Dragon ball began as a gag manga (comic) by a man named Akira Toriyama in late 1984. It was loosely based on the Chinese epic, Journey to the West (Xi You Ji, or in Japanese Saiyûki) which concerned the Handsome Monkey King, Sun Wukong. Sun Wukong had an extending staff (the Ruyi Jingu Bang, or in Japanese, the Nyoi-Kinko-Bô), a technique allowing him to fly on clouds, and have many adventures.
Toriyama's manga (published in the popular manga anthology magazine, Weekly Shônen Jump, at the rate of one chapter per week) became moderately popular, and was collected over the course of the series into volumes of about 12 chapters each, called tankôbon. And, of course, later on they created movies, tv series, video games, cd's and dvd's from it, for the Japanese, European and US markets.
Video game music is a big thing in Japan; nearly ever game gets at least one CD released. Some, however, get either an original soundtrack, and/or an arranged soundtrack released. An original soundtrack will have the music *exactly* as heard in the game; if it's an 8-bit game, you'll hear 8-bit music on the original soundtrack. If it's an arranged soundtrack, it means the music has been re-done to take full advantage of the digital format... sometimes it's even performed by a temporary band or an orchestra. All Dragon ball game soundtracks are arranged.
This album is the soundtrack album to the PlayStation 2 game Dragon ball Z3, including the intro version of the main theme by Hironobu Kageyama, The ultimate energy. The horns at the Los Angeles sessions are played by the Tower of Power horn section.
Lukather in January 2004: "We do one every year for them. It's painless and they pay LOTS of $$ for a 3 hour session. We don't even really get any credit but it is worth doing for the cash. We just did the new one that's coming out and they saw us at NAMM and asked for another this year."
