Rotten Tomatoes has an exclusive gallery of Tuis' concept art from Blood: The Last Vampire, as well as other recent movies like Dragonball Evolution. Blood: The Last Vampire is hitting select U.S. cities this Friday, including New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Cambridge, Mass., Honolulu, Chicago, Las Vegas, Dallas, Houston Seattle and Washington, D.C. A complete list is here.

More of Tuis' amazing concept art can be found at both links, below.

[Alex Tuis and Rotten Tomatoes]

The writers' strike has caused incalculable damage to genre television, including helping to kill great shows like Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. But it's also inflicted maximum damage on this summer's movies. We detailed all the ways the strike impacted movies like Wolverine, Terminator Salvation, Transformers 2 and G.I. Joe a while back — it's probably no coincidence that the one movie whose script was in perfect shape before the strike hit, Star Trek, was also the only really watchable genre film in months.

(I think part of the reason I'm so over-the-moon about Trek is because I'm grading on a curve. Put it next to Iron Man and The Dark Knight, and it might not score quite so well. I was also thinking the other day that if The Incredible Hulk had come out in 2009, we might have appreciated it a bit more.)

So how about the movies coming this fall and winter, and even into next year? Did the strike hurt them as well? I did some digging, and here's what I found out about the crop of upcoming Hollywood movies:

District 9. (August 14) Not really a Hollywood movie, this Peter Jackson-produced alien imprisonment saga was filmed in South Africa and produced by QED Films. And reading between the lines of this Variety story from November 2007, it sounds as though director Neill Blomkamp and his partner Terri Tatchell had already written the script before the film was greenlit.

Pandorum. (September 4) This Dennis Quaid-Ben Foster space-horror film was greenlit in May 2008, a few months after the strike ended, and written by newcomer Travis Milloy. Which means it was a spec script, and unless it required major rewrites, it should be fine. The film only started shooting in August 2008, which means there should have been time to make rewrites, if any were needed.

Gamer. (September 4) This Gerard Butler-starring epic about prisoners who are forced to become video-game avatars for rich kids was actually filmed during the writer's strike, so its script was long since done. It's been on ice for quite some time — rumor has it test screenings in October 2008 produced almost entirely negative responses. The movie's gone through several titles, including Game and Citizen Game. So it may not be great... but that won't be the writers' strike's fault.

Splice. (September 18, limited release). Vincenzo Natali's genetic manipulation film stars Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley as researchers who mess with the human genome... and get burned. And there was a script in November 2007, when the writer's strike started. Or at least, producer Guillermo del Toro was able to say in a statement:

Vincenzo is taking Splice to really edgy places. The moment I cringed while reading the script, I knew I wanted to help him realize his vision.

And a still from the movie came out in February 2008, while the strike was still going on. (The movie's complex visual effects have required a long time to complete.)

The Surrogates. (September 25). This one's a bit unclear. Disney bought the rights to the robot-avatar graphic novel back in March 2007. They hired the writers of Terminators 3 and 4, Michael Ferris and John Brancato, to write the screenplay. The following November, Bruce Willis signed up to star, and T3 director Jonathan Mostow was announced as director. The film was supposed to start filming in February, but the rest of the cast wasn't announced until the following April, a few months after the strike ended. So it's entirely possible the script needed some rewrites. And got them. So it may be fine. Except that it's from the writers and director of Terminator 3.

Zombieland. (October 9) This zombie buddy comedy didn't even snag star Woody Harrelson until late August 2008, a good six months after the strike ended. And co-star Jesse Eisenberg was "in talks" to appear in the film in October 2008. So I'm guessing there was plenty of time to get a script together at some point.

The Road. (October 16) This bleak Cormac McCarthy adaptation was filmed in Western Pennsylvania early in 2008, and has been on ice for a year — it was originally supposed to open in 2008. Now all we have to worry about is that producer Harvey Weinstein forced some unwise edits on the film in the interim.

The Wolfman. (November 6) This is another one that's been sitting on ice for ages — Benicio Del Toro signed up for the lead role in March 2006 (!) and there was a script review in August 2006. (If anything, looking at this crop of movies, I'm starting to wonder why so many were delayed for so long.) Del Toro got a costar, Emily Blunt, in January 2008, and it looks like the film was filmed soon after.

2012. (Nov. 13) We covered this in our rundown of the writer's strike and summer movies — because it was originally supposed to come out this summer. (Yes, another delayed film.) But the strike didn't actually impact this film much at all, because the script was bought right after the strike ended.

Avatar. (December 18) James Cameron has been working on this film since before you were born. And yes, I don't care how old you are, it's still true. In any case, chances are he's had plenty of opportunities to tinker with the script. Here he is, talking it up in 2006.

The Book Of Eli. (January 15). The Hughes Brothers (From Hell) signed up to direct this post-apocalyptic bibliophile samurai pic back in May 2007, and they were trying to rush it into production in the fall of 2007 "before a possible strike." Obviously, this didn't work out — the film's star, Denzel Washington, wasn't even announced until September 2008, and filming didn't happen until earlier this year. So count this as another film that was delayed — maybe due to the strike.

