THE LIBRARY

Drunken Master, an editor's kung fu plan, and Journey to the West, in Toriyama's stated record.

Z was a 1989 TV rebranding. Toriyama picked the last letter because he wanted to stop.

One world: Goku chased General Blue into Penguin Village in chapter 81, and Arale finished the fight.

519 chapters, a debut three months after Dr. Slump, and a circulation peak of 6.53 million in the final year.

A geezer, a China doll, and a bug monster: the phone calls that rebuilt the villains, in Toriyama's own retelling.

A 1986 Epoch shooter almost nobody has seen, and the Famicom game America received with its own name scrubbed off.

Japan named it for a shout in the theme song. America renamed it for a tournament, and the split lasted nineteen years.

Volume 1 in Japanese and English side by side, the four Japanese editions of the manga, and the doors to the craft, anime, and games questions.

42 tankobon, 34 kanzenban with new Toriyama covers and a rewritten ending, 32 Full Color volumes, and 18 magazine sized volumes: one manga, four Japanese shapes.

No plan, a storyboard that doubled as the draft, one assistant, a G pen good for forty pages, and a manuscript driven to Nagoya Airport after all night sessions.

Animator Toyoo Ashida's taut line taught his pen speed, Goku had to grow up, and Super Saiyan hair stayed uninked to save the blacking in.

About 38 pure filler episodes in 291: the Garlic Jr. arc, a fake Namek, a driving test, an afterlife tournament, and the stretched fights in between.

Chi-Chi ordered it, in episode 125 from February 5, 1992, the anime original driving test that became the most beloved filler in the series.

He named it, drew its cast, its robot, and its spaceship, and called the 64 episode Toei sequel a grand side story of the original Dragon Ball.

291 episodes became 159, the voices were recorded again, and the new Yamamoto score was withdrawn in 2011 and replaced with Kikuchi's original music.

Shunsuke Kikuchi, of Kamen Rider and Doraemon: 23 packages and hundreds of pieces for Dragon Ball and Z, still touring concert halls.

Toriyama chose Masako Nozawa from the auditions in 1986. She also voices Gohan, Goten, and Bardock, and holds two Guinness world records for the role.

Dimps' 2002 PlayStation 2 fighter: the anime rebuilt in 3D, 3.5 million copies shipped, a rebuild ordered by Torishima, and a score replaced in the HD remaster.

518,000 sold in Japan against roughly 140,000 in America, despite a two million dollar campaign built on a joke about smell.

It arrived in April 2006 as the Game Boy Advance died, and Nintendo's on-record answer was that it just did not make business sense.

No single blocker kept it away. Iwata credited the fans on Miiverse for the 2013 return, and Beginnings followed in 2015.

The Player's Guide was packed inside in place of a manual. Mother 2's red box is the other half of the pair.

Shigesato Itoi's 1989 RPG of modern America: baseball bats, psychic children, a shelved American version, and the 2015 return as EarthBound Beginnings.

The 1989 album that turned a Famicom score into English pop songs, sung in London by a fourteen year old and the choir of St Paul's Cathedral.

Three games, two countries, one red wordmark: the Japanese and American boxes for Mother, EarthBound, and Mother 3 side by side, with the histories and questions behind them.

Ape and HAL's 1994 sequel: Ness and the eight Sanctuaries, the five year making, the American flop, and the classic it became.

Lucas and the Nowhere Islands: twelve years, four consoles, a cancelled 3D version, and the 2006 Game Boy Advance game Japan kept.

Starmen.net's two year volunteer localization of Mother 3, led by professional translator Clyde Mandelin: 1,000 pages of script, 100,000 downloads in a week.

Shigesato Itoi has answered for a decade, in his own words: making a fourth Mother is, as he put it, totally impossible.

The 3D Mother 3 died in August 2000. Miyamoto blamed the GameCube's claim on the team, Iwata blamed himself, and Itoi published the whole conversation.

Red crosses off hospitals, bars turned into cafes, a band redrawn to avoid a lawsuit: Mother 2 became EarthBound under Nintendo of America's 1990s content rules.

Itoi traced the final battle's dialogue to a film scene he walked into as a child and misunderstood. The fetus theory, he never said: the record, separated.

From a foggy trip to Nepal to a worldwide hit: the history of The Vision of Escaflowne, Sunrise's 1996 fantasy mecha series, its manga, film, game, and editions.

Shoji Kawamori conceived Escaflowne after a trip to Nepal's foggy mountains: mecha plus divination, researched through Atlantis and the Bermuda Triangle.

The first Escaflowne was a 39-episode, male-oriented action series under director Yasuhiro Imagawa. It was shelved, then rebuilt by Kazuki Akane into the 1996…

Sunrise built Escaflowne as a deliberate fusion of shōnen mecha action and shōjo romance, animated in 1996, with extended scenes restored for Japanese home video.

Nobuteru Yuki, the character designer of the Record of Lodoss War OVA, designed Escaflowne's cast. Hitomi was the first character he ever designed completely…

Kimitoshi Yamane and Junya Ishigaki designed Escaflowne's Guymelefs, working from Shoji Kawamori's transforming-dragon concept inherited from Air Cavalry Chronicles.

Yoko Kanno and Hajime Mizoguchi composed Escaflowne's score: four Victor soundtrack CDs mixing orchestra, chant, and pop, and the launch of Maaya Sakamoto's career.

Every Escaflowne manga volume documented: Katsu Aki's eight shōnen tankōbon (1995–1998) and Yuzuru Yashiro's two shōjo volumes, with dates and ISBNs from the…

Escaflowne has three manga because the anime kept changing: Katsu Aki's shōnen version preserves the shelved original, Yuzuru Yashiro's shōjo version follows the…

Yumiko Tsukamoto's six Escaflowne light novels, serialized in Newtype magazine in 1996–97 and illustrated by Nobuteru Yuki and Hirotoshi Sano, documented volume…

The 2000 Escaflowne film, animated by Bones, retells the series as a dark fantasy: a despairing Hitomi, a violent Van, an Asia-inspired Gaea, and redesigned…

One: Bandai's 1997 PlayStation action-adventure, Japan-only, developed by BEC, in standard (SLPS-01015) and limited (SLPS-01014) editions, the limited box…

Fox Kids' 2000 Escaflowne was a Saban-produced edit: first episode skipped, Hitomi downplayed, Kanno's score partly replaced, 26 episodes compressed to 23,…

The original Ocean dub was recorded against the broadcast edit and cannot fit the HD director's cut. Funimation's 2016 Kickstarter, $318,784 from 2,058 backers,…

The Escaflowne home video editions that matter: Bandai's 1998 subtitled tapes, the 2002 Limited Edition, Perfect Collection, Anime Legends, Funimation's 2016…