'Dragon Ball' Confirms Macy's 2019 Thanksgiving Day Parade Return

2018 was a huge year for the Dragon Ball franchise as Toei Animation expanded the franchise into many different avenues. It was the year where the franchise seemed to be big everywhere, and 2019 is going to continue this trend by the sounds of it.

Talking about the licensing and partnerships between Toei Animation, Funimation, Bandai Namco, and other brands, the Dragon Ball franchise was confirmed to return to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade for 2019.

In the February 2019 issue of License Global magazine (as spotted by Kanzenshuu), the Dragon Ball franchise gets a considerable focus as Toei Animation talks about many of the efforts they made to expand the brand in 2018. They also talked up plans for 2019, and confirmed the series would return to the parade, "Toei will also bring the "Dragon Ball" franchise to Anime Expo, Crunchy Roll Expo and New York Comic Con this year. And in November, Toei will once again participate in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, as it did last year with its massive Goku balloon."

The 2018 Macy's Thanksgiving Parade was a big deal for anime fans as the Dragon Ball franchise debuted a brand new Super Saiyan Blue Goku balloon. It is one of the few anime franchises in the parade currently, alongside Pokemon, and was one of the many examples of just how big the Dragon Ball franchise has become over the last year.

While there's no confirmation that the Goku balloon will be the one returning, it does lend credence to the fact that the Dragon Ball franchise will be celebrating something. The anime may currently be off the air, but with early reports saying that the anime will return in some form along with this bigger push into branding and marketing in 2019, the Dragon Ball franchise will be having another landmark year should everything work out.

Dragon Ball Super currently airs its English dub on Adult Swim during the Toonami programming block Saturday evenings at 11:00 p.m. It is also available to stream on Funimation and Amazon Video. The Japanese language release of the series is complete, and available to stream on FunimationNOW and Crunchyroll. The manga has chapters that can currently be read for free thanks to Viz Media. Dragon Ball Super: Broly is currently in theaters as well.

If you wanted to catch up with the English dub of the series, there's actually a pretty nifty way to do so. You can currently stream the first 91 episodes of the dub on FunimationNOW, which brings the series from the beginning all the way to when the the universes began gathering their fighters for the Tournament of Power. It's not too far off from where the Toonami run of the series is at currently.

via Kanzenshuu

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