And I think from there on out, you're looking at movies that were greenlit after the strike, so you're probably all good. Looking at the crop of movies coming up this fall and winter, the main thing that's jumping out at me is that a lot of them were delayed for various reasons — probably not all to do with the strike. There are a lot of movies coming out from August to January, which were originally supposed to come out much earlier, but they were kept in the freezer. Make of that what you will.

Ultraviolet:

This isn't the actual opening of the movie, just the trailer. But it does include Milla Jovovich's opening monologue, giving us the 411 on future dystopias, viruses, weird swords, and hair that changes color when you walk into a different room.

D-War:

So there's a super snake and every 500 years it gets to be with a woman and grow wings, and maybe become a dragon, and then destroy the world or bring us candy. Wait, what?

Transformers:

In the beginning, there was the cube. And it was on the sphere. And the robots rose up and fought over it, and it was lost... until a whole bunch of other incomprehensible shit happened, and hey, we're on Earth!

The Gene Generation:

Any movie about gene-hackers that stars Bai Ling has got to be great, but this is the greatest intro ever. There's gene therapy, but it gets turned into a weapon, and then there are killer clouds, and everyone has to live in the walls, but some people turn the rich into tentacle monsters, except Bai Ling shoots them. Got it? Great.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie:

Now this is what we're talking about. ZORDON (must be capitalized) is fighting to rid the universe of evil, with the help of his Zords. Any questions? Didn't think so.

Dragonball:

There's a whole movie's worth of nonsensical plot, compressed into a folksy Asian-accented voiceover here. Like, who the hell is Oozaru and what's a Ma Fu Ba? We never really find out.

Alone In The Dark:

This is my absolute favorite. There are these native Americans (of course) called the Abkani, and they dug a hole, and opened a gateway to evil. With me so far? Wait, wait, there's a government agency called Bureau 70000, and it's hunting evil, and meanwhile autistic children are being turned into evil supermoles. No wait, there's more!

The Crow:

This one actually makes sense compared to the others on this page... there's a crow that carries your dead soul — sort of like the stork, in reverse — and if you're really sad, you get to stay on Earth and be bitchin'.

The Giant Gila Monster:

Aaaaaaaaaaand... back to crazy land. Who knows how giant these gila monsters can grow???

Ator The Fighting Eagle:

I love how this voiceover spends like two minutes building up the great legendary hero guy, who dies during the voiceover so that his son, Ator, can avenge him against the evil warlords.

The Humanoid:

This Star Wars rip-off has a fantastic text crawl, but goes George Lucas one better, by having someone read it to us. And it's well worth reading aloud, with all the great stuff about Lord Graal escaping and his power hunger, and the fact that Earth is now known as Metropolis. Wait, what?

Plan 9 From Outer Space

You guys convinced me this belongs in here — truly one of the most wonderfully addle-pated openings of all time! We are all interested in the future, for that is where we will spend the rest of our lives! With grave robbers from space!!!

Mutant Enterprise Crew:


First meet the no-neck Enterprise crew from the Burger King kid's meal. Who are these people? Bones and Kirk could be anyone! Why are they all shruken deformed versions of themselves? It makes me uncomfortable. Okay, the tiny ships are cute, but not the people.

Terminator Slurpees:


This is just wrong. How are we going to educate the children of tomorrow if we keep making Skynet's creations look like playful creatures that bring you iced treats? Shame on you, 7-11. Think of the children!

Dragonball Action Figures:


I really can't even begin to tell you how awful these action figures are, forget that they're poorly made, they're not even complete. Terrible, absolutely terrible. Rob Bricken, from Topless Robot, has a beautiful review of the action figures over at Anime News Network. It's worth the read.

Fancy Twilight Action Figure:


I'll admit it, I'm torn on hating these Twilight action figures because the ridiculous attention to detail. Edward even has on the oddly fitting jacket and glasses to shield him from the sun that won't kill him. Plus they even hold hands with the same enthusiasm Bella had in he movie. Oh, they're $30? Forget it then. Thanks for he tip Newsarama.

Even though it's getting a solid F for effort on title, the TV movie Alien Western actually looks pretty interesting. Marsters is stars as Sam Danville, a prisoner who's about to be executed, but his day of reckoning is interrupted by an alien attack. While I'm not a fan of the noises the aliens are making, I'll tune in for Marsters any day. Check out the clips below. Western premieres on the Syfy Channel on June 1st.

When is someone just going to give Marsters his own genre show? I don't understand it.

A group of French Dragonball enthusiasts staged a funeral service/vigil outside of a local theater. They wept, and gently placed flowers underneath the horrendous posters for the flick. This video is probably the best thing I've seen in weeks, and a totally understandable and appropriate response to what happened to their Anime baby.

[via Topless Robot]

Shônen manga, aka boys' manga (the #1 category in the unapologetically gender-targeted world of Japanese comics), has always involved action and fighting. But after the success of Dragon Ball (which itself arose in the testosterone-heavy climate of early '80s manga like City Hunter and Fist of the North Star), a new generation of manga started to mix fantasy, comedy and a light attitude with the classic martial arts formula of training and maiming. Forget about the big megahit Dragon Ball-influenced manga like Bleach, Yu-Gi-Oh! and Naruto-those ones are okay, but these are the ones you've got to read.

