Dragon Ball: 5 Scenes That Were Way Too Adult For TV
While anime has become increasingly popular over the last couple of decades, the medium has always sported a certain degree of controversy, even among its most devoted fans. This is because of the blatant fan service that many anime and manga indulge in, with the translation generally being a whole lot of focus on the female body, often from some pretty salacious angles.
Though popular anime like "My Hero Academia" and "Demon Slayer" still indulge in this kind of thing from time to time, one of the earliest examples of the trope comes in the original "Dragon Ball." This is a series that commonly depicts characters being leered at, groped without consent, or even outright assaulted, and the show plays them off for laughs.
However, it isn't just characters like Bulma (Hiromi Tsuru/Tiffany Vollmer) who are shown inappropriately in "Dragon Ball." In the first few episodes of Season 1 alone, Goku (Masako Nozawa/Sean Schemmel), a child, is shown fully nude and is also seen peeing. Furthermore, Bulma tries to shoot Goku with a gun, and she tries to manipulate him by showing him her panties. Naturally, none of these scenes made it into the American cut of the series as they were originally shown.
Master Roshi is by far the worst offender in Dragon Ball
The trend of these characters being shown in a less-than-appropriate light is carried through as the series goes on, with Goku's curious nature often used as the humorous button for these kinds of situations. While Goku may indeed regularly find himself transfixed by Bulma in "Dragon Ball" and curious about her body, there are much more morally dubious characters in the series.
Master Roshi (Masaharu Sato/Mike McFarland) is commonly depicted as watching and reading pornography and is often seen leering at, spying on, or attempting to trick a woman into showing herself naked to him in "Dragon Ball." In fact, if you asked any older anime fan to give an example of the pervy anime character trope, Roshi would probably be the first example that they'd give.
One of the most prominent incidents is a Season 2 episode that sees Roshi shrink himself down so he can follow Bulma to the toilet and watch her in the bathroom. Krillin (Mayumi Tanaka/Sonny Strait) and Oolong (Naoki Tatsuta/Ray Chase) are also commonly depicted in this way, with an especially crude scene showing Krillin pulling down Bulma's top in order to distract Roshi and expose an invisible character nearby in Season 3.
The original show was also far more adult in other ways
It isn't just nudity and inappropriate sexual situations that had the censors fuming as "Dragon Ball" made its way to the U.S. The series was also far more violent than American kids' shows, and a lot of these types of scenes were edited down or cut entirely as a result.
Probably the most notorious is when Goku finally kills Piccolo (Toshio Furukawa/Christopher Sabat) by punching him clean through the chest at the end of Season 4. This scene is particularly bloody as a shocked Piccolo stares down at the blood on his hands before rising up into the air and exploding.
Another thing fans will notice when watching the uncensored version of "Dragon Ball" is that the original version also contains plenty of coarse language, with an early example in Season 1 being Piccolo and Goku comparing each other's attacks to different kinds of bug excrement, only they use a certain four-letter word here instead.
While there are countless other examples throughout "Dragon Ball" and its sequel series, "Dragon Ball Z," it's probably for the best that many of these edits were made, as the show aired with other Saturday morning cartoons in some markets. After all, scenes like these are probably the last thing Mom and Dad would want to see their children watching when they walk into the living room.