Dragonball Z Book - The Dao of Dragonball

The Greatest Action Cartoon Ever", what the stories are about, and WHY THIS ALL MATTERS, would make our lives a lot easier.

There are about 4 or 5 books out there right now that do something similar. Unfortunately they only really touch on the trivia and minutia of the show, which can be found for free on all of the websites. As far as my research has shown there was nothing out there that took a really deep look into the series, its cast, and the cultural undertones and history behind each episode.

Perhaps you grew up with the series yourself, and are now at college age or beyond. This book has grown with you. It's serious! Metaphysical questions about life, death, immortality, resurrection of prophets, the journey for enlightenment, worshiping gods and training to BECOME a god... This is the kind of thing you might find in a Hollywood blockbuster like Star Wars, The Matrix, and Star Trek.

And when you look closely into Dragonball you'll find that it is all there as well. It just so happened that during the transition to American audiences a lot of this material was edited down or cut out entirely, so it went unseen or the message unheard.

If you'd like to find out what Dragonball is really all about, then I think you've come to the right place.

Once you've checked everything out you can go to The Official Dragonball Book Site and download some free chapters

Dragonball Z Extreme
By Jeff O'Hare
Published by Scholastic Inc.
Price: $5.99
Pages: 32 + 2 Sticker Pages
ISBN: 0-439-43722-9

Dragonball Z Extreme is a fun and brain teasing activity book fit for young children and young adults, especially DBZ fans.

This book is licensed by FUNimation, the American owners of the DBZ anime brand, so it's filled with images of characters from the series. This really pulls you into the Dragon World and makes all of the activities feel very engaging.

Crosswords, number games, mazes, and image questions fill up the majority of the book, and can be played by anyone. But some of the challenges are actually pretty tough, and if you're not a seasoned fan and know the series' lore you may feel a bit left in the dark. The 32 pages of content took around an hour for me to complete, and I'm a 24 year old university graduate, so young children should at least get an afternoon of fun out of it. Luckily all of the answers are in the back in case you're befuddled.

The author of Dragonball Z Extreme appears to be a great admirer of the source material, and cleverly uses it to great advantage with some rather comical games. One question, "What design does Gohan have on his underwear?" is easy for anybody who's in the know about how awesome Teddy Bear underwear really is. Another highlight is a game called "Going Ape" that has you solve a letter puzzle involving Goku and references Goku's monkey-like genetics and lineage with comedic results.

This book is rather inexpensive now (less than $1 in many cases), and is fit for children and adults alike. I recommend the book for any diehard DBZ fanatic, as they'll definitely enjoy the activities and the completely Dragonball focused theme. Plus it has a glow in the dark sticker of Vegeta, and that's just sweet.

The Dragon Ball Z Legend: The Quest Continues
By Satoshi Ikeda & Martin Foster
Published by Cocoro Books and DH Publishing
Price: $11.95
Pages: 188
ISBN: 0-9723124-9-8

The Dragonball Z Legend: The Quest Continues says right on the cover "An essential source for every anime fan". To that, book cover, I say you are wrong. Entertaining perhaps, but certainly not essential, even for Dragonball nuts.

The books design is a series of Q & A. Fifty-Four (54) questions related to series' trivia are posed and then answered in a couple of pages each. Unfortunately while the answers tend to be fairly on target, more hardcore fans will recognize numerous errors, and this gets frustrating after a while. Luckily the questions are varied and the answers are comical.

Every few pages there are advertisements for Dragonball paraphernalia, such as action figures, statues, and collectibles. They are kind of nice to see as they shine the spotlight on Dragonball's incredible marketability and success, but it begins to feel more like a toy catalog than a book about Dragonball.

The books layout is quite nice. The arrangement of the pages, the silhouettes of the dbz characters and the page art combine to make it feel unique and easy to read. It should be noted here that aside from the action figures and toys there are no pictures from the series itself, only silhouettes of the characters. I presume this is for legal reasons, as the book is not authorized by the owners of the Dragonball license.

The Quest Continues is filled with trivia, but after completing the book it just doesn't feel complete. It's not an easy task to create something that contains the entirety of Dragonball Trivia (thousands upon thousands of facts), so it's not as if I expected it to be a tome, but it kind of let me down. However if you go in knowing that the book is just the tip of the iceberg than I think you'll be satisfied.

The Dragonball Z Legend is written for casual fans of the series. It is not an essential Dragonball guide, and it is written more for insiders who already know this stuff, so it's somewhat fan service-esque. It's got just enough to keep you interested and reading but is filled with inconsistencies and trivial errors that will annoy you as you do, creating a weird situation where I wonder just who this book was written for.

