The first episode of Dragon Ball, broadcast by Fuji TV on February 26, 1986, has one job and nails it: it brings Goku and Bulma together and sends them on the road. The Japanese title is simply "Bulma and Son Goku"; Funimation's English dub renamed it "The Secret of the Dragon Balls".
Recap
On a remote mountain lives a boy with a monkey's tail. He trains alone and talks to an orange ball with four stars, which he calls "Grandpa": it is all he has left of the man who raised him. When the ball starts to glow, young Goku is sure his grandfather is trying to tell him something.
After outrunning a sabertooth tiger, he catches a huge fish using his tail as bait and knocks it out with one kick. On the way home, dragging his catch, he gets run over by a car. Behind the wheel is Bulma, a city girl following a strange beeping gadget. Goku has never seen a car: he decides it is a monster, lifts it up and hurls it away. Bulma answers by shooting at him, but the bullets barely sting. He has never seen a girl either, and to check whether she has a tail he lifts her skirt with his staff.
His grandfather taught him to be nice to girls, so Goku invites Bulma home. There she spots the ball and realizes she has found what she came for. It is one of the seven Dragon Balls: gather them all and a dragon will grant any wish. Bulma already has two, one found in a storeroom at home and one in a valley up north, and she tracks them with a radar she built herself. Her wish? The perfect boyfriend. Goku refuses to give up his grandfather's keepsake, until Bulma finds the right argument: she asks him to come along on the journey.
Meanwhile, in an old castle, the small blue Emperor Pilaf and his henchmen Mai and Shu find a Dragon Ball of their own, and Pilaf is furious to learn that one ball on its own is useless.
Bulma pops a motorcycle out of a tiny capsule, and Goku decides she must be a witch. During a pit stop a pteranodon ties Goku to a tree and flies off with Bulma, planning to eat her. Goku frees himself with his tail, launches the bike off a hill, leaps and extends his Power Pole to knock the reptile out of the sky. Bulma is safe, and the adventure can begin.
Our review
This is a textbook pilot. Within minutes we know everything we need about Goku: impossibly strong, naive, devoted to his grandpa, raised outside the world. And about Bulma: clever, vain and practical to the point of ruthlessness. The whole episode runs on contrast, mountain against city, staff against pistol, wilderness against capsules that hold entire motorcycles.
Director Minoru Okazaki and writer Yasushi Hirano stretch the manga's first chapter without making it feel thin. The added scenes, like the tiger chase that ends with a Road Runner-style pause in mid-air before the fall, push the tone toward a classic cartoon.
The biggest change from the manga is Pilaf's early arrival: in the comic the emperor shows up much later, while the anime introduces him right away to give the hunt a rival. A smaller but fun tweak concerns the meeting itself: in the manga Bulma brakes in time, while here she hits Goku head-on.
The humor is Toriyama at his most cheeky, with the skirt gag and Bulma's daring offers. Some of it has not aged well, and several of these moments were cut from Funimation's 1995 dub. What remains is a debut bursting with energy and wonder.
Trivia
- In Japan the first episode drew a 27.4% ratings share.
- The back of Pilaf's outfit carries the Chinese characters 炒饭, "fried rice": a pun on his name, since pilaf is a rice dish.
- In 1989 and 1990 Harmony Gold dubbed the first five episodes into English and renamed Goku "Zero". That version was test-marketed in a handful of US cities and never went to a wide broadcast.
Did you know? Toriyama personally picked Masako Nozawa as Goku's Japanese voice after listening to her audition tape.