Does the franchise/fandom pre-2013 (pre Beerus and Super) now feel like a distant memory?

[BlazingFiddlesticks]

No.

In fact, it's still weird to think of it as a current, ongoing series. That's not my default mode for thinking about Dragon Ball even to this day.

Dragon Ball is a series that ran in manga and on TV from 1984-1996, and then some other stuff happened.

And Cipher continues to kill it. Same here.

[Hellspawn28]

I have been on the DB online fandom since 2001 and we had a lot of Dragon Ball stuff to talk about for years. The years before BOG didn't feel that long ago and we didn't need new stuff to keep the fandom alive.

[KBABZ]

This is actually another topic in itself that I've had on my mind a lot over the years that I've kind of poked at the margins of but never fully delved into: just how old the franchise actually is thought of or is treated as in the minds in most current day U.S. fans from 1999 to now. Because I do genuinely think that that's an issue that is, like many others, remarkably skewed amongst a giant swath of the fanbase thanks to how absurdly late in the game (really well long after the game had ended already) so many people here had gotten into the series. It isn't something that's often taken into consideration by far too many people when discussions of this nature crop up.

I remember and forget this point all the time. For me, Dragon Ball surfaced in my life in the late 90s with the Z anime, so that's when it materialized into existence. It's super-weird for me that my all-time favourite part of the franchise, the OG DB anime, was fully wrapped up over a year before I was even born! For most westerners, Dragon Ball is a 90s property that got a resurgence in early 2000s video games and another one in the late 2010s with two new movies and a popular new show. The lack of internet and lack of interest/cross-cultivation of anything going on in Japan was probably a huge contributor to this, as well as the failed launches of the DB anime in 1989 and 1995. I would imagine that for old-school pre-www fans, anything in Japan was behind a sort of Iroh Curtain, which is why having correspondents like Julian was so helpful was the site. The influx of the internet has made finding out news and just plain getting things straight from Japan much easier.

I think a lot of people also forget that traditional forums are dying out due to the rise of social media. A decade ago places like twitter, tumblr, etc. did not exist. I notice nowadays young teens prefer to talk about their favorite shows/movies/videogames on their twitters or tumblr's rather than come to traditional forums like this one.

It feels like forums everywhere are dying out, even big ones like IGN are nowhere as active as they once were a decade ago. I think social media has really killed off forum discussion.

I absolutely hate this movement. For me, Facebook and Twitter are incredibly poor places to have the type of long and detailed and intricate type of posts with images and links that are possible on a forum. It pains me incredibly that Insomniac Games and thatgamecompany have publicly decided to nuke their forums in favour of 140-character posts like that constitutes a worthwhile discussion about your work. I'm super appreciative that the Kanzenshuu forums is still here and continues to get support.

[Bardo117]

I too can say that I am one of the oldest Dragon ball fans because the show aired significantly earlier in Mexico than it did in the US... Our community has kept going for a long time, even when we had no new content. But I could argue all day over the fact that we're still here because we haven't exhausted all conversations and analysis yet. It's taken us a very long time to uncover all details that remained from the show but that time was nearing. Thanks to the new show, we now had new things to talk about and break down.

[Kamiccolo9]

I too can say that I am one of the oldest Dragon ball fans because the show aired significantly earlier in Mexico than it did in the US... Our community has kept going for a long time, even when we had no new content. But I could argue all day over the fact that we're still here because we haven't exhausted all conversations and analysis yet. It's taken us a very long time to uncover all details that remained from the show but that time was nearing. Thanks to the new show, we now had new things to talk about and break down.

You are 23, at least according to your profile. You are not one of the "oldest Dragon Ball fans."

[Hellspawn28]

I too can say that I am one of the oldest Dragon ball fans because the show aired significantly earlier in Mexico than it did in the US.

You're 23 years old, not even close to being the oldest DB fan . You had fans that was watching Dragon Ball before your mom give birth to you. The VHS fan subber era fans hardly exist anymore, but we still had some fans like Kunzait 83 that was watching the show long before Funimation existed.

[Bardo117]

That's true Those guys are old as heck haha

[KBABZ]

I'm 27 and I would certainly not call myself an older fan. I was right in the correct age bracket to witness Dragon Ball's second wind, the popularity in the West, but that's peanuts compared to guys like VegettoEX catching it in 1995, or the "grandfathers" who originally read the manga in 1985/86 when it first came out in Japan.

[Desassina]

They are certainly getting behind. I used to watch Dragon Ball in the 90s, read the manga before I had access to the internet, and I couldn't get into this cocoon that separated canon from everything else. Years upon years of debating the meaning of documented work could only be proved wrong when the franchised got revisited. Those who have survived by sticking to documentation are different than the ones frowning upon DBS and its related work. It's no surprise. I was lucky to have detached myself into casual enjoyment like it used to be in the 90s.

