As a child, I have always loved Dragon Ball. Probably one of my favorite moments in anime is still this:

But when Dragon Ball Z came out I lost my shit!

But I have always wondered why does his, and all the other Saiyans, hair turn blond when they go Super Saiyan? It’s always been a formula to the show. The hero happily gets into a fight. The fight escalates. Then escalates some more. And then some more to the point where Goku, or whoever else from the Z fighter line up, gets a bit bested. Then they dig deep and start radiating energy and then their black hair turns bright blond.

Hiroyuki Nakano, the editor of Weekly Shonen Jump, explains “It’s a lot of work to color Goku’s hair black. But Toriyama can depict blond hair just by leaving Goku’s hair uncolored since the manga is published in black and white.”

It feels like a cop-out of an answer but it proves to make sense of the fact that the manga is produced on a schedule and putting way too much time shading the hair can be time-consuming. Which now raises the question, why didn’t they just make Goku’s hair blond, to begin with?

Well, Akira Toriyama didn’t expect that the series will continue on for the next 30 years. Just be glad we’re still getting new episodes.

Credit: SoraNews24

Written by Hugh Huynh