• One Piece (Eiichiro Oda). Wacky super-powered pirates travel the globe of a fantasy world in search of "One Piece," a legendary lost treasure. The illustration for the article comes from this. Running since 1997 in Japan, this series combines the high spirits and humor of Dragon Ball with its own particular brand of gory (yet usually nonfatal) swordfights and punchups. It's Pirates of the Caribbean meets Dragon Quest meets Yellow Submarine, with blood; plus the world of One Piece is much more fleshed out and internally consistent than Dragon Ball ever was Oda says Toriyama is his favorite artist, and the two of them have even collaborated on a one-shot Dragon Ball/One Piece crossover, Cross Epoch. (It's not officially translated, but unlicensed scanlations can be found online.)

• Jing: King of Bandits (Yuichi Kumakura). The fantastical adventures of a young bandit in a Looney Tunes world of surrealism, wild scenery and strange monsters. This 1995-1998 manga (and its more Gothic sequel, Jing: King of Bandits: Twilight Tales) is episodic, without any real ongoing story, but it's a children's fantasy adventure with style.

• Ranma 1/2 (Rumiko Takahashi). Another must-read kung fu manga, which ran in a competing magazine, Weekly Shônen Sunday, from 1987 to 1996. Ranma 1/2 (from the creator of the rather blah Inuyasha) is very different from Dragon Ball; it's a pure action-comedy, with not much story to speak of, and it's about a group of high school martial artists cursed to transform into various animals and things when they're splashed with cold water. The hero transforms from a guy into a girl, often when naked, leading to much speculative fanfiction. But if you read only two manga about Chinese-style martial arts, let this be number two.

• Eyeshield 21 (Riichiro Inagaki, Yusuke Murata). Action manga. Spiky hair. American football. 'Nuff said. This (intentionally) hilarious, melodramatic sports manga has been running since 2002.

• Shaman King (Hiroyuki Takei). Had enough fighting manga in faraway lands, with silly characters? How about a fighting manga set in the modern world, where the heroes are shamans and wizards fighting a tournament ON THE BEHALF OF VARIOUS THINLY-DISGUISED WORLD MYTHOLOGIES TO DETERMINE WHICH WILL BE THE DOMINANT RELIGION FOR THE NEXT 500 YEARS? This bizarre 1998-2005 manga is full of subversive humor, pot leaves (mostly censored in the English edition), American superhero references and crazy fight scenes. Unfortunately it kind of peters out before the conclusion.

• Knights of the Zodiac: Saint Seiya (Masami Kurumada). Running from 1986 to 1990, this series technically isn't influenced by Dragon Ball; the veteran artist, Kurumada, had been drawing boxing comics and boys' action stories long before Toriyama got started. But the cartoony, nonstop violence and machismo of Saint Seiya is a manga classic, the Green Arrow to Dragon Ball's Green Lantern. The plot theoretically involves martial artists who derive their powers from the Greek gods (they're holy warriors, aka "saints"-an element obscured in the unsuccessful English translation of the anime), but basically it's just one fight scene after another. Its over-the-top insanity and complete lack of logic makes Dragon Ball look like a work of heavy intellectualism.

• Jojo's Bizarre Adventure (Hirohiko Araki). Like Saint Seiya, this one's another parallel evolution of action manga. From 1987 to the present day, with breaks of no more than a few months, this horror-superhero-mystery adventure has delivered its own brand of craziness to readers throughout Japan. It starts out as the story of two feuding brothers in Britain in the 1890s, turns into a story about martial artists versus vampires, then about globetrotting psychic-powered heroes who can materialize spirits outside their bodies. The current storyline, Steel Ball Run, is about a transcontinental horse race in the Wild West. With superpowers. Imagine a glam fusion of Burne Hogarth's Tarzan, Bill Sienkiewicz's run on New Mutants, '80s splatter films, and Knights of the Zodiac, and you have an inkling of the idea.

• Dr. Slump (Akira Toriyama). This one isn't the "spawn" of Dragon Ball, it's the older brother. Toriyama's 1980-1984 Dr. Slump, a slapstick comedy about the adventures of a mad scientist and his android "daughter," is full of sci-fi movie references, robots, aliens and poop jokes. Some Japanese culture commentators consider it the last "grassroots" manga megahit, before later shows (including Dragon Ball) became more commercial and calculated. It's Toriyama's personal favorite of his own manga. And he drew it while living with his parents!

How dumb is Dragonball? It's the kind of movie where the good guy and the bad guy are fighting, and the good guy pauses to look serious and say slowly, "I must believe... in... who.. I am." And the bad guy doesn't kick the good guy in the face while he's monologuing. It's the kind of movie where the good guy makes constipated faces over and over again, while he's trying to summon his ki energy. It's the kind of movie that makes absolutely no sense, if you pause to think about it for two seconds.

And yet, I enjoyed it a lot. Maybe I just succeeded in lowering expectations to a nadir this movie could soar over. Or maybe I just have a soft spot for a dumb action comedy. Either way, I found myself giggling a lot at this film, both during the funny parts and the serious parts.

