 If you are anything like me, then you are first. What you're doing to Dragon Ball Z was after school, around the early 2000 knots, and you were captivated by these monk-looking guys and girls dressed in really cool robes, particular Goku's super, super cool haircut. Of course the most enticing thing about it all was his ability to tap into energy levels were completely, what's the word, you would have not, you would not have guessed an ordinary looking guy, or at least a humble looking guy like that would have been able to tap into, but I guess other than the fact that he was jacked, but you saw that first started really tapping into, which I guess I started on the cell saga and I was just drawn into the initial animation and the idea, the mysticism behind it, the harnessing of energy and of course the duality between good and evil just became a really, kind of the glue that stuck me to the entire series from then on. So as the story unfolded, it just got better and better and more archetypal and into a vision for the supernatural that I was inclined towards. So anyways, Dragon Ball Z for me was a huge part of my later childhood, because I actually didn't find out about it until one of my neighborhood friends told me about it. And yeah, it just always held a place near and dear to me in my heart, because it has so many of those timeless elements to it. So without further ado, we're going to tap into the history behind the famous sagas that kept millions of children glued to their afternoon television sets and kept them from getting sunburned and scraped up and breathing fresh air for years for at least a half hour every day to their big dismay. So Dragon Ball Z, you don't need to be a supreme Kai to know how much of an influenced Dragon Ball Z he had on well on me, but the world of anime, there's a lot more to this franchise than just fights, spiky hair, the screaming at the top of your lungs to increase your power. Even though I admittedly did that plenty of times, trying to tap into my own super saiyan believed super saiyan power, the same tale of Goku and his friends branches back all the way to 1984 and has more twists and turns than Snake Way. With over five hundred billion, oh sorry, five billion, five hundred billion. Probably going to happen soon though. Five billion in franchise sales. Dragon Ball Z is a cornerstone of Japanese animation and a cultural phenomena. So although I initially got into Dragon Ball Z, I of course very quickly discovered that it had a predecessor in Dragon Ball, and it was the predecessor to Dragon Ball Kai, Dragon Ball GT, and the Dragon Ball Empire franchise, exploring the four anime series, Dragon Ball Z GT. That's the five if you count Dragon Ball Kai, but I honestly stopped at Dragon Ball Z. So this isn't the tale of a die-hard Dragon Ball Z fan, but certainly was a significant player in my childhood. It's upon 19 movies, I honestly didn't realize it had that many movies. Over five hundred chapters of manga, over five hundred chapters of manga, nearly a hundred video games, which that's the most, that's definitely the most, like a surprising number, that's so many. Multiple Universal Studio Rides, all kinds of ridiculous memes, and of course it's over nine thousand. It is a landmark event in internet memes. Shenron has finally answered your wish. As you can tell I'm tapping into an article here about Dragon Ball's history, so it's a looper article. If you guys want to go track it down, it's called The Untold Truth of Dragon Ball Z. So it's gonna have a bunch of corny literary attempts to, it's not gonna have a bunch of corny phrases in it. Nonetheless, here we go. Goku's journey began with Akira Toriyama, the creator of Dragon Ball. With his first Dragon Ball manga chapter in 1984, the issue of weekly Shonen Jump. But his origin actually starts way before that. Toriyama, who'd already won multiple awards for his hit comedy manga. I'm recently starting to pronounce it in manga as I realize that's more popular. So forgive me for the slip up. Dr. Slump. So Toriyama originally had a hit comedy here, but he wanted to just try something very, very different. A big departure from what he had already made. He turned to older folklore, in particular the 16th century novel Journey to the West. So this was a tapped into it. I keep saying that, I don't know why. I looked it up, Google it is an extended account of the legendary pilgrimage of the Tang Dynasty Buddhist monk, Wayne Zhang, who traveled to the western regions that is Central Asia and India To obtain Buddhist sacred texts or sutras returned after many trials and much suffering Tains the broad outline of Wang Zhang's, Wan Zhang's on the western region The novel adds elements from folktales and the author's invention, that is the Gatmo