For the pickier types of fan I say stay away, and read about the trivia elsewhere, but for casual fans it will prove to be entertaining and thought provoking.

Remember, if you're a hardcore Dragonball Z fan then I can't hesitate to remind you of The Dao of Dragonball. It is a book that will help you harken back to why DBZ is one of the best anime and manga ever, and if you don't think that already, it might convince you.

Dragonball Z: An Unauthorized Guide
By Lois and Danny Gresh
Published by St. Martin's Paperbacks
Price: $5.99
Pages: 211
ISBN: 0-312-97757-3

Fair warning... This review is scathing, and it makes me feel bad to have written it, but it's also very true and needed to be said. With that brief foreword...

To paraphrase a seminal comedy of our time, Billy Madison, "Nowhere in this book's incessant rambling and incoherent nonsense does it even come close to forming an intelligent thought. I am now dummer for having read it."

Truly, Dragonball Z: An Unauthorized Guide should never be read, by anybody, including DBZ fans. I barely even know where to begin with this book other than to say that it consists of over 200 pages of random observations, incorrect assumptions, little to no facts... and insights from a 10 year old.

This book was written by a mother and son team. Unfortunately the 10 year old appears to be the more intelligent of the two, and his comments are few and far between. I would have preferred if the whole book were written by him. Seriously, I cannot believe that this book was ever published in its current state. It's like a bad blog post gone wild with stream of consciousness and then multiplied exponentially.

At this point I should mention that I am a hardcore Dragonball fan. I'm writing my own book about the subject, you know? So when I read a book like this it makes me want to cry, throw the book into the opposite corner of the room, and then cry some more. Yet fate of fates has assigned me with the task of reading the whole thing so I could write this review. Bear that perspective in mind.

What's so bad about it? For starters, it's completely random and chaotic. The so-called chapters diverge from their own subject material so many times that even the author questions why we should listen to her anymore:

"You can't pay attention to me, by the way, when I'm sitting here, making fun of Yamcha's fork cuts. After all, why listen to me? I'm a grown woman who eats pizza for dinner every night and who talks to stuffed pigs when I think nobody's around."

Indeed Lois, indeed. And nowhere in the rest of the book does she give us reason to think otherwise. Sadly, this isn't coming from a comedically inclined prologue or introduction; this is in Chapter 4, the main focus of the book.

Sometimes when children say unintelligent things it comes off as 'Honest', and "Innocent', and it makes you gaze inside at your adult perspective cruelly honed over years of real world life and cause you to shockingly look at things with fresh eyes, dropping your preconceived notions. Bill Cosby created an entire series of television shows built on this premise. Unfortunately this book does not fall into that category, because when Danny's comments, such as "This may be better than Pokemon, there is more action." are used it feels like they're solely so that Lois can somehow apply it to a random aspect of her life, which is only tangentially related to Dragonball or the quote, if at all. And her musings, while definitely unintelligent, are bereft of the benefits of simplicity often applied to such a lacking.

What about the actual content of the book, is it DBZ related? Yes, sort of, I'll give it that. It does discuss each of the main characters, the basic plots, and why the Dragon World is entertaining and captivating: All of these things are expressed. But if you're not familiar with Dragonball on an 'all too familiar basis' to begin with, you'll be completely lost by the end of the first chapter. The book doesn't explain anything particularly well.

The character analyses are one dimensional, looking at them as either "Good Guys vs. Scum and Filth", and the descriptions of each are shallow and not even worth the time it takes to read the words. You can type any DBZ characters name into a search engine, pick the first link, and find out more about the character in a few seconds then you'd find in this entire book. Honestly, I just did it, and it worked.

The one saving grace is that this book provides a unique perspective that you don't find in most others. The 'mother and son duo' that are actively interested in Dragonball and were so enamored by it they took the time to write an entire book. That's not something easy to do, and not something you hear about on a daily basis, for this subject or anime in general. On that particular front I give them my respect.

But if you can base your whole approval of a book on the fact that it was merely written, I'd say you either need to go a bit deeper or prepare yourself to read every book in existence, because that's the only way I could ever recommend Dragonball Z: An Unauthorized Guide.

Pojo's Unofficial Dragonball Z Cards Simplified: A Player's Guide
Editor in Chief - Bill Gill, AKA "Pojo"
Published by Triumph Books
Price: $9.95
Pages: 96
ISBN: 1-57243-600-X

The Dragonball Z Collectible Card Game (CCG) premiered in 2000 with the Saiyan Saga starter decks and booster packs. There are now over eighteen expansions and several rare and promotional cards to play around with. The CCG's purpose is to play mock battles in Dragonball with your favorite DBZ characters and abilities, mixing and matching fighting styles and combat techniques to come out the victor. Pojo's Unofficial Dragonball Z Cards Simplified: A Player's Guide details the origins of the game, the various cards, and strategies from winners of national tournaments.

