Post
by Gaffer Tape » Mon Oct 22, 2018 9:42 pm
As another person who was introduced to the series via dub season 1 on Toonami, I can say it really wasn't that hard to jump in. I mean, I remember for certain I didn't even catch it on its first day. But I mean, most shows I first got into as a kid, in these days before streaming and ubiquitous Internet, I always came in somewhere in the middle. It's just the way television worked. You had to do your best to jump in and figure out what was going on. But in all of those cases, when I finally did manage to catch the first episode (if what I was watching was story-heavy enough to have a discernible "first" episode in the narrative sense) I was thrilled. I have no idea how I even figured this out, but when I was a kid, I did find out that "Tommy's First Birthday" was the first episode of Rugrats before I even saw it. And I kept tuning in hoping I'd eventually catch it. I just don't get the mindsets of all the people saying, "Eh, I was a kid. I didn't care about the story. I just wanted to see the action." I always cared about the story.
So as for DBZ specifically, I had seen enough serialized shows to understand that I needed to follow the ongoing story. And while I couldn't catch every episode the first run through, I tried to build up my knowledge piece by piece, figuring out relationships to characters as best I could. And I can't remember which happened first: if I saw some of the flashbacks in DBZ episodes or if my friend told me he had seen Dragon Ball when it had aired a couple of years earlier. Either way, the instant I knew there was story that came before what I was watching, I had to know more about it. It might seem like pointless filler to some, but some of my favorite moments in those first two seasons of DBZ were when Blooma and Popo flashed back to Ma Junior and Shen talking, and later on when Blooma was captured by Freeza's men and flashed back to even earlier episodes. That was just amazing to me. I wanted to know who that guy with the mustache was. I wanted to know more about the story of when Goku transformed like I'd seen Gohan do. I wanted to know about this tournament Goku had said a similar great ape had appeared at. As soon as I got the Internet I was looking stuff up. I was ordering all of FUNimation's Dragon Ball VHS tapes of the first 13 episodes. I had to fill in the gaps because I loved this story and wanted to know what I had missed. Those brief glimpses into the past were like archaeological treasures.
So as I said, I really, really don't understand when people, even as kids, say they didn't care about the story. It's a completely alien concept to me. And it's gotten worse for me lately. Since I do my Dragon Ball Dissection series on YouTube, I get all kinds of feedback, but over the past several months, I started getting a general idea expressed to me multiple times that I'd never seen before. It was a mocking sort of, "Haha, you watch Dragon Ball for the story?" Again, it was just such an alien concept to me that the idea of (presumably) adults not only not caring about the story but actively making fun of people who do... I still can't wrap my head around it. And, you know, I'm not here to judge. However people find joy in the entertainment they consume, that's fine, I guess. If just enough plot to get from fight A to fight B is what they come here for, then I can't tell them they're doing it wrong. But, to be frank, it just gave off this "content to wallow in ignorance" vibe that kinda depressed me.