What Toriyama Buried Under All That Screaming

At some flea market, maybe age ten, I found the first two volumes of the Dragon Ball manga. I read them until the spines cracked. When the anime started airing I knew immediately that something real was happening—not just a cartoon but a thing that would stick.

The early arc is still the one I love: Son Goku and Bulma wandering a world that felt genuinely strange, chasing dragon balls through landscapes that scrambled Chinese folklore, science fiction, and complete tonal chaos. Bulma’s perfect tits. The comedy that had room to breathe. The sense that anything could happen and most of it was going to be fun.

Then the Saiyans arrived, then the power levels, then months of screaming in empty wastelands with golden hair crackling at maximum volume—and I understood that we were in a different show now, one that had traded mystery for escalation and wasn’t coming back. I watched it anyway, dutifully, but the thing that had grabbed me was already gone.

The Wisecrack channel has a video that unpacks the philosophy buried in the series—Buddhist ideas about the self, the circular relationship between strength and suffering, the way Son Goku maps onto archetypes that predate superheroes by centuries. Akira Toriyama was doing something more considered than the endless power-level escalation makes it look. It’s there if you want to find it.

I’d still rather he brought it back to where it started. Adventures. Strange landscapes. Treasure hunts. The perfect tits of Bulma.