@Kamiccolo while you are correct about Japan being the defining market, I think you are definitely underplaying the importance and popularity of Z in the West.
Also while there is no break in the manga, Raditz's appearance not only introduces new status quo with Goku being a parent but also adds a noticeable science fiction shift. It is perfectly understandable why that point was chosen for the start of a new anime series.
If Super (or another DB series with a new name) were to come back to T.V., would anyone like to see Cabba, Caulifla and Kale join the Z-fighters? They could easily become Goku & Vegeta's new proteges and possible successors (since Gohan, Present Trunks and Goten don't have the same drive and desire to be warriors, and unless they give Piccolo a god-level form, A17 will be the relevant non-saiyan team member at this point). Plus, bringing them into the main cast could give us the long awaited U6 Sadala arc that many fans wanna see.
And if Broly survives after the new movie, it would a great opportunity to expand on his and Kale's characters.
Really? I didn't know that.
But my real question is, does anybody there care about Chiaotzu?
So, he's a hopping corpse or something. Speaking of old DB material not really being explored, you know it would be fun to see Bulma and Oolong but heads again like when they were younger. It's funny how Oolong went from being one of the main viewpoint characters to really a background one at the end of the series. Like here is a fun idea, Bulma, Goku, and Oolong go through old places they visited in their youth for old times sake and recollect how much things have changed.
Chiaotzu never grew past being absent entirely in the arc immediately following his introduction - which in a bizarro world where Toriyama had chosen differently would've been the point where he got used to writing him around - especially given that that was where Dragonball started growing into the kind of series it would eventually. IIRC, he's the only main/supporting casualty of Piccolo who hadn't already had a regular role in the dynamic, so being out of it meant he was screwed from the start.
Toriyama as a writer rarely ever rebrands minor characters a long period after their introduction, except to double down on the roles he already set for them. And Chiaotzu didn't even get one. So while Tien had more of an appearance in that following formative arc and thus ended up with the personality he would eventually keep for good and a small, but still consistent role in the overall dynamic, Chiaotzu got cemented by both author and audience as a throwaway character.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Oct 11th 2018 at 6:44:40 AM
He's very much a creature of habit and someone who tends to go back to old wells.
Especially when it comes to how he uses characters.
At the same time, you never know when he's going to decide someone is important again (the Pilaf Gang kinda fit into this, even if they can't really do much).
But that's never going to be Chiaotzu.
One Strip! One Strip!The more I try to understand the way Toriyama works, the more I feel that his origins as a comedic writer still lay very large in the way he approaches writing - especially now that he's come back to Dragonball after not doing anything with for so long: the most noticeable part being that when you get right down to it, in his works the dynamic between the characters is king. Characters gain or lose prominence based on how much humor and/or drama he can get out of their interactions, which is why some characters with well dug niches keep them even after they've been largely left behind by the plot.
Super by and large feels like an attempt to reconcile the comic writer and the story writer, with a lot of stumbling along the way. That's always why I figured the Pilaf Gang returned: because he liked them, the dynamic they had, and the jokes associated with them, so he decided they should be back.
But it's also why he's shown hesitance to actually use them in a plot significant way (from a story point of view, Future Mai is an entirely new character) and why outside of the three of them interacting with each other they actually have very few interactions with the rest of the cast (even their interaction with Trunks, minus Mai's, are limited): because the world around them is very different from when they were introduced, and doing either of those would break out of the dynamic that drew him back to them in the first place.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Oct 11th 2018 at 7:12:04 AM

Japan is the most significant market for the series by far and there the anime is little more than an advertisement for the manga. Fun fact, Z didn't even get released on home video until the mid 2000s despite being a late 80s to early 90s series.
(This, by the way, is also the main reason GT so Out of Focus; its actual TV ratings weren't super far off from the previous arcs, but there was no comic form of it so most of DB's original base rarely experienced it)
On Cold, he mainly existed for worfing purposes (and to give Freeza someone to exposit to). Trunks killed Freeza easily, but he did it with a sword while Freeza wasn't powered up, so it could be potentially dismissed as a fluke. Then Cold, who was built up as a peer power to Freeza (the guidebooks clarified that he was "somewhat weaker") faced Trunks fully on guard with no surprises and without a sword in play and still got wrecked in two hits. Showing that Freeza ain't shit to the new bad guys, not even with his last resort Godzilla Threshold power that he can only sustain for a minute or two.
Edited by Kamiccolo on Oct 10th 2018 at 7:21:35 AM