In Dragonball Evolution, Goku (Justin Chatwin) is your pretty standard movie youngster, who doesn't fit in at school and gets bullied by the rich jocks. His grandpa has forbidden him to fight them - even though he could beat them with one hand tied behind his back, thanks to his super-awesome martial arts training. (I kept being reminded of the classic Motown martial-arts epic The Last Dragon, and hoping someone would say "Kiss my Converse.") But Goku is special, and meant for a greater destiny than high-school bullying. He soon falls afoul of the evil Piccolo (James Marsters), a nasty from outer space who's been imprisoned for 2,000 years after he nearly destroyed the world. Now Goku is racing to find the Dragonballs before Piccolo does, or Piccolo will destroy the world for sure this time.

The movie pretty much announces what sort of film it's going to be in the first few minutes. We see an obscene closeup of the sweat on Goku's face, and then an even tighter closeup of his nose as the sweat rolls off, and then Goku is play-fighting with his grandpa Gohan, on top of a pair of tightropes. Goku almost wins by knocking a fly into Gohan's mouth, so he swallows it, distracting him. But then Gohan wins with his ki power. The whole thing is seriously slapsticky and ridiculous and demented.

And it pretty much sets the tone for the rest of the movie. Chow Yun-Fat plays Master Roshi, the teacher who takes Goku under his wing, and apparently decides that there's no piece of dialogue he can't improve with eye-rolling and crazy cackling. Chow knows what kind of movie he's in, and his enjoyment is actually sort of contagious. He almost single-handedly turns the whole thing into a zany pantomime, punctuated with whizzy acrobatic fight scenes.

At times, it reminded me of a somewhat more coherent version of Dragon-Wars - another terrible movie that I loved - maybe just because of the attempt to cram tons of overly dense backstory and random characters into a short movie. And because of the way everybody just runs with all the nonsense. The main difference is, this is a martial-arts epic, so there are regular kick-boxing sequences.

So Goku has to learn to believe in himself and trust his feelings and so on, and meanwhile every time he touches the Dragonballs he gets apocalyptic visions of everything being destroyed. Just in case those visions aren't clear enough, the movie includes about a dozen scenes in which Gohan, Roshi and various other people repeat the same pieces of information over and over again, which isn't a bad thing if you're bringing small children to this film.

The other thing I really liked about this film was the two female heroes, Chi Chi and Bulma. They're just as one-dimensional as everyone else in the film, but they're at least vaguely empowered. Chi Chi is another martial-arts expert, and she actually gets to be one of the people who teaches important lessons to Goku once or twice. Meanwhile, Bulma may look like a club kid, but she's actually a PhD in awesome pseudoscience, who invents cool gadgets and totes a laser gun. (And she has the motorcycle that somehow collapses itself down to the size of a pebble, in a sequence cribbed from Transformers.)

The biggest problem with the film is the villain, Piccolo. I've read a hundred interviews lately where James Marsters explains all of the rich depth he put into playing this character... and none of it shows up on screen. Marsters, covered with makeup that would have been laughed off Star Trek: The Next Generation, struts around reciting ludicrous villain dialogue while Not Getting The Job Done. We don't even see that much of him, and he seems to be a bit of a pushover in the end.

The last twenty minutes or so of the film dissolves into mediocre CGI, but there's still enough slapsticky fighting and Chow Yun-Fat clowning to keep you awake. And by this point in the film, Justin Chatwin's dough-faced earnestness had started to win me over.

If you're going to see one mindless Joseph Campbell wank-chalice of a film about the Hero's Journey this month, you could do a lot worse than Dragonball. For one thing, the movie doesn't feel the need to put down its female characters to make the male hero look good. For another, it's pretty fun in parts, and you can tell Chow Yun-Fat was enjoying goofing off. And you'll enjoy making fun of its many flaws afterwards.

Star Trek:

Here are seven new pics, and a new Imax poster, for next month's space-operatic epic. [DVDForum via Slashfilm]

Terminator Salvation:

Here's a new poster, featuring the smushy heads of doom, plus another actiony poster. [Spike and Icon Vs. Icon]

Iron Man 2:

A new set video reveals that all the stars of this movie will be bipedal. Also, there's a glimpse of the movie's logo. [IESB]

X-Men Origins: Wolverine:

A few new TV spots give you the lowdown on the 10,000 mutants in the movie:

Dragonball Evolution:

The race Goku comes from, the Saiyans are evil - they come to a nice planet, kill all the intelligent life, and then sell it to the highest bidder, says James Marsters. And once again, Piccolo doesn't die in this film. Marsters is signed on for two more. [Sci Fi Wire]

Bulma's car is a yellow speedster with a black racing stripe, a Can-Am Spider, which appears in the early high-school sequences. Yamcha, the film's "Han Solo," drives a camouflaged big-wheeler based on the Hummer. Yamcha is a "hustler and a swindler," says actor Joon Park. Also, Goku and his love interest Chi Chi have a fight in the temple courtyard. And Piccolo travels to Earth using an alien Genesis Chamber, including a metal throne that Piccolo uses to control the Dragonballs.

