Wall Street Journal Branded Dragon Ball Dangerous — 26 Years Later Everyone Wants to Be Super Saiyan
Long before anime was a safe bet in the West, Dragon Ball blasted into the mainstream with breakneck battles and sky-high stakes. By December 3, 1999, even The Wall Street Journal was weighing in—proof the phenomenon had outgrown the niche and upended the status quo.
Remember the late-90s panic about kids and TV violence? Dragon Ball was right in the blast radius. And The Wall Street Journal went hard.
1999: WSJ vs. Dragon Ball
On December 3, 1999, the Wall Street Journal ran an opinion piece by Sally Beatty titled 'Kids Are Glued to a Violent Japanese Cartoon Show.' It wasn't a review; it was a warning shot aimed at parents and policymakers in the zero-tolerance era. The thrust: Dragon Ball wasn't just action-heavy, it was savagery packaged for children.
- The piece zeroed in on fight scenes, holding up moments like Frieza impaling Krillin on a horn as proof the show normalized graphic violence.
- It framed Goku and Vegeta's brawls as gratuitous rather than story-driven, the kind of spectacle that would desensitize kids.
- Cartoon Network, for its part, said it hadn't gotten complaints from parents or advertisers. And Funimation had already cut down blood and other content for TV. Still, the article dinged the network for planning to lean even more into Japanese animation.
- Two other series were waved off with eyebrow-raising shorthand: 'Gundam' was described as a tale of bad guys from outer space, and 'Tenchi Muyo!' as the story of a lady's man who winds up in an interstellar war.
Read today, the whole thing comes off as very 1999: a lot of anxiety about foreign media, a comparison to safer American slapstick like Wile E. Coyote, and a strong undercurrent of 'this strange new thing is bad for kids.' We've seen echoes of that attitude since in assorted book bans and culture skirmishes, but the anime market obviously didn't back down. It exploded.
2024: The article resurfaces, and the author changes tune
When Akira Toriyama passed away in 2024, that WSJ piece started making the rounds again. Beatty responded with a very different read of the show compared to 1999, calling Dragon Ball Z groundbreaking and crediting it with opening a door for more sophisticated storytelling aimed at American kids. She also said that, from the audience perspective, the series was:
'mature, engrossing, and emotionally moving.'
Where we are now
About 26 years later, Dragon Ball hasn't just survived; it's one of the biggest anime franchises on the planet. People still compare Goku to just about every shonen lead, and plenty of fans point to him as a legit inspiration. The WSJ piece reads now like an overreach from an era that treated Japanese animation as a threat instead of, you know, entertainment with a different flavor. Also: not to shock anyone, but controversy sells. That article definitely tried to cash in on it.
If you want to revisit the show that apparently terrified the late-90s, the Dragon Ball anime is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.