Burning fight! You are champ!

 Let's do some pointless trivia about Dragon Ball, shall we?

One of the rumours most commonly thrown around about the series is some variation on "Akira Toriyama originally planned to end the series after [insert saga here]". The only time this is confirmed to have been his original intention is after the original Dragon Ball series - Toriyama was initially unwilling to continue the story after that point, since he had just gotten done with Dr. Slump and didn't want to commit to another long-running franchise. Ironically, the moment most often cited as being where Toriyama supposedly originally planned to end - the end of the Frieza saga - is also the one where that absolutely can't have been the case, since the Frieza saga literally ends on a cliffhanger and a set-up for the next story arc.

Toriyama utilises a lot of regional dialect stereotypes in his works for humour, Dragon Ball included, but many of these don't get carried over to localisations, which often means that characters come off differently to Japanese viewers compared to non-Japanese viewers. For example, in the Japanese version, Goku speaks with a Tohoku dialect, which is usually used in Japanese media to stereotype a character as being a bit of a country bumpkin and not too bright (compare giving someone a kind of redneck/hillbilly accent in Western media), so it fits Goku's personality well. However, a joke in the Japanese version that didn't get carried over to dubs is that Chi-Chi also speaks in a Tohoku dialect - a subtle indication to Japanese viewers that she appears to be smart, but she's actually just as dumb as Goku. This is the reason she's so obsessed with getting Gohan an education - essentially, she's smart enough to know an education is a good thing to have, but not smart enough to think beyond that. However, since no attempt was made to localise her regional dialect, the dubs completely drop this aspect of her character, and as a result she just comes off more like an unfairly strict parent.

In the Japanese version, Vegeta and Gotenks's attacks all have English names (mostly unchanged in the dub). Toriyama once revealed that the reason for this was to make them sound uncouth.

The original English dub (done by Ocean Group) created a few plot holes due to the localisers taking some liberties with the script. One example in particular comes when Goku explains his Instant Transmission technique - in the dub, he states it allows him to move at the speed of light, which doesn't explain why he was able to use it to travel across galaxies in an instant (since even moving at the speed of light, travelling that distance would take several years). In the Japanese version, no speed limit is given for the technique, and it's merely stated to be... well... instant.

Ironically enough, though, there was also a moment where this happened in reverse - the Japanese version created a plot hole which the English version then fixed. Specifically, in the Japanese version, Cell at one point mentions that he can regenerate from any attack because of a special nucleus in his head, and as long as that nucleus survives, he won't die. The problem is that Cell once got his entire head and most of his upper torso vapourised and still regenerated, despite the fact that that nucleus should have been destroyed. The English version fixed this by having him instead say that he can regenerate as long as even one cell of his body remains intact.

Speaking of Cell, it's common to hear people saying that Vegeta would have killed Cell if he hadn't missed with his Final Flash. The problem is he didn't miss - Cell dodged the attack at the last second, and that was after Vegeta baited him into standing still so he would have a clear shot.

Mr. Satan is the only character in the entire series to have fought both Cell and Majin Buu and never died.

Speaking of Mr. Satan, his name change in the dub to Hercule, while necessary at the time, unfortunately obscured another joke where he pleads to the people of Earth to lend their energy to Goku for his final Spirit Bomb against Kid Buu. In the Japanese version, we're treated to scenes of crowds of people all around the world raising their hands to the sky and chanting "Satan! Satan!"

Toriyama revealed that Mr. Satan's real name is Mark. In Japanese, this would be written as Maaku, and if you rearrange the characters, you get Akuma, which means demon.

Many characters have punny names in the series - some Japanese, some English, and some both. Gohan, for instance, is a word meaning "cooked rice" in Japanese, but can also be used as a generic term for a meal of any sort. Son Goku is the Japanese reading of Sun Wukong, the Monkey King from Journey to the West - in fact, Dragon Ball started out as a very loose adaptation of that story. Most Saiyans are named after vegetables - in Japanese, the term is Saiya-jin, literally meaning "someone from Saiya", with "saiya" being an anagram of "yasai", Japanese for "vegetable". Namekians are named after words for snails in various languages, such as Dende (from the Japanese "dendenmushi") and Cargo (from the French "escargot"). Bulma's family are all named after undergarments, with Bulma herself's name being a corruption of "bloomer", though in some official localisations their daughter Bra's name was changed to Bulla. Mr. Satan's family all have "demonic" names. A particularly clever one is Pan, the daughter of Gohan and Videl, whose name functions as both a food pun and a demon pun - "pan" in Japanese means "bread" (a loanword from the Portuguese "pão"), but Pan is also the name of a character in Greek myth who later became associated with depictions of the Devil.

