Dragon Ball Anime

Within a short amount of time Dragon Ball had reached a level of popularity in Japan that convinced the people of Toei Animation to produce both an anime series and a feature film based on the characters.

The anime series premiered in February 1986 on Fuji Television, running weekly and in prime time with new episodes every Wednesday night.

The anime series that was produced closely matched the manga that it was based on, but this had the major drawback that the anime would often catch up to the current point in the manga and the animators were left to create additional episodes and situations to allow them time for more source material to be written. Such material in the series was often of a lower quality than the original manga and occasionally would directly contradict information that would be provided in the source material later. This is perhaps unsurprising due to the difficulty of producing 20 minutes of animation each week, with only 14 pages of manga to work from.

In December of 1986, the first theatrical film version of the anime was produced. Simply titled "Dragon Ball" (When released on VHS, the subtitle "The Legend of Shenlong" was added), it retold the events of the first several episodes of the anime series. The movie was followed by additional movies in the July of 1987 ("The Sleeping Princess in the Devil's Castle") and the July of 1988 ("Mystical Great Adventure").

Because of the popularity of the title in Japan, three video games (all for the Nintendo Family Computer) were produced. The first, released in 1986 as "The Mystery of Shenlong", was the only action game of the three. The other two (released in 1988 and 1989) were card game/board game hybrids.

The anime series ended in April 1989 after 153 episodes (and Goku's transition to adulthood). Although the animated series ended, fans did not have to wait long for the continuation of the story. The sequel anime, Dragon Ball Z debuted the following week.