[Bardo117]

I would like to point out that from 2004-2012 this forum acquired roughly 4600 Members. Then from 2013-2017 this forum has acquired around 6000 members. Coincidentally, 2013 was the year that BoG was announced, and that span of years is when Dragon Ball Super was announced and is currently in syndication. Lines up with what I had said earlier, that new content will forever drive discussion and activity more than discussing an old existing franchise.


Which made me realize I am the 3108th member of this board... Which means I have been around for the majority of this websites forum lifespan(7/13 years)....Which technically I've been lurking here since 2007.... Damn

[precita]

Anyone younger than say...28-30, was obviously not around for the start of the online fandom.

Hell I'm 31, and even I know there are tons of people older than me around who have been there from the start...like around 1997/1998ish.

[Kunzait_83]

The lack of internet and lack of interest/cross-cultivation of anything going on in Japan was probably a huge contributor to this, as well as the failed launches of the DB anime in 1989 and 1995. I would imagine that for old-school pre-www fans, anything in Japan was behind a sort of Iroh Curtain, which is why having correspondents like Julian was so helpful was the site. The influx of the internet has made finding out news and just plain getting things straight from Japan much easier.

See, a lot of what's said here (and not just in the above quote mind you) hearkens to a larger general sentiment about "the old days" among younger fans today (younger fans meaning basically anyone who got into Dragon Ball and moreover anime as a whole from the late 90s and early 00s onwards) that is profoundly not true at all, has left me continually dumbfounded at how ingrained its become, and that I feel is greatly overdue a thorough debunking.

The idea of an anime as widely visible and globally popular as Dragon Ball being kept behind an "Iron Curtain" as it were in Japan is just completely not at all remotely what it was like back then. For starters, the internet WAS around back then. One of the very first places I'd ever even heard of Dragon Ball from was in usenet discussions... all the way back in 1990. I first started using the web in 1989, and even by then it had been around and had boundless discussions going back just shy of almost a decade prior. You can even to this day, if you're so inclined, dig back and find Newsgroup chat discussions about first impressions of Return of the Jedi when it was first released in theaters. Or discussions about X-Men comics dating back to the original debut of long running classic characters like Lady Deathstrike and Forge. People talking about fan translations of various anime and who has more accurate subs... back in 1986.

Its not just Dragon Ball itself, North American Dragon Ball fandom, and North American anime fandom that are older than most fans today are aware of, but even the internet itself and the significant part its played in all of the above.

In 1993 you could order subbed tapes of the entirety of original Dragon Ball on various websites for what were then-fairly reasonable prices. In 1992 you could order any kind of wall scrolls, posters, models and figurines, soundtrack CDs, import video games, even raw official Japanese VHS and Laserdisc releases of tons of major anime titles from not only various web sources, but also the back pages of all kinds of fan/enthusiast/hobbyist magazines; many of which you could just pick up off the shelves in any local supermarket, so its not like any of this was buried all that deep or hiding out on anyone. Hell, there were people and websites in the mid-90s that you could mail in your CD-based consoles to be modded to play Japanese imports for as little as 30 to 50 bucks.

Plenty of stores that sold comics, video tapes, and even some head shops would have fansub tapes of all kinds of anime: one of my closest friends in elementary school would binge on fansubbed Fushigi Yugi and Flame of Recca all through the mid 90s from tapes she'd pick up at a trinket store called Charms for like 20 bucks a pop. There were penpal programs where you could easily make connections with native Japanese people who were perfectly willing to tape stuff raw off Japanese television if you were willing to trade American paraphernalia with them (which is how my friends and I ended up following Evangelion as it was originally airing in Japan in '95/'96: paid for entirely with Babes in Toyland and Hole singles).

This idea of there being some kind of pre-internet mystical forcefield of a cultural blockade that was hiding away all the anime goodies within the titanium walls of Japan, far from the sight of any and all Westerners around the world, particularly in the United States... this is a complete and utter fabrication that came into existence with the coming of age of the Toonami generation of anime fans, who A) weren't at all around following anime that far back prior and B) have almost never at any point in all these years, even with Google, Wikipedia, Youtube, and countless blogs at their disposal, ever bothered to do any kind of serious digging back into what the fandom and culture in the U.S. was at all like back then. Or fuck, even just ASKING someone who's older than them that was active back then.

