They release a Dragon Ball Z movie, and the theaters fill up. Then they release another, and the effect is exactly the same. Apparently, the folks at Toei Animation and Akira Toriyama got the message: Fans want to see Dragon Ball, and as a result, the warrior with the most outlandish hair in the universe will have a new television series. The official name is Dragon Ball Super, and all arrows point to its imminent premiere during the month of July.
A golden era for Dragon Ball
There is an old movie in which the spirit of a baseball player tells a half-crazy farmer to build a field in the middle of his crop, arguing that "he will come." If we borrow that thought for a moment, Toei Animation made a new Dragon Ball Z movie waiting for "them" to come. Of course, "they" are the fans. More comedic than intense, Battle of Gods established a return to Dragon Ball's roots, and to Akira Toriyama's particular style, which gets along quite well with humor. A quick fast-forward to April 2015, and we find that the box office takings of Fukkatsu no F tripled the original budget of the film in Japan alone, even displacing Furious 7 at the box office, while the rest of the globe awaits to take theaters by storm. Dragon Ball is going through a new golden age. What can surpass this?
Dragon Ball Super details
The answer is its official return to television. It has been 18 years since the end of Dragon Ball GT, a series that we can almost consider "non-canon" (unless the higher powers say otherwise), and in Japan Dragon Ball Z Kai, the revised and condensed version of DBZ, is about to end. The name for the new series is Dragon Ball Super, a name that doesn't surprise much given how often it has been used in games and other side projects. The story and character development will be handled by the very Akira Toriyama, while the production includes Osamu Nozaki, Atsushi Kido, and Naoko Sagawa, three names involved in the franchise for many years.
The chronological location of Dragon Ball Super is "a few years after" the defeat of Majin Buu, which makes us think of the series as a direct sequel to the two films. This news resists no analysis: Dragon Ball is back. No "modern" series managed to fill the void left by Goku and his friends, and I imagine it will have no problem taking the place in the schedule that Dragon Ball Z Kai will free (next Sunday is the last episode, if I'm not mistaken). The immediate efforts will be focused on the distribution of Fukkatsu no F, which will reach more than 70 countries, and if everything goes well, July will be the month in which Dragon Ball Super will occupy the screens of millions.