Buddha Gave this task to the monk, referred to as Tang, Sun Zeng, in the novel And provided him with three protectors who agree to help him as an atonement for their sins These disciples are Sun Wukong, Zubai and Xia Wuzhin Together with a dragon prince who acts as Tang Zezeng's steed, a white horse Journey to the West has strong roots in Chinese folk literature, Chinese mythology, Taoist and Buddhist philosophy And the pantheon of Taoist immortals and Buddhist bodhisattvas are still reflective of some Chinese religious attitudes today Enduringly popular, the tale is at once a comic adventure story, a humorous satire of Chinese bureaucracy A spring of spiritual insight and an extended allegory in which the groups of pilgrims journey towards enlightenment by the power and virtue of cooperation Going back to Toriyama, there is clear analogies between Dragon Ball Saga, the Dragon Ball Universe And a lot of its characters and the original texts Or at least the popular text of Journey to the West Toriyama's editor in fact, Kazuhiko Torishima, explained that Journey to the West was used because it was basically free intellectual property Which in itself is actually a very popular thing to do for large profit making companies nowadays And if you're not sure what I'm referencing, just think of all the original Disney animated films that you grew up on If you're from the West, and in fact if you're not from the West, I'm genuinely curious, I'd be fascinated to know if you're really from any non-English speaking country I would love to hear if you guys either watched Disney movies as well, or you had your own version of animated movies or any type of entertainment that was as ubiquitous For people's childhoods as it was in the States, I mean there's rarely anybody I've met over here at least that hasn't watched a surplus of Disney animations And honestly you might be led to believe that Disney is this big evil corporation, or at least a corporation large enough to not solicit any sympathy or perhaps respect creatively nowadays But Walt Disney himself was actually a really intelligent guy for using all of the works that were not copyrighted in the intellectual domain So it's called public domain stories when you don't have to pay royalties to anybody to use the creative intellectual property of it And in fact, with a quick few taps of the keyboard, I found that a nice little list and I'll just read some of the top movies in their subsequent profits earned by Disney By using them all of these were not original ideas, they were works that were not only not Walt Disney's but they were old enough to at the time already have been in the public domain So Alice in Wonderland earned Disney a cool 1.02 billion with a B dollars and that was originally from Lewis Carroll's book in 1865 Aladdin, at least half a billion dollars is from a folktale, just one of the tales in 1001 Nights, which was originally from 1706 Some other big ones are Beauty and the Beast from G.S. Barbeau, Dave Villachman, Villeneuve Névis, Villeneuve, sounds like a French name from 1775 Before we were even declared a nation over here in the States, earned 425 million dollars, but Bugs Life is actually, I honestly didn't know this one, it's from Aesop's fables Aesop's fables were a collection of fables credited to the slave Aesop who lived in ancient Greece between 620 and 564 BC Wow, Jesus, so he's 500 years older than Jesus Before Socrates, Plato realized they were that old, Bugs Life gave him 360 million dollars And then there's a whole slew of others, Chicken Little, Christmas Carol, Fantasia, which was a score based on Bach, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and older classical compositions And then Frozen was actually from Hans Christian Andersen's Ice Queen, created in 1845, and of course Hercules, John Carter was from Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1917, The Little Mermaid I don't know, same guy as the Frozen, the Ice Queen creator, Pinocchio, Boca Hones, Sleeping Beauty, Tangled, the Brothers Grimm fairy tale of Rapunzel And even The Lion King was inspired from Shakespeare's Hamlet in 1603 Wow, it apparently was from, and that was inspired from the Japanese animated series called Kimba the White Lion The Journey West was used because it was basically free intellectual property, that's the whole point we're going off on there The Journey West, for any of you guys who might be familiar, the famous actor Jet Li and also the newly, well relatively to me The other famous martial artist, Donnie Yen, they both starred in movies called The Monkey King and Journey to the West And even Jackie Chan actually was in one too, so there's been a lot of adaptations of this movie, arming of this fable story And there's actually a slew, and the most