In a crucial scene, Goku stands over the fallen body of one of his companions, and Piccolo gloats that he's won. Goku summons his last remaining strength and says, "My grandfather taught me the first rule is, there are no rules." Then he attacks Piccolo. [Comic Book Resources]

They Came From Upstairs:

A couple of stills from the Ashley Tisdale alien invasion movie. [Rope Of Silicon]

Doctor Who:

David Tennant explains what to expect from Saturday's new episode, "Planet Of The Dead." Michelle Ryan "in a catsuit" steals something important. She jumps on a double-decker London bus to escape, and winds up falling through a wormhole in time and space to another planet. There, she and the Doctor are attacked by the red, flying Swarm, plus the alien Tritovores. Plus something sinister is happening back on Earth. The Doctor can't get back home, because he's trapped like everyone else. But "luckily we manage to communicate through the worm hole because we doctor a mobile phone." The episode is mostly light but with some dark moments, and at the end there's a hint that things are about to get much darker. This is the last time the Tenth Doctor gets to have fun. [BBC]

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles:

Here are two clips from tonight's season finale - which we still hope won't be a series finale. No fate but what we make! [Fox]

Dollhouse:

Here are some photos from episode 11, "Briar Rose." And do you notice a familiar face? Apparently Alan Tudyk plays "Stephen Kepler, the agoraphobic designer of the Dollhouse," who helps Paul Ballard with his investigation. (Remember, we were told we'd meet Alpha before we knew it was Alpha.) Meanwhile, Echo helps a young girl come to terms with her traumatic past. And Boyd protects the Dollhouse from an intruder. [SpoilerTV]

V:

ABC released a synopsis for its new reboot of the stealth alien invasion show:

Today, the world woke up to find spaceships over every major city. The Visitors claim to have come in peace, bringing gifts of medical miracles and technological breakthroughs. They promise to do no harm. They're lying. Most people believe the aliens have arrived just when we needed them most. We're eager to embrace their generous offers of help, but while tracking a terrorist cell, Homeland Security agent Erica Evans stumbles upon something far more sinister. When her partner tries to kill her, Erica discovers that the aliens have plans to infiltrate our governments and businesses, planting seeds for their plot to control mankind. Convincing anyone of the truth will be impossible because the Visitors have two powerful weapons. First, they've given the people faith with their reassuring presence and gifts. Second, they've rallied our youth. Thousands of teens, including Erica's son, have been recruited as 'Peace Ambassadors' but they're actually serving as unwitting spies. Erica's violent introduction to the truth thrusts her into the resistance movement, where she joins forces with Ryan, a rogue alien driven to save humanity. She'll have to balance her covert activities with her job, and her role as a mother, fighting to protect her son Tyler even as he joins forces with the enemy.

[Visitorsite]

Lost:

The producers answer some questions in their official podcast. Desmond's wound really is serious, and his life may be in danger. We'll learn more about the ramifications of John Locke's shocking resurrection. Next week's outing, "Some Like It Hoth," gives a sense of comedy to the show. And after that, it's a non-stop rollercoaster of events. [SpoilersLost]

Will Kate and Sawyer really get back together in season six? Here's an utterly baffling response from E! Online:

Ummm...not to spoil everybody for everything ever, but based on reading Harry Potter up through Half-Blood Prince, I can reliably tell you that Ron and Hermione get together in Deathly Hallows. Either that or everybody dies, but Hermione-Draco? Not ever gonna be canon.

(Who's Draco in this example? Juliet?) Meanwhile, next week we'll learn why Miles was on the freighter, and also whether he's been on the island before. [E! Online]

Also in next week's episode, Naomi makes a return appearance, despite being dead. Apparently, it's a flashback, and she hangs out with Miles in it. [TV Guide]

Fringe:

Here's what happens in the last few episodes of the season. In "Midnight," someone is mutilating tons of bodies and draining all their spinal cord fluid out. Their investigation leads them to a scientist with possible ties to the ZFT bioterrorist cell, and then they're shocked to discover the identity and motive of the killer. The kills get more and more frequent, until our heroes take desperate measures to stop them.

In "The Road Not Taken," Olivia starts dreaming while wide awake, seeing stuff that's not there. Investigating the case of a woman who spontaneously combusted, Olivia decides to use her visions for clues. Meanwhile, Walter admits prior knowledge of the ZFT manifesto. And Peter's secret project is revealed, and turns out to be useful in solving the case.

And in the finale, "There's More Than One Of Everything," someone with close ties to Fringe Division is attacked, and David Robert Jones comes back. And then Walter disappears with no explanation. [SF Universe]

Supernatural:

An upcoming episode called "The Rapture" features a whole lot of Castiel, judging from these pics. [SF Universe]

Dragonball: Evolution is the live action adaptation of Akira Toriyama's manga Dragon Ball. Fans of the original manga and anime series are seething with questions. Does Justin Chatwin look enough like Goku, who's supposed to be 12 years old in the original manga? Is James Marsters, playing Piccolo, green enough? Regardless of these quibbles, the movie's goofy haircuts, landscape-leveling super martial arts, and magic orange balls with little stars in them are all recognizably Dragon Ball.

