Dragon Ball: Curse of the Blood Rubies

Dragon Ball: Curse of the Blood Rubies is the earliest of the Dragon Ball feature films, a 1986 theatrical release that reworks the opening stretch of Akira Toriyama's manga into a single self-contained story. Instead of continuing the television storyline, it offers an alternate telling of how Goku first crosses paths with Bulma, Oolong, Yamcha, Puar and Master Roshi during a search for the Dragon Balls, with the avaricious King Gurumes filling the antagonist role. For anyone curious about how this franchise behaves outside its main continuity, the film is a compact and revealing example.

Running roughly fifty minutes and assuming no prior knowledge, it works as an approachable entry point. The appeal here is brisk adventure comedy: a small cast, a clear treasure-hunt goal, slapstick fighting, and a world that still feels loose and folkloric rather than locked into escalating power tiers. Its mild content level and familiar adventure rhythms suit younger viewers, casual fans, and anyone wanting a short, low-commitment sample of early Dragon Ball.

An English dub exists, and the film is available through Bilibili TV and Amazon Prime Video, which keeps the barrier to entry low. It is best treated as a standalone curiosity attached to a much larger franchise rather than a required chapter; its value lies in seeing the series' origins reimagined with film-only characters designed by Toriyama and in the light, unpretentious charm of that very first quest.

Goku is a boy with a tail who lives alone in the wilderness, surviving on his own until he meets Bulma, a clever teenager on a mission to collect the seven Dragon Balls. She explains that gathering all seven summons a dragon that will grant a single wish, and the two become unlikely traveling companions, with Bulma doing her best to keep the naive and enormously strong Goku out of trouble.

As they continue their search, the pair cross paths with a cast of characters who each want the Dragon Balls for very different reasons. Among them are a shape-changing Pigsy named Oolong, a desert bandit called Yamcha and his floating feline companion Puar, and the eccentric martial arts master known as Master Roshi. Their competing interests turn the hunt into a series of comic and action-filled encounters, and the film presents these meetings as a reimagined version of how the group first came together.

Standing against them is King Gurumes, a ruler whose hunger for the mysterious Blood Rubies has left him monstrous in body and desperate in spirit. He too is searching for the Dragon Balls, and his army scours the land to claim them first. The story follows Goku and his new allies as they race against Gurumes and his forces toward a confrontation over the wish itself.

Dragon Ball: Curse of the Blood Rubies is the first theatrical film in the Dragon Ball anime franchise, arriving in 1986, the same year the Dragon Ball television series began. Rather than continuing the main timeline, it presents an alternate version of the story's opening arc, showing how Goku first encounters Bulma, Oolong, Yamcha, Puar, and Master Roshi during their separate searches for the Dragon Balls.

The movie is a modified adaptation of the manga's initial story arc, with the new antagonist King Gurumes taking the place of Emperor Pilaf. This change places the film outside the canonical events of both the manga and the TV anime, establishing a pattern followed by later Dragon Ball features that exist in their own continuity. It is therefore a self-contained spin-off and alternate retelling, not a continuation or a starting point for the franchise as a whole.

As the first of several Dragon Ball theatrical films, it helped expand the franchise beyond its serialized roots. While not essential to the main storyline, it holds a distinct place as an early experiment in retelling familiar material with new characters designed by Akira Toriyama, and it remains a standalone entry within the larger Dragon Ball universe.