The book starts off with a nice introduction to the Dragonball series and is a suitable primer for those unfamiliar with the topic. Of course there's no substitute for watching the show or reading the comic book, but it sets you up for the rest of the contents. It follows with a description of the various card types, such as Physical Combat, Energy Combat, Non-Combat, Dragon Ball's, Battle Grounds and Locations, and Mastery cards. It then breaks those down into different fighting styles, including Red, Blue, Black, Orange, Saiyan, and Namekian along with descriptions of what makes each one unique.

Overall it gives a pretty good idea of what the game contains, but it doesn't actually include the rules, so you're left trying to piece together how the game is played from the descriptions of cards and strategies therein. I suppose this is because the rules change frequently with each new release of cards, and it would have been difficult to summarize all of the rules into a few pages, but it would have made a lot more sense to me if they had tried.

Layout and graphic design of A Player's Guide is excellent, with full color pictures of all the DBZ cast members, sections laid out in different colors, and an overall DBZ theme throughout. There are a few minor complaints, like the typesetting in certain places, but that doesn't affect the content in any way. The large pages are pleasing to the eye and pull you in deeper.

Near the conclusion they list all of the cooler cards that were released over the three year period since the game started and the book's release. It includes a top 10 list of each Saga (Box Set), and provides really great (and useful) information for any player of the game.

In the end I was really pleased with Pojo's Unofficial Dragonball Z Cards Simplified: A Player's Guide, and it actually got me thinking about starting to play the CCG myself. There are probably tournaments still going on in the neighborhood hobby shop, and it might be fun to drop by and throw down a few Kahemameha's.

Pojo's Unofficial Total Dragonball Z
Editor in Chief - Bill Gill, AKA "Pojo"
Published by Triumph Entertainment (Triumph Books)
Price: $12.95
Pages: 128
ISBN: 1-57243-416-3

At the time of its publication (2000) Pojo's Unofficial Total Dragonball Z was the best DBZ book on the market. Even now, in 2007, it's not so bad. It's not quite a book so much as a glorified magazine, but it's a worth a read if you absolutely must absorb everything DBZ related. If not, I would recommend the newer version, Pojo's Unofficial Absolute Dragonball Z, which came out three years later, simply because it's the fresher fish in the market.

Aside from its own merits, this book serves as a walk down memory lane of the year 2000 in American anime and television based pop culture. It captures the influence that Dragonball had on the American telescape with its success on Cartoon Network's Toonami and Adult Swim, the release of a Collectible Card Game, VHS and DVD obsessions, and video game imports all the rage.

It starts off with a basic synopsis of what DBZ is, along with the success found on Cartoon Network. In this section we find some actual interviews with CN staff, who agree quite proactively that DBZ is unstoppable and that they had no intention of taking it off the air at any point soon. Afterwards, quite inexplicably, they jump into a hypothetical 'whom would play whom' in movie casting, were a DBZ film to ever be developed in the Western world (aka Hollywood). This was par for the course on any self respecting DBZ website. At the time the runaway success of the series had prompted many rumors of a major motion picture, and I imagined it seemed quite fitting back then, or even now (see here), seven years later, as DBZ fans continue to wait for their beloved to reach the silver screen.

The rest of the book is quite literally titled 'Dragonball 101' and serves as such, consisting of episode listings, succinct summaries, an explanation of the GT series (unseen on TV at the time), some 3D randomness complete with 3D glasses, the basics of the card game and some typical strategies therein.

The main complaint to be found with this book is its lack of depth. It's as if every page is standing knee deep in the shallow end of the pool and there just is no deep end. If you're obsessed with DBZ then you'll be providing your own depth by virtue of recollection to your yesteryears, but this book does not provide such on its own. As I said before, it's basically a big magazine.

The one area it does excel is in the character bio section. There are 300 characters described in alphabetical order, and while the summaries are succinct they are also informative and trigger the great memories of each character that you had perhaps forgotten about (Bacterian, anybody?). Of course while the section is pretty big, it's not something you can't find elsewhere, such as Wikipedia, nor does it cover all of the characters in the series.

Overall it's a fairly decent book, and one of the better DBZ paperbacks in the American market. It's nothing stupendous and certainly could be better in a lot of areas, but if you're just looking to find out what this whole 'DBZ Thing' is all about, and prefer to read about it in book form rather than go straight to the source, than this might be right up your alley.