Toyzinger
The Super Battle Collection is undoubtedly the most successful collection of Dragon Ball figures from the 1990s, produced by BANDAI and supervised by Akira Toriyama himself. Production began in 1992, meeting the demand from anime fans for 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 end of Dragon Ball Z anime and manga, many fans were left without content from their favorite series. Then, in 1996, an anime called Dragon Ball GT was released, which was completely unrelated to the comics and continued 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.
Hopefully one day BANDAI will decide to release more figures in this line featuring characters from Dragon Ball Super, just as KENNER did by expanding its collection of vintage STAR WARS figures as new content was created, thus demonstrating that figure collecting is not only about the quality of the sculpture and endless articulation, but that nostalgia can undoubtedly be a very important factor when deciding which figure to purchase.
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