Dragon Ball Square Menko Card: A Piece of Showa-Era Japanese Anime History
What Is a Menko, and What Makes This One Special?
This listing features a square menko card from the original Dragon Ball anime series — a type of flat, thick-paper toy with a full-color printed illustration on one side. Menko have roots stretching back to the Edo period in Japan, where children played a game of slapping cards onto the ground to flip their opponent’s pieces. By the 1960s through the 1980s, anime and tokusatsu characters began appearing on menko in earnest, turning them into a beloved format for both play and casual collecting. This square-format card, printed with characters from the first Dragon Ball anime series, is a product of that era.
The copyright notice on the card reads Bird Studio / Shueisha / Fuji TV / Toei Doga — the official licensing credits used during the original Dragon Ball anime broadcast from 1986 to 1989. “Toei Doga” is the former name of Toei Animation, the studio that produced the series; the company changed its name in 1998, which suggests this card was most likely manufactured before that year, and the “Showa retro” description points toward the late 1980s. The manufacturer of the card itself is not identifiable from the card alone, which is typical for this era — licensed menko were produced by numerous small and mid-sized toy makers throughout Japan.
The Characters and the World They Come From
Dragon Ball was created by Akira Toriyama and ran in Weekly Shonen Jump from 1984 to 1995. The first anime adaptation aired on Fuji TV from 1986 to 1989, spanning 153 episodes and following the young, monkey-tailed Son Goku on his adventures. This card depicts Goku in his boyhood form — spiky black hair, blue gi, and red Saiyan tail — alongside Bulma in her early character design: blue hair, oversized glasses, and pink top. These early-series visuals are significant; once the sequel series Dragon Ball Z began in 1989, the adult Goku became the dominant image in merchandise, making the original boy-Goku-and-Bulma pairing a visual marker specifically tied to the first series.
Why Collectors Around the World Are Drawn to This Kind of Item
Dragon Ball is one of the most recognized anime franchises globally, with deep fan communities across North America, Europe, and South America. Interest in early Showa-era merchandise — the physical artifacts from the original broadcast years — is strong among those who grew up with the series and those who study its history. Menko occupy a distinct place in that conversation: they are a uniquely Japanese toy format that was never widely distributed outside Japan, and they predate the modern trading card era entirely. An officially licensed menko bearing the Toei Doga and Fuji TV credits functions as a small primary document of Japanese animation history from the 1980s. Because menko were inexpensive, mass-market children’s toys, many were played with and discarded — making well-preserved examples increasingly uncommon in today’s market. In Japan, the broader “Showa retro” revival has brought renewed attention to exactly these kinds of everyday anime goods from the era.
Price: $7.67 | View on eBay
