DragonBall and its sequels ran for 508 episodes, 17 movies, 3 feature-length TV specials, and a whole bunch of extra stuff. When you compare that to the original 42-volume manga, there seems to be an inflated amount of "extra information" in there... and you are right! This extra material is called filler. Filler is used to pad out the series for many reasons; in the case of DragonBall, more often than not, it was because the anime was running along-side the manga, and there was no way for the anime to run ahead of the manga (since Toriyama was still writing it, at the same time!).

The company behind the anime, Toei Animation, would occasionally make up their own little side stories (occasionally based on ideas from Akira Toriyama, the original author) to either further explain things, or simply to waste time! Filler does not come only in the form of side stories, though; sometimes it is as simple as adding some extra attacks into a fight... sure, that is filler, too!

The point of this section, however, is not to list every single extra punch to the face that was added to the anime; that is not really accomplishing anything. Rather, there will be two purposes for the section. First, we would like to detail all the examples of obvious filler in the show (things like entirely new sagas, little side stories, substantial story padding, etc). Second, we would like to detail all of the filler that creates inconsistencies and plot-holes with the original manga's storyline.

[ Part 1: Complete Listing ] [ Part 2: Inconsistencies ]