As a child, I didn't understand why cartoon characters had a kind of amnesia between episodes. What happened in one was forgotten or ignored in the next, creating isolated stories.
Long before I heard about narrative arcs, transmedia and other terms that generate fictional universes, I thought there was a great potential being wasted there.
And not that it was a very crazy idea, from another world. Soap operas already existed, after all.
“Dragon Ball Z” was the first contact I had with an animation with a continuous story.
Even too much: sometimes two characters spent three, four episodes staring at each other and moaning before getting beat up. In others, when the animated series reached the manga (a situation I only found out years later), it got “fillers”, bad stories to wait for the manga to move forward.
This Friday (8), we heard the news that Akira Toriyama, the creator of “Dragon Ball”, died at the age of 68.
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I don't think I would be able to watch his most famous work again, much less the sequences that, I think, are still ongoing. (A few years ago I saw a blue-haired Goku. I didn't understand and I was too lazy to find out what was going on.)
Another merit of “Dragon Ball” that I only recognized later is the fact that it is an openly childish production. (As long as we ignore the non-edifying message that any and all problems can be solved by actually fighting.)
“Dragon Ball” takes itself seriously in a silly way, which only a child can accept without finding the whole situation kind of ridiculous. No wonder, the parts that I still find funny are the ones that take themselves less seriously, like Mr. Satan and the anticlimax of the Z sword.
If I almost became an otaku one day (and I was this close), it was Akira's fault.
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