All Dragon Ball fans have seen how more and more characters have been added over the years, so that one might think that Akira Toriyama will end up running out of names for them. To give an example of this, in the Dragon Ball Super Power Tournament saga, more than ninety new characters were added at once, including sixty fighters, ten gods of destruction, ten angels, ten Kaio Shin, among others.
Something that seems quite curious to us is that the mangaka has a certain trick, since many of his characters have the origin of their name in normal elements. To give an example of this, all Saiyans have the name of vegetables in English, while Bulma’s family has its origin in the different types of underwear. And this is not limited only to the protagonists, since Frieza and all the members of his race come from derivatives of the cold, among others.
Dragon Ball has the novel Journey to the West as original inspiration
We must mention that, Goku, has two names in the series, these being the aforementioned and Kakarotto, derived from Carrot (Carrot in English). However, we can see that in Akira Toriyama’s drafts, Goku’s original name was different.
His inspiration comes from Journey to the West, a mythical novel that has Sun Wukong as one of its protagonists. And it is right here where Goku, as a child, found his base, since in Toriyama’s original sketches the protagonist of Dragon Ball was represented as a monkey completely and with the name of son goku.
It is for all this that it can be seen that Goku would be the Japanese translation of Sun Wukongbeing here where we also find the justification that Goku had a tail and could become Ozaru, although it must be said that in the Chinese novel Sun Wukong never achieved this transformation, being more of a martial arts fighter who achieved immortality.