Like most manga, Dragon Ball is a single story, not part of a universe of characters like DC or Marvel comics. But with over 8,000 pages of comics since 1984, countless anime and video games, and lots of characters with names like "Trunks" and "Vegeta," it's easy for outsiders to get lost. Here, we answer some basic questions about the arguably unfilmable series.

What is Dragon Ball?

What is Dragon Ball Z/Dragon Ball GT/Dragon Ball Kai/etc.?

What exactly are the Dragon Balls? (Spoilers, though not for the movie)

So is it science fiction or fantasy or what?

Bulma, Goku, Piccolo, Chichi-what's up with the names?

Isn't Dragon Ball just a bunch of speedlines and ripped dudes with bad hair screaming "It's over 9,000!"

What do fans think of the live-action version?

Jason Thompson is the author of "Manga: The Complete Guide" and the forthcoming Del Rey graphic novel "King of RPGs". As a manga editor for Viz and Random House, he has worked on the English editions of Dragon Ball, Yu-Gi-Oh!, YuYu Hakusho, Uzumaki, Fullmetal Alchemist and many other titles.

One of the problems with the TV series was that it had to follow the plot of the manga, which was also being produced at a rate of one chapter a week. However, one 14-page chapter, consisting mostly of fighting, does not easily fill up a 20-minute animated TV show. As a result, the originally brisk and action-packed manga became padded out into a bloated mess of a TV show. To kill time (and save animation costs), characters would just talk endlessly about what was happening, rather than doing anything. Sometimes the animators created their own non-canon storylines, "filler arcs," in which characters wandered off and got into little adventures or fought one another in different combinations. However, these side stories were never allowed to alter the main plot. Countless animated movies and TV specials, which regurgitated concepts from the manga (Hey! Freeza's got a brother, and he's a bad guy too!) usually just exacerbated the problem. The animators also do an inconsistent job of adapting Toriyama's cartoony character designs for the screen.

For those who would prefer a tighter Dragon Ball Z anime, there is hope; on April 5, 2009, Toei Animation released the first episode of Dragon Ball Kai ("Dragon Ball altered/modified") a remastered edition of the original Dragon Ball Z created for the show's 20th anniversary. According to Toei and Fuji TV, in addition to audio and video remastering, Dragon Ball Kai will eliminate the many "filler arcs" and redundant scenes created for the original Dragon Ball Z anime and make the story stick more closely to Akira Toriyama's original manga.

As for the speedlines and crazy hair and the guys shooting energy out of their hands due to their mastery of martial arts, that's all there in the original. (The yellow hair is the outward sign of a power-up, "Super Saiyan," which doesn't show up until the second half of the original manga.) And for those who embrace the absurdity, there are many fan-made live-action Dragon Ball movies.

The original Japanese anime series, based on the manga, was also called Dragon Ball. It ran from 1986 to 1989, and covered a little past the ending of manga volume 16, up to the end of Goku's final battle with his first archenemy, Piccolo. At this point, Toriyama was gearing up for a major new story arc, and Toei Animation decided to relaunch the anime under a new name. They chose the name Dragon Ball Z (pronounced "Zet" in Japanese). The reasons for the name change are obscure, but Toriyama joked in an interview with Banzai!, a now-discontinued German manga magazine, that he chose the subtitle "Z" because he was getting tired of drawing Dragon Ball and the last letter of the alphabet would make readers think the end of the series was approaching. (It's an open secret that Toriyama intended to end the Dragon Ball manga years before the actual ending, but was pressured into continuing it since it was such a moneymaker.)

No such luck; the Dragon Ball Z TV series ran from 1989 to 1996. At this point the manga series had already ended, but the licensors decided to continue the series in an anime-only form based on some of Toriyama's ideas and character designs. The resulting new series, in which Goku travels through outer space and meets a lot of aliens, was titled Dragon Ball GT ("Grand Tour"). Dragon Ball GT ran from 1996 to 1997 and is not considered canon by many fans of Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z.

Imagination-rich and information-poor fans spread rumors of other spin-offs with names like Dragon Ball AF. None of these are real, except for the 2009 Dragon Ball Kai, which is not a new series but a remastered version of Dragon Ball Z. (See "Isn't Dragon Ball just a bunch of speedlines and ripped dudes with bad hair screaming "It's over 9,000!"".)

None of these anime adaptations and spin-offs have any direct relation to Dragonball: Evolution, and the subtitle "Evolution" is purely an invention of the American filmmakers.

Eventually, in the manga and anime, we learn a little more about the Dragon Balls: they are artifacts created by Kami-sama (literally "god"), the mysterious supernatural being in charge of protecting Earth. When Goku meets Kami-sama he finds out why the Dragon Balls were made, although the explanation isn't so convincing (basically, Kami-sama made them to give humans something to strive for). Gradually we also find out that there are various rules that apply to the wishes. For instance, you can bring the dead back to life, but you can't bring the same person back twice. Further complicating matters, the second half of the series introduces a second set of Dragon Balls, the Namekian Dragon Balls, which have different rules and summon a different dragon. The anime-only storyline of Dragon Ball GT introduces still more Dragon Ball variants.

