Who composed Dragon Ball's music?

Shunsuke Kikuchi: 23 packages of music, hundreds of pieces, one sound for both series, from the same pen that wrote Doraemon's theme and the Kamen Rider scores.

Ask a room of fans to hum Dragon Ball and they will not hum an opening song first. They will hum the tense, brassy, endlessly reused background themes under the fights, and those are the work of Shunsuke Kikuchi (1931 to 2021). Kikuchi was already one of Japan's most in demand television composers when Toei hired him: a Nihon University music graduate working since 1961, the composer of the original Kamen Rider, of Doraemon no Uta, the Doraemon theme that ran for 26 years, and of Dr. Slump before it. People in the industry had a saying for his reliability: if Kikuchi was in charge of the music, the show would be a hit.

For Dragon Ball he worked the way television composers of his generation worked, in packages: batches of themes recorded together and catalogued for the editors to deploy for years. Between 1986 and 1995 he delivered 23 packages for Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z, the first recorded days before the series premiered, the last for the thirteenth Z film in June 1995 and folded back into the series' final episodes. Depending on how variants and short cues are counted, the packages hold more than 400 pieces, by some catalogues over 500. His signatures are all over them: a sixteen beat blues and pentatonic basis, up tempo brass for the fights, and slow, strange, spacious cues for everything uncanny. He wrote themes, not episodes, which is why the same piece can cross from a child's adventure in 1986 to a god's threat in 1995 without changing a note.

Kikuchi stepped away from Dragon Ball after Z ended in 1996, handing the franchise to Akihito Tokunaga for GT, and kept composing, chiefly for Doraemon, until illness slowed him; he retired in 2017 and died of aspiration pneumonia on April 24, 2021, aged 89. The music refused to retire with him. When Kai's replacement score collapsed in 2011, Toei reached back for Kikuchi's, and since 2017 the Dragon Ball Symphonic Adventure concerts have toured his themes with full orchestra. The Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers gave his Z score its International Award, for the most foreign licensing royalties of any Japanese work, in 2008, 2015, 2018, and 2019: the sound of a weekly cartoon, still earning like a standard.

THE KIKUCHI RECORD

1986 to 1995, and after

23 packages

Batches of themes recorded across nine years, catalogued by letter and number series, and reused by the editors for a decade of episodes and films.

400 to 500 plus pieces

The count depends on whether variants and stingers are counted separately. Every catalogue agrees on the scale: hundreds of cues for two series.

The sound

Sixteen beat blues and pentatonic writing, hard up tempo brass, and slow background cues that became as famous as the fight music.

Before Goku

Kamen Rider, Tiger Mask, the Doraemon theme that ran 26 years, and Dr. Slump: Toei hired the most bankable television composer in Japan.

The emergency return

In 2011 his Z score replaced the withdrawn Kai score at short notice, which is why the recut sounds, proudly, like 1989.

The concert afterlife

Symphonic Adventure tours his themes with orchestra from 2017, and his Z royalties won JASRAC's International Award four times.

The score Kai tried to replace →

Who composed Dragon Ball's music?

THE KIKUCHI RECORD

THE FIRST WORD