We HAD an internet back then (albeit in a VERY different form for sure), and it DID play a role for sure. But moreover than that, we also had NUMEROUS other avenues for finding out about, watching, and consuming anime, as well as TONS of other foreign media from all around the world, without having to rely on TV airings in the slightest. The further growth of the internet as well as the advent of torrenting and streaming has certainly streamlined the living hell out of all that and made all this stuff way, way, way simpler... but that's a COMPLETELY different matter from all traces of any kind of a Western awareness of and interest in anime as a whole (and something like Dragon Ball in particular) just plain not existing at all beforehand and not having had any reach or impact on anyone before. Tons of specifics have certainly changed a great, great deal between then and now, but the world of pop culture and anime and U.S. interest in foreign media was all still spinning long, long, long many ages before FUNimation's DBZ dub had ever entered any of your lives.

I know this may come as a shock to a lot of 20-somethings around here, but contrary to what many of you may think (mostly unconsciously), the 1990s (and the 1980s for that matter) were hardly some primitive stone age where we were all just figuring out how fire worked and the biggest new technological innovation taking the world by storm was the wheel. The internet was in its infancy, it hadn't yet taken the whole world by storm (although it was clearly on the precipice of doing so) - but despite that, mass media in numerous forms, apart from and outside of mainstream broadcast television, was very much a thing that existed and it very much had a fairly large audience.

The world of pop culture didn't then, and never has at any point revolved itself primarily around children's cartoon TV airings and the whims of what 3rd graders in 1999 were interested in. Anime, manga, Japanese video games, Japanese cultural minutia and media translation as a piece of geek hobbyism: none of this shit was at all the least bit new to anyone above a certain age bracket back in 1999/2000. People much older than all of you had been at this for over 15, in some cases 20 years (in my case, maybe just around 10) by the time many of you had seen your very first Toonami bumper or collected your first Pokemon.

In other words, there's an ingrained, rarely commented upon, yet very widespread and deeply internalized "conventional wisdom" that has formed a large part of the bedrock of the thinking and view of history in modern 2000s and 2010s anime fandom where seemingly all of popular culture prior to kids of the late 90s/early 2000s being "awakened" to anime at the turn of the millennium (be it from DBZ on Toonami, or Pokemon, or Sailor Moon, or whatever else) consisted solely and utterly of children's media that they were interested in, and everything else out there existed in a total blank void without anyone else who were around living before them in the whole wide world (or at the very least the U.S., which sadly for a lot of Americans is the same thing) either acknowledging or or caring about any of it, and everything not directly tied to what they first started watching when they were toddlers suddenly just sprouted into being the moment they first saw it.

Time and time and time again, there's this continued treatment of anything that had ever occurred with both this particular series and even with anime as a broader entity, being relegated in people's minds as having happened in some blank, unseeable and unknowable netherworld of gated-off foreign/alien otherness. When in reality its like, guys... we're talking the U.S. in the early/mid 19-fucking-90s here, not 10th Century Western Europe. Perspective here. Shit wasn't THAT different or THAT much less "advanced" before you all came of age in the overall grand scheme of things. Not a single, solitary one of you who first got into all this as a starry-eyed child of Pokemon and Tom the Robot were in the least bit even close to the first ones at the table by any metric whatsoever.

In the early 90s we still drove gas-guzzling cars, we still had a Bush in the White House, we were still talking about a war in Iraq, about racial unrest in the inner cities, and a (FAR less destructive and disastrous) attack on the World Trade Center. Stand-up comedians were still bigger mouthpieces for truth than TV news talking heads, we were still fighting about the legality of marijuana, gay figures in the media were still causing a moral panic among religious idiots, Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich were still colossal douchebags, there was still shitty, talentless pop stars and boy bands saying and doing stupid shit in public (just with a helluva lot more cooler rock bands still around to act as a counterbalance; that part's sadly missing now), the mainstream media was as vacuous, sensationalist, and soullessly opportunistic as ever, global warming was still a threat and everyone knew it, college campuses the nation-over were still teeming with hyperbolic, overzealous "Social Justice Warriors" (or "PC Police" as we used to call them back then) who were nitpicking and raging alongside (as well as clashing) with Bible thumping fundamentalists over the latest dumb, empty, tabloid-baiting, sexual provocateuring nonsense that then-Madonna/now-Miley Cyrus or Taylor Swift were engaging in for media attention...

...and nerds still played video games (even some online ones! Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, and Warcraft II, among plenty of others, all say hi), still argued over favored gaming consoles, still watched heaptons of anime, still bitched about shitty dubs and haggled over preferred fansubbers, and still followed and imported gobs and gobs of this shit from Japan.

We just did it through dial-up, that's all.

[KBABZ]

okay sorry?

[Kunzait_83]

That wasn't just aimed specifically at you. And it wasn't intended to be inflammatory. So chill.

[KBABZ]

That wasn't just aimed specifically at you. And it wasn't intended to be inflammatory. So chill.

