What inspired Dragon Ball?

The habit came first. Akira Toriyama loved kung fu movies and said he had seen Jackie Chan's Drunken Master (1978) dozens of times; he watched kung fu films while he inked (Men's Non-No, January 2014). When his editor Kazuhiko Torishima pushed him toward a kung fu story, Toriyama tested the idea in the 1983 one-shot Dragon Boy, whose hero Tangtong is Goku in rehearsal.

Torishima then suggested the framework: Journey to the West, the sixteenth-century Chinese novel of the monk Tang Sanzang's pilgrimage, guarded by the monkey king Sun Wukong. Toriyama's first Goku was drawn as a full monkey. Torishima rejected it; the final Goku is a human boy who keeps a tail as his distinguishing mark, and the novel's furniture came with him: the Power Pole descends from Wukong's size-changing staff, the Flying Nimbus from Wukong's cloud. Toriyama mapped the pilgrim band onto his cast directly: Bulma in the Sanzang role, Oolong as Zhu Bajie, Yamcha as Sha Wujing.

Even the title is a movie reference, taken from Enter the Dragon and the era's many dragon-titled kung fu films. And the plan was short: Toriyama expected the story to end once the Dragon Balls were gathered, in about a year. It ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from December 3, 1984 to May 1995: 519 chapters, forty-two volumes, and the defining shonen manga of its generation.