Bulma's quest for the Dragon Balls, for which she recruits Goku as her bodyguard, is what sets Dragon Ball in motion. However, the truth is that, in the grand scheme of things over the 42-volume graphic novel series, the Dragon Balls really aren't that important. Bad guys are always trying to get them so they can wish to rule the world or attain ultimate power, and the good guys are always trying to stop them. The only thing the good guys ever use the Dragon Balls for, more or less, is to wish their dead friends back to life. In short, they're a MacGuffin. Dragon Balls are the title of the series, but they're no substitute for good ol' martial arts training.

The long answer is, Dragon Ball was originally intended as a sort of Fractured Fairy Tale, a play on the Chinese legend Saiyûki (Journey to the West). (The same legend used as source material for the 2007 Monkey: Journey to the West stage musical and Jamie Hewlett's 2008 animation sequence, Gene Yang's graphic novel American Born Chinese, the 1978 Monkey TV series, Kazuya Minekura's bishonen manga Saiyuki and much more.) Although his personality and appearance are quite different, Goku is loosely based on the Monkey King; that's why he has a monkey's tail, a magic staff and rides around on a cloud. (Most of these elements are jettisoned in Dragonball: Evolution.) Toriyama also added to the mix a large dose of Hong Kong martial arts movies, particularly Jackie Chan's Drunken Master. Toriyama has even said that Jackie Chan in his youth would have been the ideal person to play Goku.

The celestial bureaucracy of the Dragon Ball universe, in which there are several layers of by no means omnipotent "gods" in charge of the earth and the universe, is also vaguely reminiscent of Chinese mythology, although no comparisons to any real-world religion are intended. When asked about his world's religion in the January 2003 issue of SHONEN JUMP, Toriyama replied "To be honest, I wasn't really thinking about it too deeply."

The other big influence in Dragon Ball is science fiction. Toriyama is a fan of sci-fi movies (his favorite is Alien), and Dr. Slump is full of gags based on Star Trek, Star Wars and other sci-fi and monster movies, not to mention plenty of fanciful cars, hovercrafts and dinosaurs. In fact, the Chinese style of Dragon Ball was originally intended as a break from Dr. Slump's Western sci-fi themes. But over the long course of Dragon Ball the story loosened up and acquired more and more science fiction influences. Gamera has a cameo in the series, as does a thinly disguised Arnold Schwarznegger from The Terminator, and Freeza, one of the villains, transforms into a creature clearly based on H.R. Giger's Alien. Dr. Slump and Dragon Ball even take place in the same universe-the Dr. Slump characters appear in a lengthy cameo in Dragon Ball volume 8.

The clearest point at which Dragon Ball turns from mythology to sci-fi is the shocking revelation which opens the Dragon Ball Z part of the storyline-in which Goku, previously just a weird kid with a monkey's tail, is revealed to be one of the Saiyans, a race of mercenary space aliens. Of course, this was all made up retroactively, as Toriyama himself admits; originally Goku was just supposed to be like the Monkey King. Did we mention that in Dragon Ball, the gods are aliens too?

* Goku = a reference to Son Goku, the Monkey King from Saiyûki (very classy)
* Master Roshi = a translation of "Muten Roshi," Japanese for "the invincible old master." Muten Roshi is just one of his titles, however; he's also known as "Kame-Sen'nin", the "turtle hermit," because he uses the kame (turtle) style of martial arts. See the turtle shell on his back for weight training?
* Piccolo = a half-size flute
* Yamcha = Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese word for "dim sum"
* Bulma = a phonetic misspelling of "bloomers," i.e., girls' underwear
* Chichi = Japanese slang for "boobs"

Will Dragonball: Evolution turn into an ongoing franchise, so characters with names like Trunks, Vegeta, Raditz, Freeza, Butta and King Cold will make their appearance? The box office will decide!

* In the film, Goku is a semi-normal high school student, rather than a childish monkey-boy with a tail who lives in the woods. However, even in the anime and manga, Goku does eventually grow up from a three-foot-tall Peanuts character into a normal-sized, perhaps Chatwin-sized adult.
* Piccolo's skin isn't a very bright green, and he doesn't seem to have antennae
* Master Roshi, who in the manga is a dirty old man who asks to look at Bulma's panties in return for a Dragon Ball, doesn't commit any acts of sexual harassment
* a bunch of characters have been removed, including Kuririn (Goku's fellow student under Master Roshi), the talking animals Pu'ar and Oolong, and Master Roshi's pet turtle
* plenty of plots and subplots have been removed, leaving the movie as kind of a mixture of Dragon Ball volumes 1-2 (the introduction of Goku and Bulma) and 13-16 (the introduction of Piccolo, and the big fight).

There's plenty more. A more serious complaint, however, is that "the script is an absolute, unmitigated disaster," to quote Zach Berlatsky of anime news network. What does the creator, Akira Toriyama himself, think about the Dragonball adaptation? Here's a translation of his words in a text announcement preceding a February 2009 promotional video:

"As the original creator, I had a feeling of "Huh?" upon seeing the screenplay and the character designs, but the director, all the actors, the staff, and the rest are nothing but "ultra" high-caliber people. Maybe the right way for me and all the fans to appreciate it is as a New Dragonball of a different dimension. Perhaps, this might become a great masterpiece of power! Hey, I look forward to it!!"

