So shortly after my last video on my review of the Resurrection F arc in Dragon Ball Super, Twitter user M1806B posted a screenshot highlighting creator Akira Toriyama's message to fans of Dragon Ball in the recently published Dragon Ball Super History Book. The Super History Book, as the title suggests, features the history of the Dragon Ball franchise since its debut in the 1980s. The book also includes a long interview with Toriyama and his thoughts on the franchise in the last 30 years and what he thinks of it now. Among the things he openly expresses are his thoughts on the recent Dragon Ball Super Anime series.
The translation comes from the DBZ board on reddit and it writes the following:
"Dragon Ball once became a thing of the past to me, but after that, I got angry about the live action movie, re-wrote an entire movie script, and now I'm complaining about the quality of the new TV anime, so it seems that Dragon Ball has grown on me much that I can't leave it alone."
Just to put his statement into detail, the live action movie Toriyama's talking about refers to the Hollywood film "Dragon Ball Evolution" from 2009 by 20th Century Fox. The very same movie studio behind the terrible Fantastic Four movie from last year. So you can't put two-and-two together. If you haven't seen Dragon Ball Evolution, don't. It's just plain awful.
About rewriting an entire movie script, he's referring to the movie version of Battle of Gods. Now I personally do not have the details of Toriyama having to rewrite the script for the movie. But I assume the initial draft didn't go very well either by him or from the brass at Toei that resulted in the rewrite, and again for the TV arc in Dragon Ball Super.
Finally, the last part of his statement obviously refers to the overall quality of Dragon Ball Super. And he's not alone here. Shujiro Hamakawa, one of the Animators behind Dragon Ball Super, has also expressed his frustations on the lack of quality control over the series. Again with the translation from reddit, he writes:
"Dragon ______, where I'm working at the moment, is beyond help. The animation director can only check the layout for the next 10 days. No matter what, the quality can't be guaranteed. Who messed the schedule up, and when?"
So you have it straight from the creator's mouth that Dragon Ball Super pretty much sucks. Having said that, there's really not much Toriyama can do about it. Although he is indeed the man behind the Dragon Ball franchise, legally speaking, he doesn't own Dragon Ball at all. It is Toei's Intellecual Property. It's just like how Stan Lee, despite being the creator of many superheroes from Marvel, no longer has any creative control over them. Marvel does. Same with George Lucas. He created Star Wars, but Disney now owns it and the company can do whatever they want whether or not Lucas likes it.
As far as Toei is concerned, Toriyama's comments means nothing and they can continue to do Dragon Ball, with or without Toriyama's seal of approval. We've seen this before with Dragon Ball GT. Still, it is not everyday that a creator of something like Dragon Ball criticizes the company for not putting any effort on the quality of the product. At the very least we know Toriyama's stance on this and what we should expect when the Champa Arc in the Dragon Ball Super Anime begins.
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