Toyzinger
The Super Battle Collection is, undoubtedly, the collection of figures from Dragon Ball most successful of the 1990s, produced by BANDAI, and with the supervision of Akira Toriyama himself, in 1992 began its production, thus covering the need that all anime fans had to have a line of action figures of their favorite characters. This line enjoyed success from day one until its completion.
Even if today’s figures have better sculpting and more articulation, I don’t think any Dragon ball be comparable to this one.
The first 10 figures of the line had two productions, one in Japan for the Japanese market and another in Hong Kong to supply the rest of the world, which was clamoring for a line of figures from their favorite series.
So, these figures can be found with two different packaging, the ones distributed in Japan, with the box completely in Japanese, and the Hong Kong ones, where we can read the title of the collection and the name of the character in English. It must be said that the Japanese versions are somewhat better in quality and much more expensive than the international ones.
In addition, in 1992, taking advantage of the release of the film “Dragon Ball Z: The three great Super Saiyans”. An event was created in Japan where a pack with the three Saiyans from the movie was sold exclusively. This pack is nowadays considered a “Holy grail” and is by far the most difficult piece to obtain of the entire collection.
After the success of the first wave of 10 figures, production continued for years and BANDAI kept releasing Dragon ball Z figures until vol.27.
From this point on, the figures were already produced entirely in Hong Kong, so we can only find these figures in their international packaging (in English).
It must be said that the quality of the sculpts dropped a bit compared to the first 10, but this did not prevent them from continuing to sell like hotcakes, since at this time Dragon ball Z enjoyed huge success worldwide.
After the completion of the Anime and Manga of Dragon ball Z many fans were orphaned of content from their favorite series, then, in 1996, an Anime was released called Dragon ball GT which was totally detached from the comics and continued with the story of the heroes of Dragon ball Z.
Obviously, BANDAI took the opportunity to continue to expand its collection of star figures with these new characters, reaching volume 42.
In addition, to finish the collection BANDAI released a final volume 00 with a Son Goku ultimate with interchangeable heads of all his transformations.
With a total of 42 volumes + 2 packs, in 1998 the line of figurines “Super Battle Collection” came to an end. Possibly, the line of figures of Dragon Ball most mythical of all. Today, different collections of Dragon ball figures and new manga and anime from the franchise continue to be released. This is a franchise that has managed to skip generations and has fans of all ages.
I wish someday BANDAI would decide to release more figures from this line with the characters from Dragon Ball Super, as KENNER was able to do by expanding its collection of figures of STAR WARS vintage as new content was created, demonstrating that figure collecting is not only about sculpt quality and infinite articulations, nostalgia, without a doubt, can be a very important factor when acquiring one figure or another.
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