ball was almost canceled prematurely: the anime, despite being at its peak quality, was losing audience in Japan because the public continued to associate Akira Toriyama with the silliness of Dr. Slump (which, to be honest, was what he really liked). In the end, determined to give it a more adult twist, they not only made Goku grow up, but also chose the director of Saint Seiya for the anime; thus, Dragon Ball Z was born, a series that the author hoped would be the last… because he had run out of ideas. Little did he know that they would end up making 291 episodes over six and a half years and creating a legend along the way.
Kamehame, Master Toriyama!
Although it is no longer the case, in the past, manga authors had little say in the anime, which was left in the hands of the studio and the network. However, Toriyama was somewhat involved at the beginning of Dragon Ball, where he chose the voice actors and even requested that the color choices be different from those of Dr. Slump, as he wanted to give it a different tone as a pure and hard shonen fighting series. They listened to him, yes, but beyond some designs for the movies (and needing his approval for the vast majority of the merchandising), the author was left out of the anime, as demonstrated years later by the mere existence of Dragon Ball GT.
However, on February 18, 1986, a week before the premiere of the first episode on Fuji TV, the mangaka had a feature in Weekly Shonen Jump, which revealed the secrets of the series. Nothing unusual for anyone who knows something about animation, except for a small detail: you could see an image of Toriyama holding a drawing of Son Goku made by him. The text read “He was able to draw his own key frame and see the process by which it became an animation sheet.” So… did a drawing by the author end up in his own anime?
The answer is that sadly no. Despite having a drawing from the master himself, it is most likely that Toriyama had it framed on the wall or that Toei possesses it and has it stored somewhere. The only thing that is clear is that this image of Goku with the staff in hand was never seen on any channel, and it became a lost work that now, a year and a half after his death, it would be incredible to recover.
Over the years, Toriyama stopped enjoying anime and even stated that he was openly displeased with what had been done with his work: “For a while, Dragon Ball became something of the past, but then I got angry about the live-action movie, I rewrote a complete script and now I complain about the quality of the new anime, so it seems that it has grown on me so much that I can’t just leave it alone“. Dragon Ball Super, at that time, had terrible animation quality, to be honest, and no one knew what to do about it. Who knows, maybe they could have drawn on a certain forgotten image to rediscover what made it special.