Toriyama is more charitable to Hollywood than Alan Moore-but then again, Toriyama, like most manga artists, has always had no illusions about producing mass entertainment. (Incidentally, it's worth mentioning that Dragonball: Evolution is not the first Dragon Ball film; that honor goes to 1989's Dragon Ball: The Magic Begins, an unlicensed Chinese live-action adaptation.)

The best thing going for Dragonball: Evolution is that, beneath all the spiky hair and shouting, Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball is a good story. (Particularly if you're a 14-year-old boy.) The fights and cliffhangers are exciting, the villains are reprehensible and the heroes are noble (and sometimes the villains are noble too, deep down), and the mixture of sci-fi, fantasy and comedy is entertaining and imaginative.

But there are other elements of Dragon Ball which may be difficult to make the transition to live action. One of these is the quirky, simple art style which gives Toriyama's work so much of its appeal. Toriyama's stories may be intense by the standards of American children's animation, but the appeal of his art is the cartooniness, which, when Dragon Ball started in the '80s, stood out among more square-jawed macho manga like City Hunter and Fist of the North Star. (Today, on the other hand, the influence of Dragon Ball has made the big-eyed, spiky-haired angular look the default manga style.) Putting simple, cartoony characters in dramatic situations is one of the trademark elements of manga and anime, and a more interesting way to adapt Dragon Ball might have been with film-quality animation or CGI, like the upcoming Astro Boy live-action movie. Although Keanu Reeves may not look entirely like Spike Spiegel in Cowboy Bebop, no real human being can look quite like a Toriyama character.

To use another example, Akira is set in a recognizably real urban sci-fi environment, but Dragon Ball is set in a primary-colored, fairytale world. The Wachowski Bros.' Speed Racer tried the "live-action cartoon" approach, with mixed success, but will Dragonball: Evolution go the grim-and-gritty route and turn out like the live-action Super Mario Bros.? Manga and anime fans cringe at the word "cartoon," but it's a good word to describe Toriyama's creations: a world which combines aliens and magic dragons, comedy and drama, absurdity and sincerity, a world of sweat and blood and winking unrealism.

Dragon Ball is, basically, a martial arts story with elements of fantasy, science fiction and comedy. The hero, Goku, is a boy with a monkey's tail (or not, in the live-action version) who is raised in the woods by a martial artist. Bulma, a girl on a quest for the seven magic Dragon Balls (a treasure which can grant any wish), accidentally discovers the guileless Goku and introduces him to civilization. Over many adventures, Goku travels around the world, develops his already prodigious fighting skills, and saves the world from evil martial artists many times over.

This is the basic formula: lots of martial arts, lots of training sequences, a few jokes. (Sometimes dirty jokes.) Whether Goku's opponent is the green-skinned Great Demon King Piccolo (his first major opponent, played by James Marsters in Dragonball: Evolution), or the alien mercenary Vegeta (presumably next in line for the sequel), or the artificial life form Cell, or the genie-like magical pink blob of doom Boo, the structure is the same. New bad guys show up, and Goku must defeat them (as much out of a love of a good fight as a desire to save the planet); if he's not strong enough, or he loses the first round, he hits the gym and soon he's buff enough to have a fighting chance. Rinse and repeat for 14 pages a week, once a week for ten years, and you have a 42-volume, 8,000-page graphic novel series.

This Dragon Ball formula became the model for a successful shonen (boys') manga, inspiring such little-known works as Yu-Gi-Oh! and Naruto. But it wasn't always intended as an epic, and if it seems to have lots of quirky elements (such as Bulma's blue hair, or the magic nyoi-bo staff which Goku sometimes fights with, or the titular Dragon Balls themselves, which really aren't even that important in the manga), it's because the series changed a lot over its 10-year run. When he started Dragon Ball, Akira Toriyama was best known for his previous hit, the 1980-1984 mad scientist comedy manga Dr. Slump. Dragon Ball was also conceived as a comedy, or comedy-adventure, albeit based on Hong Kong martial arts movies rather than the science fiction genre. But readers reacted more to the action elements than the comedy, and so, with the guidance (or pressure) of his editors, Toriyama gradually de-emphasized the humor elements (such as the talking animals, which aren't in the movie) and emphasized the fighting and melodrama. The resulting hit combo was spun off into anime, video games, and merchandise, and made Shônen Jump magazine the manga equivalent of DC and Marvel put together; at its peak in the early '90s, before the magazine market started its slow worldwide decline, it sold 6.53 million copies per week. As for Dragon Ball, it was rated the #3 manga series of all time by Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs .

The anime was first translated for English syndication in 1995, although it didn't become a hit until it started appearing on Cartoon Network's Toonami programming block in 1998, where less intense censorship allowed the characters to really beat each other up like in the original Japanese version. The manga was translated by VIZ and printed as two separate series, Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z... which leads into the next question.