Theme songs get stuck in your head, but the real soundtrack of Dragon Ball is the background score: the cues under a powering-up aura or the silence before a finishing blow. In Japan one man, Shunsuke Kikuchi, wrote that music for more than a decade. English-speaking fans, though, grew up with something else entirely, because the American dub of Dragon Ball Z threw out the Japanese score and commissioned its own. Here is who wrote what, from Kikuchi to Faulconer, from the Kai copyright scare to Daima.
| Series or film | Years | Japanese score | US dub score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dragon Ball and its 4 films | 1986–1989 | Shunsuke Kikuchi | — |
| Dragon Ball Z and its 13 films | 1989–1996 | Shunsuke Kikuchi | Saban (1996–1998), Bruce Faulconer (1999–2003) |
| Dragon Ball GT | 1996–1997 | Akihito Tokunaga | Mark Menza |
| Dragon Ball Z Kai | 2009–2011 | Kenji Yamamoto, then Kikuchi | — |
| Battle of Gods, Resurrection 'F' | 2013, 2015 | Norihito Sumitomo | — |
| Kai: The Final Chapters | 2014–2015 | Norihito Sumitomo | — |
| Dragon Ball Super and Broly | 2015–2018 | Norihito Sumitomo | — |
| Super Hero | 2022 | Naoki Satō | — |
| Dragon Ball Daima | 2024 | Kosuke Yamashita | — |
Shunsuke Kikuchi, the sound of the original
Born in Hirosaki in 1931, Kikuchi was already a veteran when Toei brought him onto Dragon Ball in 1986. He had scored Tiger Mask, the Kamen Rider shows, UFO Robo Grendizer and Doraemon, whose famous Japanese theme song he also wrote, as well as Dr. Slump, Toriyama's previous series. For Dragon Ball Z he composed around eighty dedicated tracks, and the show also borrowed cues from the thirteen films and from the first series. His style mixes action-movie brass, electric guitars, drums and Asian instruments, and fans who know the original can recognize the "next episode" preview theme or the Super Saiyan motif within a couple of notes.
Kikuchi stopped composing in 2017 to receive treatment for an illness and died in Tokyo on April 24, 2021, at 89. He received an Award of Merit at the 2013 Tokyo Anime Awards and a lifetime achievement award at the Japan Record Awards in 2015.
Did you know? JASRAC, Japan's music rights society, gave Kikuchi its International Award, based on royalties earned abroad, for the Dragon Ball Z score in 2008, 2015, 2018 and 2019. Decades after the show ended, his music was still among Japan's most-played works overseas.
The American scores: Saban and Faulconer
When Funimation brought Dragon Ball Z to US syndication in 1996, working with Saban Entertainment, the Japanese music was replaced. Saban's contract musicians Ron Wasserman and Jeremy Sweet, known for Power Rangers, wrote a new guitar-driven score, and Sweet sang the new opening that fans nicknamed "Rock the Dragon". For contractual reasons, the music was officially credited to Saban founders Shuki Levy and Haim Saban, the latter under the alias "Kussa Mahehi", and how much they actually contributed is unclear.
When Cartoon Network revived the show on Toonami and Funimation resumed the dub without Saban, the music changed again. From the third season of the dub in 1999 until episode 291 in 2003, the score was written by Dallas composer Bruce Faulconer and his team: 243 episodes of music that an entire generation of American fans still associates with Goku. Faulconer later remastered his work as a nine-volume album series, The Best of Dragonball Z.
Purists eventually got their way. When Funimation redubbed episodes 1–67 uncut in 2005, the new score came from Nathan M. Johnson, since the company had stopped working with Faulconer's studio, and its remastered DVD sets later let viewers play the English dub with either the American or the original Japanese music.
Akihito Tokunaga and GT
For Dragon Ball GT in 1996, Toei moved on from Kikuchi. The score went to Akihito Tokunaga, born in Yokohama in 1971, a bassist, arranger and composer from the Being record label stable who had worked with acts like Zard, B'z and Mai Kuraki. On GT he handled music production as well as composing and arranging. The connection shows in the songs too: in 1996 Tokunaga was arranging tracks for Field of View, the band behind the opening "Dan Dan Kokoro Hikareteku", and writing for Zard, who sang one of the endings. His score is more symphonic than Kikuchi's, a good fit for a show that ends on a farewell.
In the US, Funimation's GT dub swapped in a guitar-based score by Mark Menza, who also wrote the instrumental openings of the remastered Z dub. The alternate English dub produced for Europe and Canada by AB Groupe and Blue Water, instead, kept Tokunaga's original music.
The Kenji Yamamoto case in Kai
For Dragon Ball Z Kai, the recut version of Z that began airing in Japan in 2009, Toei commissioned a brand-new score from Kenji Yamamoto. He was no stranger to the franchise: he had arranged "Cha-La Head-Cha-La" in 1989 and scored many Dragon Ball video games. Singer Hironobu Kageyama has said he was astonished by that arrangement, which sounded nothing like the American-rock demo he had recorded.
On March 9, 2011, Toei Animation announced that it had found several of Yamamoto's tracks that, in its view, might infringe the rights of unnamed third parties, and that it would replace them while it investigated. Comparison videos had been circulating online in Japan since May 2010, but Toei never publicly identified the works involved, and the official account remains the studio's statement.
The fix was a return to the past. From the last broadcasts of the first run, on March 20 and 27, 2011, Kikuchi's Z score replaced Yamamoto's, and the credits and official website were updated. Reruns and streams have since used Kikuchi's music from episode 1, and later DVD and Blu-ray volumes were released with the replaced score. When Kai resumed in 2014 with The Final Chapters, the new score came from Norihito Sumitomo.
Norihito Sumitomo and the Super era
Sumitomo had already scored Battle of Gods in 2013. Born in Komatsushima in 1964, a Berklee College of Music graduate and saxophonist, he won a Japan Academy Prize for excellence in music in 2001 for the film Whiteout. His sound is orchestral, with choirs and big brass. He went on to score Resurrection 'F', the whole of Dragon Ball Super, whose soundtrack CD came out from Nippon Columbia on February 24, 2016, and the film Broly in 2018. For Super Hero in 2022, Toei turned to Naoki Satō, known for the first five Pretty Cure series and Eureka Seven.
Daima
Dragon Ball Daima arrived in 2024 with a score by Kosuke Yamashita, a Hamamatsu-born composer known for Digimon Xros Wars and several Super Sentai and Kamen Rider shows. Nippon Columbia released around seventy of his tracks as a soundtrack album on March 19, 2025. The songs come from a self-declared fan, German producer Zedd, who composed both the opening "Jaka Jaan", with the duo C&K, and the ending "Nakama", featuring the singer Ai.
The songs, from "Rock the Dragon" to Kageyama's Japanese openings, have a story of their own, told in our guide to Dragon Ball theme songs.