WHO WAS DRAGON BALL CHARACTER, FRIEZA, BASED ON?
For those unaware of Dragon Ball or Dragon Ball Z (who most will know), Frieza was the main antagonist of the Dragon Ball series, who regularly fought against the likes of Goku and Vegeta and tried several times to destroy Earth.
In the twenty-seventh episode of Dragon Ball Super, he manages to do so…! It’s said Frieza “presse[d] his palms onto the surface of the planet…fire[d] an energy blast straight at its core, causing the ground to rupture and stream of magma to erupt” which resulted in the planet’s destruction.
Let’s hope aliens with superpowers don’t visit us anytime soon…
But who was Frieza based on?
According to the creator, Akira Toriyama, Frieza was a character who would visit planets within the Dragon Ball universe and regularly wipe out the planet’s population, then resell the planets once he was done.
Frieza was essentially inspired by real estate personnel, whom Toriyama called “the worst kind of people.” It’s also said that Frieza’s entry in the Dragon Ball series, back in October 1989, coincided with the ‘Japanese asset price bubble’.
This was an economic bubble which went from 1986 to 1991 in which “real estate and stock market prices were greatly inflated”. Which coincidentally, coincides with Frieza’s introduction.