I seem to have a habit of mashing your paragraph button around here; I swear the Daizenshuu Orange Brick review was shorter than that! I'm guessing as a young'in I don't see things like Usenet chats and whatnot as quite counting simply because I have no familiarity with it and it doesn't seem like the internet to me, anymore than Skype or DIscord would be today. And from a similar (and equally flawed) angle, if there's no websites around to help spread information from foreign countries, how could people outside of those countries possibly know about it?

(don't bury me in paragraphs again plz)

[floofychan333]

Pre-Super isn't a distant memory because I had been watching for a while before Super was announced, but I've only been in this fandom since 2015 so I guess I haven't been around for the pre-Beerus era. Though of course I never got around to watching the first arc of Super until earlier this year...

[sintzu]

I became a member less than a year before BOG was announced so I can't say I know how it was here but I do remember the franchise before BOG as I got into it in 2005. Back then like some have said, DB was a complete franchise, we had 508 episodes, 17 movies and 3 specials. Fans were able to analyze everything it had to offer, debate things properly and so on. I do in a way miss the way things were back then simply because it gave DB a complete statue, it had a clear beginning and ending. It also enabled people, companies & artists to move onto new things. Now however, everything is about franchises and if something can't become one out of the gate then it's dropped.

[Hellspawn28]

Anyone who says that the series would be dead without any new material is wrong. I have been on the DB online fandom since 2001 and there was popular forums with many things to talk about. Heck, this site was already 14 years old before we got BOG and we still had a lot of things to talk about. I admit that I do like the new content that we have got such as Beerus, Whis, Zamasu, new lore like the 12 Universes and several others. However I won't cry if we never got a new series or new movies.

[sintzu]

I admit that I do like the new content that we have got such as Beerus, Whis, Zamasu, new lore like the 12 Universes and several others. However I won't cry if we never got a new series or new movies.

We didn't need anything new but most fans always wanted new content but thought it would never happen, at least not from Toriyama. Now, we're half way through his 5TH arc with no signs of stopping. Although it hasn't been as good as some hoped, I'm still happy to see the franchise continue cause the 2 movies were great, the manga has been great and the anime has its moments.

It'll be interesting to see what happens once Super is over, will they continue with a new series without him or just leave it be in fear of ruining the success he brought back to the franchise ? I do think once he's over we'll have more than enough content for them to take advantage of without the need of a new series.

[mecha3000]

I was just discussing this very topic with my brother, but I know I'm late to this particular post. But yeah, it does. The video games pre-2013 (such as Budokai, Budokai Tenkaichi, Raging Blast) almost feel like time capsules of a world in which Beerus and Whis weren't even conceived yet or the concept of other universes. The term Universe 7 wasn't even a thing back then (as far as I remember). Also, there was a feeling of ultimate finality back in those days. There was Dragon Ball to Dragon Ball Z (the manga story from Toriyama) and then Dragon Ball GT (the anime only story from Toei). There was never a chance back then that the series would continue because it never seemed possible despite the popularity it still sustained with new video games and home re-releases.

Then, in 2008 it all started back up again: There was the '08 special (which introduced the concept of surviving Frieza soldiers and Vegeta having a brother, Tarble) like everyone brings up, where it seemed we might finally get more. Then, little by little - We got more. In '09, we got Dragon Ball Kai in Japan. In 2010, there was the Plan to Eradicate the Super Saiyans remake (the Dr. Raichi and Hatchiyack story retold) in 2010 with Raging Blast 2. In 2011, we got Episode of Bardock (which introduced Frieza's ancestor Chilled and Super Saiyan Bardock). This was the precursor to the full-on Dragon Ball Renaissance that fans say began with Battle of Gods in 2013 and especially flourished in 2015 with the release of Resurrection 'F', the start of DB Super, and Xenoverse.

Ever since 2013, however, I do admit that the franchise/fandom of the past is a distant memory. Now, most of the talk is about the gods and universes - something that slightly annoys some of my friends. I kind of miss the days where the franchise survived mainly on the novelty of wanting more and getting new video games and stuff. However, I PREFER that we now have Super because I've always wanted a new series that could continue the story. Originally, when Resurrection 'F' was announced - They made it sound like it would take place AFTER the manga (not the Buu Arc), so I thought it would focus on Uub - which I REALLY wanted Super to be.

So, I like what's happened with the franchise because it furthers the chances of Uub and even Pan getting the treatment they deserve for the EoZ timeline. And also, FEMALE SUPER SAIYANS IS NOW CANON TO DRAGON BALL!!! For this, I really appreciate the new series. Also, Super has given new voice actors in Japan and worldwide a chance to become a part of the DB franchise.

Long story short, yeah - The old days of the DB are over. But still, I keep those old days in my best memories and will still continue to appreciate whatever comes out of Dragon Ball next.