Did Toriyama design Super Saiyan Goku with red eyes?

Was the original Super Saiyan transformation supposed to have red eyes? I believe it was. A Super Saiyan with red eyes is how Akira Toriyama originally conceived this transformation to look, even though the Dragon Ball Z anime (1989) from Toei Animation went in a different direction.

I think one of the things people loved about Ultra Instinct was the focus on Goku having silver eyes. The eyes of a character can tell a lot about their emotions. With a great artist, and a great animator alongside them, whether in manga or anime, you can tell what's going on inside a character's head from the way the eyes are drawn. Dragon Ball is no exception.

Goku's red eyes started with the Kaio-ken, not Super Saiyan

Red eyes on Goku and the other Super Saiyans are a real thing, but Super Saiyan wasn't the first time Toriyama conceived red eyes. Some images of the Kaio-ken taken from the guidebooks show Goku with red eyes while he uses the technique, even though in the Dragon Ball Z anime he has black eyes.

Something similar happened with the Super Saiyan transformation. Red eyes were one of the original ideas Toriyama danced with, but for the anime it was altered.

Why red eyes in Dragon Ball signal rage, not evil

I want to be very clear on this point: red eyes in Dragon Ball don't necessarily represent evil. In other forms of fiction, some people would look at a character with red eyes and read it as a sign of something sinister, maybe even an occult force. That's not the case here.

In Japan, red eyes were used as a tool across different manga and different pieces of art to show a strong emotion, usually rage. A character with red eyes isn't evil. It means they're furious. Goku, especially early on in his Super Saiyan transformation, was an angry young man, and rightfully so.

Toriyama's sketch for Cooler's Revenge gave Super Saiyan Goku red eyes

I think the most famous example is the sketch of Super Saiyan Goku that Toriyama drew to help the anime staff prepare for the fifth Dragon Ball Z movie. It's known as Cooler's Revenge in the United States, and in Japan by a title built around the phrase strongest versus strongest. That film gave us the real Super Saiyan Goku in his theatrical debut for the very first time. Not the fake one from the previous movie, but the full golden haired warrior.

Toriyama wanted Goku to have red eyes when he became a Super Saiyan. Yet at one point the movie zooms in on Goku's eyes, and they are not red, even though he's still very angry.

Someone could argue that's only one example, and that maybe Toriyama misplaced his colored pencils that day. There's always an excuse. But with more research, you find that isn't the case. At one time, red eyes were without question planned as part of the Super Saiyan design, even for the anime. At some point, and I don't know exactly when, somebody on the Toei Animation staff decided not to go with red and instead used blue or green depending on the character. It also changes depending on who the artist was in some instances.

The original Dragon Ball manga color pages show red eyed Super Saiyan Goku

The original manga tells a different story. Many Dragon Ball fans know, though some don't, that there were colored chapters and colored pages in the original run. I'm not talking about the full color editions where everything is in color, which came out a few years ago. I mean back in the '80s and '90s, when Dragon Ball was first running and a certain number of chapters were printed in color.

Go back and examine those colored pages and you'll find some interesting surprises. One of them is that Goku does indeed have red eyes in his Super Saiyan transformation.

The coloring of those original pages is very different from the full color editions. The full color editions took a lot of inspiration from the anime and colored everything vibrantly, so they look more like an American comic than a manga. The original colored pages felt more like newspaper comic strips. They had a variety of colors, but they kept that old school, more simplistic look.

Because of that, many fans have thought Toriyama may have used the red eyes to give Super Saiyan a more artistic, stylish flavor. To me, it's no accident. Why would he do an anime design for the movie for the Toei production staff if he didn't, at one point, intend for Goku to have red eyes? Across the colored pages of the entire fight between Goku and Frieza, Goku has red eyes whenever he's a Super Saiyan.

Red eyes, white hair and a Super Saiyan design that kept changing

Those same Frieza fight panels also show Goku's Super Saiyan form with white hair. That could be seen as a stylistic choice by Toriyama, or perhaps he did at one time intend for Super Saiyan Goku to have white hair. By the time the Cooler movie was being produced, Toriyama had stuck with the red eyes but gone with the signature golden hair.

The Cooler movie was already in preproduction before the Dragon Ball Z episodes of Goku fighting Frieza as a Super Saiyan were out. All of this was being made around the same time, so it would make sense that Toriyama's mind changed a few times on the final design.

As far as I know, Toriyama either colored most of these pages himself or worked closely with his assistant on the colors. I don't believe a different person was doing the coloring. So Toriyama without question colored these eyes red on purpose.

Toriyama dropped the red eyes during the Cell saga

The red eyed Super Saiyan was only consistent until around the middle of the Cell saga. In the fight between Vegeta and Android 18, for example, Super Saiyan Vegeta has red eyes. Later in that arc, Toriyama shifts to more of a light gray look for the eyes instead of red.

At some point he dropped the idea. Maybe he saw the anime version and wanted to match it. It could be many different reasons, and we may never know. It does seem like Toriyama changed his mind several times about what color the eyes and hair were supposed to be for Super Saiyan.

It makes you wonder how things would have gone if he'd stuck with the red eyes. Would it have been cooler, or do you prefer the yellow hair and blue eyed look? Some have said that look was done on purpose to resemble Saiyans, but I don't think that was the intention, and the red eyed Super Saiyan goes some way to proving it.