Dragon Ball’s Opening Chapter Captured on Vintage Menko

Vintage Dragon Ball Menko Card Featuring Young Goku and Bulma

Menko: Japan’s Traditional Card Game

This is a menko card — a thick cardboard game piece with roots in Japan’s Edo period. The format here is circular (maru-menko), generally considered the less common of the several menko shapes that also include rectangular and square varieties. In the game, players slap cards to the ground trying to flip an opponent’s piece face-down; the symbols printed on the face — a yellow hand marker and a blue circle bearing the kanji for “iron” — are standard menko indicators used to determine who wins each round. These are not trading cards in the modern TCG sense. They are game pieces, sold at stationery shops and dagashi-ya, the small candy-and-toy stores that were central to Japanese childhood through the 1980s.

During that decade, manufacturers tied menko to popular anime franchises, producing character cards for series like Dragon Ball, Saint Seiya, and Kinnikuman. The format then declined sharply in the 1990s as handheld video games reshaped what Japanese children spent their pocket money on.

Young Goku and Bulma at the Beginning of the Story

The artwork on this card belongs unmistakably to the original Dragon Ball series — not Dragon Ball Z, not any later continuation, but the story Akira Toriyama began serializing in Weekly Shonen Jump in 1984. The manga ran until 1995 and has since sold over 260 million volumes worldwide. The anime adaptation, produced by Toei Doga and broadcast on Fuji TV, debuted in February 1986 and ran for 153 episodes through April 1989.

Two characters share the card’s face. Young Son Goku is shown airborne with his Power Pole (Nyoibo), the extendable staff he carries through the early chapters. His tail is visible — a detail specific to his childhood form that disappears entirely before Dragon Ball Z begins. Bulma appears alongside him on her capsule dirt bike, the vehicle she rides during the opening arc of the adventure. The background is a desert landscape with rolling dunes, matching the wilderness setting when Goku and Bulma first set out together in search of the Dragon Balls. This pairing is the franchise at its most elemental: the original duo, at the start of everything.

What the Copyright Line Reveals

The card carries a four-party copyright credit: Bird Studio (Toriyama’s personal studio), Shueisha, Fuji TV, and Toei Doga. That final name is the key detail for dating. Toei Doga changed its name to Toei Animation in 1998, meaning any product carrying the old name was manufactured before that year. Combined with the early-series character designs and the anime’s 1986 debut, the manufacturing window points to somewhere between the late 1980s and mid-1990s — though the exact year cannot be confirmed from the card alone. A number printed vertically on the left side, “5978104486,” appears to be a product or lot reference. The menko manufacturer itself is not identified on the card; specialist toy companies produced licensed anime menko during this era, but which one made this particular piece cannot be determined.

The four-party credit does confirm official licensing — meaningful context in a collecting market where unlicensed merchandise has long circulated alongside genuine products. For collectors drawn to the original Dragon Ball series in particular, merchandise from this era is distinct from the far larger body of Dragon Ball Z material that followed, and the opening-chapter dynamic between Goku and Bulma carries a specific significance: it is the franchise’s starting point, before the story became something else entirely. Menko as a format adds a further layer of cultural specificity; the game never spread beyond Japan, and the character cards tied to the 1980s anime boom exist within a tradition that has no real equivalent anywhere else in the world.