Yamcha has a rather undeserved poor reputation among fans as being a weakling who often gets killed and never amounts to much. People tend to forget that for one, he only actually dies twice in the entire series (which is one time fewer than Goku), and for two, he's actually kind of a badass and has done some impressive things, in the original Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z, and Dragon Ball Super. Such feats include being the first person in the series to use a ki technique (his patented Wolf Fang Fist) and saving everyone from Goku's Great Ape form in the original series. People who think this of Yamcha are most often conflating him with Krillin, who actually does get killed with some frequency - in fact, Yamcha's death at the hands of the Saibamen (that was largely responsible for giving him this reputation in the first place) came about because he was trying to protect Krillin from being killed again.

On a related note, Yamcha is not the weakest fighter of the main cast, as many people think - while there are definitely some characters who considerably outrank him in terms of power, by the end of Dragon Ball Z he was still stronger than Yajirobe, Korin, Chiaotzu, Master Roshi and Mr. Satan, among others.

And speaking of said death above, many paint it as a completely undignified and embarrassing death, to the point his iconic death pose has been parodied thousands of times in various other works whenever a character suffers an embarrassing defeat. The thing that most people forget is that Yamcha was actually winning against the Saibaman he was fighting until it suddenly grabbed him and self-destructed, a thing that none of the Z-Fighters knew they could do and that none of them could have predicted, seen coming or countered.

Given that the Saibamen are explicitly compared to Raditz in terms of power level, many people assume this is supposed to mean that Raditz is relatively weak. In fact, Raditz was an elite Saiyan warrior and considered equal in power to Nappa - the comparison was meant to indicate how powerful the Saibamen are, not how weak Raditz was. Not to mention Nappa explicitly says that the Saibamen planted on Earth will grow stronger than usual thanks to Earth's nutrient-rich soil. Also, despite many video games using Saibamen as weak, disposable mooks, Toriyama claimed that Saibamen are actually very rare and valuable, and said that only a select few warriors are capable of handling them.

The fact that two cyborg (i.e. humans with mechanical parts) characters are referred to as androids (i.e. entirely mechanical beings) in the dub is often said to be due to a mistranslation. In fact, while it's not an accurate description, it's not a mistranslation - the original Japanese term used to describe them, "jinzō ningen", literally just means "artificial human", and "android" is a valid translation of said term. (In fact, the only way to differentiate "android" and "cyborg" in Japanese would be to literally use the English terms, i.e. "andoroido" and "saibōgu", since otherwise both would be "jinzō ningen" in Japanese.) Not to mention that the fact they were cyborgs was a plot twist originally, so the term "android" may have been deliberately chosen to hide this fact, just as the ambiguous term "jinzō ningen" did in the original.

Gohan is often thought of as being a teenager during the Android Saga, which isn't helped by many video games using the name "Teen Gohan" for this form of him in their English localisation. He's actually only ten years old at this point in the series (technically 11, due to spending a year in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber, but physically still ten), making him a pre-teen at best. Ironically, the Buu Saga form of Gohan, despite often being referred to as "Adult Gohan" in aforementioned video games, actually is a teenager, being 17 (physically 16) years old.

A lot of people will claim that Master Roshi was the one who taught the Z-Fighters the iconic Kamehameha technique. Except while he did invent the technique, he never actually taught it to any of them - Goku and Tien both copied it after seeing it once, while Yamcha and Krillin were able to recreate it independently with no input from Roshi at all. In fact, when Roshi first sees Yamcha and Krillin using it, he freaks out and says that they're not ready for it yet before being proven wrong. Roshi never intended to teach any techniques at all - in fact, he reprimands Krillin for expecting to be taught special moves in his debut arc, stating that the Turtle School is about building the body's own strengths. 

Despite common belief, Goku is not illiterate. He was explicitly taught reading and writing by Master Roshi, as well as at least some mathematics. Not to mention he has a driver's license, which (at least in Japan) means he had to have passed a written test which probably required more than a basic level of literacy. He is shown to have bad handwriting, however.