Son Goku’s Menko Card and the Game It Was Made For

Dragon Ball Circular Menko Card from the Original Anime Series

What Menko Are and Where Anime Characters Fit In

Menko are thick pasteboard cards — one of Japan’s oldest children’s games, with roots stretching back to the Edo period. The rules are simple: players take turns slapping their cards onto a hard surface, and whoever flips an opponent’s card face-up wins it. By the postwar decades the game had evolved well beyond its origins, and manufacturers began printing popular subjects onto the cards — baseball players, television heroes, then anime characters.

Dragon Ball menko arrived during the original anime’s broadcast run on Fuji TV. Toei Animation’s adaptation of Akira Toriyama’s manga launched in February 1986 and ran for 153 episodes through April 1989 — a period fans now call the first series, before Dragon Ball Z continued the story. The franchise was one of the representative titles of the late-1980s anime boom, and officially licensed merchandise moved through toy shops and dagashi-ya (the small penny-sweet shops central to Japanese childhood) throughout those years. Menko were a natural part of that merchandise landscape.

Four Characters from Dragon Ball’s Opening Arc

This card features Son Goku, Yamcha, Puar, and Oolong — all four appear in the story’s very first chapters. None of them are latecomers introduced in Dragon Ball Z; all four belong to the earliest quest-for-the-dragon-balls arc, which gives the card a distinct early-series identity.

Goku is the series’ hero: a boy modeled on the Monkey King of Chinese legend, recognizable by his monkey tail and the extending staff known as the Power Pole. Yamcha is introduced as a desert bandit — a skilled human fighter who eventually becomes one of Goku’s allies, with an early comic trait of freezing up around women. Puar is Yamcha’s small, shapeshifting cat companion, almost never seen apart from him. Oolong is a shapeshifting pig who joins Goku and Bulma near the very start of their journey.

The copyright notice on the card lists Bird Studio, Shueisha, Fuji TV, and Toei Animation — the four parties who together licensed Dragon Ball goods during the original anime’s run. That four-party credit is a reliable marker of the 1986–1989 broadcast period, and the absence of any Z-era characters reinforces it.

A Game Format That Faded Before the 1990s Were Over

This card’s round shape — maru-menko — was one of two standard menko formats, produced alongside rectangular versions. The symbols printed on the right side of the card, a green “iron” mark and a red fist mark, served as strength and attribute indicators used to resolve wins and losses through a simple rock-paper-scissors-style system common across menko of the period.

The menko market collapsed in the 1990s as trading card games — Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! in particular — took over the youth collectible space. Cards from the 1980s anime boom have since become vintage items, passed between collectors rather than schoolyard players. For anyone drawn to Dragon Ball’s original run — the small-cast, early-adventure version of the story — this card sits right at the start of it all.