Why Does Future Trunks’ Hair Change Colors?

The English language broadcast of Dragon Ball Super has reached the much awaited Future Trunks arc of the series, and fans have been wondering one major thing about the character’s return. What’s up with Trunks’ hair?

Fans who remember Future Trunks remember his purple haired look in Dragon Ball Z, but were surprised to see him return with a completely different hair color. Surprisingly, there’s a simple explanation for it.

In the manga series Trunks and Bulma both had the same colored hair, and it was purple most of the time. Bulma was given blue hair for the anime adaptation, but Toei (for unknown reasons) kept Trunks’ hair purple. Toriyama then decided to design Trunks with blue hair to match Bulma in the anime, but Toei had been changing his hair back to purple.

But for some reason, with his return in Super, Toei did not change Toriyama’s character designs for the arc. So Toriyama designed Future Trunks’ blue haired look, and it was not changed. This even leads to some characters acting like he had always had blue hair, as sort of a hair retcon for the character.

Though the change came about with production mishaps, fans have decided to come up with their own reason that sounds just as feasible. People’s hair color changes when they get older, so fans have just theorized that this older Trunks now has hair closely resembling his mother.

Dragon Ball Super airs on Crunchyroll Saturday evenings at 7:15 p.m. CST. Adult Swim airs the English dub during its Toonami block Saturday evenings at 9:30 p.m, and is now available to stream on FunimationNOW and Amazon Video.

If you want to catch up with the English dub, the first 39 episodes of Dragon Ball Super are now available to stream on FunimationNOW, Crunchyroll’s VRV service, and available to purchase on Amazon Video. The 39 episodes span the full range of what has aired in the North America and covers the “Battle of Gods” arc, “Revival of F” arc, and the most recently ended “Universe 6” arc.

Funimation has previously announced the rest of the series will soon be available on the service as well. Releasing in 13 episode batches two weeks after the last episode airs on Cartoon Network, fans of Dragon Ball Super‘s English dub without a cable connection will soon have a way to experience the series.

There is currently a new Dragon Ball film in the works for 2018. The film will focus on the Saiyans, the “origins of Goku‘s power,” and potentially the story of the very first Super Saiyan God. Not only does it aim to be the best film in the series, original creator Akira Toriyama will be contributing to the film’s script and new character designs.