Dragonball Goku

Toriyama's Goku finds his origins in one of Toriyama's earlier characters named Tanton, a fictional protagonist who appears in a one-shot series called Dragon Boy. In this story, Tanton's odd physical characteristic was a pair of wings. When Toriyama decided to create Dragon Ball, he used author Wu Cheng'en's Journey to the West as inspiration for his own series. The name Toriyama adopted for the character is the Japanese romanization of 孫悟空 (Sun Wukong), who is the central character in Journey to the West. To be creative with the character, Toriyama stated that he designed Goku not as a monkey like the Journey to the West character, but as a human-looking boy with a monkey tail. Though Goku is treated as a person from another planet, Toriyama initially had the idea to give him the identity of person from Earth, but with the introduction of adding fighters from other planets it was established that Goku is a Saiyan. In order to advance the story in faster way, Toriyama made Goku learn to teletransport to allow the characters to move to any planet in just a second.

Dragonball Goku

Dragonball Goku

Toriyama explained that Goku's gi uniform is modeled after the robes worn by the Shaolin monks of China, being that he wanted Dragon Ball to take on a Chinese feel. During early developments of the manga, various readers commented that Goku was rather plain, so the author changed his appearance and added several characters like Master Roshi and Krillin, then created martial arts tournaments to give the manga a more fighting style. Since it was commented that Goku would sure win the tournaments, he made him lose in the first two tournaments though he also wanted Goku to be the champion. With the ending of the Cell arc, Son Gohan was meant to replace his father as the main protagonist; Toriyama thought that Gohan was unsuitable for that part so he avoided doing that.

Dragonball Goku

Dragonball Goku