It will have rained a lot, but we still haven’t recovered from the disaster that was ‘Dragonball Evolution’… Because even still we use it as a yardstick when we talk about other live action anime remakes.
It’s hard to imagine what a good adaptation of ‘Dragon Ball’ could be like, but at the time Jackie Chan wondered what it would be like to get into the skin of Goku. And it also seems like he knows what it would take for the movie to succeed.
With the approval of the teacher
Jackie Chan is one of the biggest fans of ‘Dragon Ball’ in the industry, and that he was hooked relatively late after his professional colleagues did not stop recommending it.
“For a long time, I had heard from people around me that ‘Dragon Ball’ was very interesting. So I watched the anime, and then read the entire Chinese edition of the manga,” Chan told the series’ Daizenshuu guide. . “Naturally, and as everyone said, he was very interesting. I think the character I liked the most was Goku, of course.”
“It’s a job that I would really love to turn into a movie. ‘Dragon Ball’ is full of so many amazing and imaginative ideas. However, to turn it into a live-action movie we would need a lot of amazing special effects and a massive budget,” dropped the actor.
Chan has hit on one of the keys, because if you end up with so-so special effects, cheap CGI and mediocre action scenes… for that we better stay in the anime field. The bad thing is that Jackie Chan has already gone a bit too far to play Goku, although he does He is the only actor who has the approval of Akira Toriyama.
‘Journey to the West’ was one of the great inspirations for Toriyama when creating ‘Dragon Ball’, but the other was Jackie Chan himself. Toriyama is also a big fan of the Chinese actor and how he combines humor and martial artswith which he wanted to try to draw a story that had all these elements
“When I was still drawing ‘Dr. Slump’, I was in love with Jackie Chan movies, so I played them in the background while I worked,” Toriyama confessed in the book ‘Dragon Ball: A Visual History’. “I mentioned this to him in passing. to my editor, and he told me to try to draw a self-contained story about kung-fu.”
“So I put out this piece with the dubious title of ‘Dragon Boy’ (basically identical to Goku but with wings instead of a tail). And surprisingly, people loved ‘Dragon Boy’, so I closed the wacky ‘Dr. Slump’ ‘ and got to work on a new martial arts series.”
The rage for Jackie Chan did not go away with time, and back in 2013 Toriyama even went so far as to say that “Nobody could play Goku except him”. Unfortunately that ship seems to have already sailed, although dreaming is free and some fans have even tried to give the idea of what Jackie Chan would look like fully immersed in the role of Goku (especially if we had the movie in the 90’s).
Now what live-action adaptations are making a comeback (although in Japan they have never left and a few are released every year), perhaps in a while someone will dare to give it again another attempt at ‘Dragon Ball’. Especially if Netflix’s ‘One Piece’ series turns out well and finally breaks the curse of bad anime remakes.
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