Tankōbon Title Page
Kanzenban Title Page
Full Color Title Page

Chapter Information

Chapter Synopsis

Oolong tells Goku now would be the time to apologize for fooling him, but Goku just tells him to bring it on. Oolong boasts some more, and Goku wants him to hurry up with the match. Suddenly, Oolong looks at the clock, and then runs out of the village yelling to hold on a minute. Goku runs after him, only to find a pig dressed in a Chinese Communist outfit standing outside the village. Goku asks the pig if he’s seen a bull, and the pig points to his left, so Goku runs off in that direction. The pig says he’s Oolong-sama‘s true form. A narration box reveals the mystery of Oolong: “The time of Oolong’s transformation is only five minutes. (Within those five minutes, he can transform as many times as he wants.) And then, for him to transform again, he must take a one minute rest!!”

Goku returns to the village and says Oolong’s run off, and Oolong looks at his watch. A whole minute’s passed, so now he can transform again. A giant metal robot enters the village and challenges Goku, saying he’s the strong Oolong-sama, and says he’s going to put Goku in this soup and eat him. But then he gets some soup on his thumb and burns himself, blaming Goku. A little boy then shoots Oolong in the back of the head with a slingshot, and his mom comes and takes him away. Goku thinks Oolong seems really weak, and Oolong explains that he’s the world’s strongest. Oolong asks about Goku’s strength, and he says Grandpa taught him martial arts. Oolong wants him to demonstrate his strength by breaking through these three bricks with one hand. Goku easily does it with one finger, and Oolong cowardly transforms into a bat and flies away.

Bulma yells at Goku to catch him so they can find out where his hideout and the girls are. So Goku calls for Kinto-Un, and flies off after Oolong. Oolong notices that Goku is giving chase, and so the scared bat changes into a much quicker rocket. Goku still maintains a steady chase, until the five minutes run out, and Oolong turns back into a pig. Goku catches Oolong as he falls and takes him back to the village, where he’s tied up and put on a leash. The villagers tell him to return the girls now, and so he leads everyone to his house. His house is a giant palace, and everyone’s impressed. The parents rush in, only to see their daughters relaxing and living a luxurious life. Oolong says he just wanted a nice, calm girl, so he’s glad to get rid of these spoiled ones.

After saving the girls and receiving the Dragon Ball (not actually shown), Goku, Bulma, and Oolong are riding along a river in the Capsule No. 8 Boat toward the next Dragon Ball. Goku asks why they brought Oolong along, and Bulma says that his transformation abilities might come in handy. Oolong wants to leave, until Bulma says it’s hot, so she may sleep in just her underwear tonight. Goku then pat-pats Oolong, “You’re a man!” Oolong yells that it should be pretty obvious, since he likes girls and hates men.

Chapter Notes

Explanatory Notes

• This is the first chapter in the series to be presented entirely in black and white, including the title page.

Title Page

• As the first chapter published in calendar year 1985, the title page contains a New Year’s greeting in both Chinese and Japanese. However, the greeting was removed for the kanzenban release (and in the colorized version, which is based on the kanzenban).

Timeline

• The official timeline first used in Daizenshuu 7 places the start of this chapter on September 5th, AGE 749 (continuing on immediately from the fifth chapter), with the ending portion seemingly occurring the next day on September 6th. The first date is reckoned by working back from the first concretely-known date of the series, which is the date of the 21st Tenka’ichi Budōkai on May 7th, AGE 750. (The date of the 21st Budōkai is itself derived by calculating back from the date of Piccolo’s world conquest precisely three years and two days later on May 9th, AGE 753.) The second date seems to be arbitrary; nowhere is the amount of time that passes between the end of the confrontation with Oolong and the start of their cruise down the river actually shown in the comic. Nevertheless, Daizenshuu 7 places the group’s first encounter with Yamcha on the 6th, and since no significant amount of time appears to pass between the end of this chapter and the start of the next, we must assume that the trio spent the night off-panel, either in the village or on the road.

Name Puns

• As recounted by Akira Toriyama in the 2004 guidebook Dragon Ball Forever, the names for the three girls kidnapped by Oolong — Hedge, Hogg, and Lee — originate from the pair of tank models that were near his workbench at the time he was drawing the chapter. “Hedgehog” technically refers to an anti-tank obstacle, but here probably indicates Tamiya’s model of an M5A1 Stuart VI with one welded to the front (a so-called “rhino tank”), as was used at Normandy in June 1944. “Lee” likewise refers to the M3 Lee. As with Bulma’s 1st Armored Division insignia on her nightgown in Chapters 2-4 and the name(s) “SHERMAN PRIEST” on the door in Chapter 5, these belonged to the Allied forces in World War II.

Vehicles

• This is the first appearance (release-wise) of Bulma’s Capsule No. 8 Boat, which also appears in the following chapter before never being seen again within the series, despite not being lost with Bulma’s other capsules. (In fairness, their next destination is a desert, but still.) However, it is seen again in the final chapter of Jaco the Galactic Patrolman, published in September 2013 (though it is chronologically earlier in the story). There, Bulma uses it to get to Dr. Omori’s island near East City. (Omori calls her a weirdo for not using an aircar, but let us of course remember that in Dragon Ball proper, anti-gravity vehicles are not first seen until Chapter 7, and Dr. Slump, where such vehicles were common, has yet to be woven into the series’ mythos. Her deliberate use of a conventional watercraft would not seem at all unusual at this point in the story, especially to a reader approaching this chapter when it was first published in January 1985.)

Antecedents

• Oolong’s transformation time-limit is taken wholesale from the character Pingyao in Akira Toriyama’s 1983 one-shot Dragon Boy, Part 2. There, the shape-shifter (whose appearance will be reused for Pu’er in the following chapter) can transform for only three minutes, “like Ultraman”. Thus it would seem that the time limit itself ultimately derives from Ultraman, which is also referenced directly in this chapter (see below).

Inside Jokes / Easter-Eggs

• In the first panel on page 13, a fish with a head resembling the face of Ultraman jumps from the water and utters “Shuwatch“, which is Ultraman’s trademark sound effect when he leaps into the air.
• The engine of Bulma’s Capsule No. 8 Boat resembles R2-D2 from Star Wars. The author is no stranger to riffing on Star Wars: his first-ever (unpublished) comic was a Star Wars parody, and he still made reference to the film series quite a bit in Dr. Slump (with the base of antagonist Dr. Mashirito being the dome of an R2 unit, for instance). In Dragon Ball, however, these references tapered off, with most of them centering around technology seen in and around Capsule Corporation in West City (cf. the traffic outside the company headquarters and the machines in Bulma’s bedroom in Chapter 69).

Author’s Comment

• Each issue of Weekly Shōnen Jump featured short comments from the various series’ authors, giving fans a brief insight into their current thoughts, ranging from series-related announcements to trivial happenings in their personal lives. Akira Toriyama’s comments from this issue were:
  う～、さぶいよ～。冬はやだよ～。早く春を通りこして夏がこないかなあー。<明>

  ---

  Uh, it’s so cold. I hate winter. Hopefully we’ll cruise through spring and get on into summer pretty soon here. <Akira>

Page Breakdown

The majority of the Dragon Ball series was drawn in black and white, but chapters were occasionally published with color pages. This breakdown notes how many full-color, limited-color, and black-and-white pages appeared in this chapter. As the tankōbon volumes were not released with these colors intact, any color pages shown are taken from the kanzenban release.