If you thought that “Dragon Ball”He continued to the Majin Buu saga because Toriyama was super motivated, think about it again. In a recent interview, his exEditors Kazuhiko Torishima, Yu Kondo and Fuyuto Takeda released several bombs about what really happened behind the scenes.
During the Cell saga, Toriyama was ready to close the curtain and move on with his life. But the editorial did not agree. Although at the beginning they did not take their intention to finish, in the end they put pressure to continue. Takeda, one of his editors, was always on his side and tried to make his life easier, but still the series ended up spreading two and a half more years. Toriyama probably thought that he only had a few weeks or months left, but the reality was another.
When Toriyama asked if he liked to design new characters, he confessed that he really had more fun to create round and funny figures. The solution? Create Majin Buu, a villain with tender and comical appearance. Torishima insisted that the series had to end before, but the editors noticed that Toriyama was having fun with this last part. Clear example? The absurd gags such as the Kamikaze Ghost of Gotenks attack, which left editors between surprised and confused.
After the madness of time travel and paradoxes in the Cell saga, Toriyama decided that it was enough with complicated plots. The Majin Buu saga became a kind of respite: less tangled logic, more comedy and pure chaos in Dr. Slump. Mr. Satan's character got into the story with the idea of putting more humor, and in the end he ended up being key to saving the world.
Another crazy fact: Toriyama never wanted to create Frieza. His editor Kondo had the rule that a character had to look “cool” to work, and Freezer was more an editorial pressure than something that Toriyama really enjoyed drawing. In fact, Toriyama reached a point where he no longer wanted to draw Freezer, which led to Cell creation.
But even with Cell there were problems: its original design was more insectoid, and the editors thought it was not attractive enough as a villain. When they gave him a more humanoid appearance, his acceptance improved. The logic behind this came from previous experiences: in “Dragon Ball”, every time an enemy was too monstrous or huge (such as giant apes), popularity fell. So they opted to maintain the fighting between more similar characters in size.
Although Toriyama always did his best, over time his enthusiasm was declining. Ten years later, when they proposed to do something new with the series, he simply replied that he no longer seemed fun. During the Buu saga and the end of Frieza's, he still had fresh energy and ideas, but over the years his interest was changing. The Toriyama of before, the one who put crazy ideas and enjoyed making absurd gags, was no longer equally motivated.
Despite the insistence of the publisher, Toriyama managed to close the story in its own way with the BUU saga. It was a more relaxed ending, with less complications and more fun. These details show that, although “Dragon Ball” was a worldwide phenomenon, its creator had to deal with many pressures to maintain balance between its creativity and what the publisher wanted to sell. In other words, which could have ended with Cell, ended up extending by pure external insistence.
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(Tagstotranslate) Dragon-Ball
