When Akira Toriyama's death was announced in March 2024, the American reaction that arrived first and loudest did not come from networks or distributors. It came from rappers. Chance the Rapper and Denzel Curry posted before most outlets had a package ready, and that sequencing is the clearest available evidence of who has been carrying Dragon Ball in this country for thirty years.
The dub, the theme, the window
Dragon Ball Z reached American kids in a specific, degraded, unforgettable form: an English dub with a hard-rock theme called "Rock the Dragon," episodes recut and reordered, an orchestral score replaced with guitars. Purists have complained about that version for decades. They are missing the point. That version is the one that ran in the afternoon on basic cable, free, in millions of households, and free access is what makes a canon.
Toonami is where most of that happened. The block put DBZ in the 4-to-6 window through the late nineties and early 2000s, and the show became load-bearing for a generation the way a record does — everyone knew the same episodes, the same fights, the same transformations, because everyone was watching the same broadcast at the same hour.
Why Goku, specifically
Slate published the definitive treatment of Black fandom's relationship to Toriyama's work after his death, and the argument is not sentimental. Dragon Ball Z is a show about a working-class fighter who is continuously underestimated, who trains past the ceiling everyone assigns him, who is defined by a power level the world insists on measuring, and who beats an aristocratic tyrant obsessed with bloodline purity. Frieza is explicitly an emperor of a race that treats Goku's people as disposable labor.
Put that story in front of Black kids in America at 4 p.m. and the resonance is not a coincidence. Okayplayer has made the structural case for why hip-hop and anime share a grammar; DBZ is the purest instance. The training arc is the mixtape grind. The power level is the streaming number. The transformation is the moment the neighborhood stops laughing.
What the bars did with it
The references run deep enough to be unremarkable now, which is itself the tell — Super Saiyan as a verb, Kamehameha as a punchline, Goku as shorthand for a comeback. HuffPost documented how thoroughly rap absorbed the show's fighting-spirit framework years before the mainstream press treated anime fandom as a normal adult thing.
And the tributes in 2024 made the relationship explicit. Uproxx covered Chance the Rapper and Denzel Curry's posts; NPR reported the death of the creator at 68. Two American rappers eulogizing a Japanese manga artist is not a novelty story. It is the culture acknowledging a writer it considers one of its own influences.
Who monetized the affection
Toriyama's estate and Shueisha hold the rights. Toei produces. Bandai Namco sells the games and figures. Sony's Crunchyroll distributes in the West after a $1.175 billion acquisition. adidas licensed the characters onto seven silhouettes in 2018 and proved anime could move footwear at retail.
Every one of those businesses was built partly on an American demand base that Toonami created for free and that Black viewers made culturally durable. The Black artists who kept DBZ alive in the lyrics for three decades were doing unpaid marketing for a franchise now worth more than most record labels.
The take
Rock the Dragon was a bad translation of a great story, and it still produced one of the most widely shared texts in modern Black American pop culture. That should tell you how little polish the culture needs when the story is right. Toriyama drew a poor fighter who would not stay down, and a generation of kids on the other side of the world recognized themselves immediately. Honor him by being clear-eyed about the rest: the recognition was mutual, the affection was real, and the money went home.
## Sources - Akira Toriyama: How Black fans came to love Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z — Slate, March 2024 - Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama dies at 68 — NPR, March 8, 2024 - Chance The Rapper And Denzel Curry Pay Tribute To Akira Toriyama — Uproxx, March 2024 - How Rap Music Harnessed 'Dragon Ball Z's' Fighting Spirit — HuffPost - Anime and Hip-Hop Have Always Been Speaking The Same Language — Okayplayer