Synopsis

Young Goku sets off on a quest with his teenage friend Bulma to find the seven Dragon Balls, which grant whoever possesses them a single wish.

This led to Toriyama creating the 1983 one-shot manga Dragon Boy, which he later redeveloped into Dragon Ball.

The title Dragon Ball was inspired by Enter the Dragon and later Bruceploitation knockoff kung fu films, which frequently had the word "Dragon" in their titles, and the fighting scenes were influenced by Jackie Chan movies.

His concept of the Dragon Balls was inspired by the epic Japanese novel Nansō Satomi Hakkenden (1814–1842) from the late Edo period, which involved the heroes collecting eight Buddhist prayer beads; Toriyama adapted this into collecting seven Dragon Balls.

Toriyama originally thought the manga would last about a year or end once the Dragon Balls were collected.

Toriyama wanted to set Dragon Ball in a fictional world largely based on Asia, taking inspiration from several Asian cultures including Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Central Asian, Arabic and Indonesian cultures.

The island where the Tenkaichi Budōkai is held is modeled after Bali (in Indonesia), which he, his wife and assistant visited in mid-1985, and for the area around Bobbidi's spaceship, he consulted photos of Africa.