recent one coming up that's, looks like it's getting a lot of flak for not using actual Asians in their roles, it's called whitewashing Which is, I think it's understandable, that's a whole other ball of wax though, some interesting stuff on whitewashing If you care to go down that rabbit hole on YouTube, there's a lot of actually really brilliant videos about that, kind of video essays In The Matrix and Doctor Strange, for instance, there's another one, the famous bald sorcerer lady he goes to was originally Asian in the comics, I guess Oh and Ghost in the Shell, using Scarlett Johansson instead of an actual Asian lady, because it's an Asian actress You know, I mean, who doesn't like Scarlett Johansson, but I honestly did expect them to use an Asian actress, but I don't know, I guess there's two sides to that story, because although it is an adaptation from an Asian source material At the same time, if you're arguing that a person has to look a certain way in order for it to be authentic, in essence you're kind of discriminating based on skin color and surface looks In a way that makes you seem like a racist in a way, but I'm not trying to get into that, I'm just saying there could be arguments made for both sides, but I guess a reason I brought that up was because Netflix is working with some other big companies to once again recreate an adaptation of Journey to the West, so yeah, this is extremely, and it's very, you know, rightfully so, it's got a little bit of everything, it's got mystical elements, it's got a diverse range of rich, very interesting characters It taps into the mysticism of religion, spirituality, it feeds our will to power, Nietzsche's famous phrase, by every character in the world access to this energy source Like when they do the spirit pawn, and Goku has to ask all the inhabitants of Earth to put their hands up so that he can use their energy, that in itself is a great analogy almost of the adrenaline philosophy of the entire series That really taps into a very uplifting idea that we all harness some form of the energy field in ourselves, and it's just a matter of tapping into it with enough meditation which I confess I definitely did as a kid I remember, it was probably after Gohan was shown by Piccolo just how powerful he really was, and the is what it is, so that I remember sitting on my bed I remember sitting on my bed and literally for what seemed like an eternity for a, you know, a 13 year old kid who was about 10 minutes trying meditating and forming a chi-ball and using my force And it did not work, I got a lot out of this series, so I think it's an enduring work, and of course the source material from Journey to the West is an even more pervasive cultural artifact That isn't going to go away anytime soon, just because it has all the right elements of a great enduring tale, and so does Dragon Ball So I didn't get to the meat of this article yet, but I wanted to give you guys a nice background so that next time we can really break down delve deep into specifically Dragon Ball and its lore and its relation to the Journey to the West characters So I'm going to leave it there for now, and I really want to hear what kind of stories you guys were brought up on speaking about that Disney tangent I would be really fascinating to know if you guys watched Disney movies in non-English Europe or Asia or India or Australia or Africa Let me know, I'd be really curious, I mean, and I assume South America did just because Spanish, I feel like everything was translated into Spanish at some point, if it's big enough and Lord knows, Disney is definitely big enough So I'm looking forward to hearing your feedback about this episode, I'm really excited about it, I loved it, it was really fun talking about it, and I love learning the relation between modern and historical events Like me and shenanigans, we weren't talking, but actually I was about to say he or she, I can't tell based on your goofy profile picture, but if you listen to this, thanks shenanigans for your really insightful comments about the ancient Greeks And just how their perception was so much different than ours, and how learning about that can really help us comprehend and categorize more just where our values lie nowadays relative to historical events And it kind of just helps you know just where you are in the history, and that's what I love about these stories, is that there's so much rich literature out there that it's really cool that people can recycle it And put it to good use so it doesn't get lost, so we're not endlessly repeating the same mistakes Because it doesn't matter how old certain things are, if there's value there's value, you know, it might need to be restylized for a modern audience, but the core of the story is still the same