Chrono Trigger wrote: Dragon Ball is very fucking fresh in the world's eyes. It's been fresh ever since 1995 when the manga ended.
Um… no, not exactly.
Dragon Ball was something that I clearly remember a LOT of older, longtime anime/manga fans getting incredibly burnt out on around during that precise time period. I was just getting into it during the Cell Games myself, but as the Buu saga dragged on, I still freshly remember a LOT of people in online discussions, from many different corners of the globe including Japan, making their increasing boredom and weariness with the series readily apparent. Sarcastic jokes about how much the SSJ characters had hijacked the series were plentiful and commonplace amongst the then-fanbase, and few fans at the time were shy about expressing how tired they were of seeing golden hair dominating the marketing.
For my part I was still a starry eyed newbie, and hence that sort of jadedness with the series hadn’t set in with me yet. And granted there were still any number of folks like me who were still digging it, and stayed on for GT. But even back then it was very clear to me that this series had been going on for QUITE awhile and was
long starting to wear out its welcome in many circles.
The Japanese had been following it since it’s debut in the early/mid 80’s of course, other foreign markets not long after, and most of the Western anime fans I knew of at the time who followed it had done so in many instances as far back as the early 90’s. By the standards of that era of fandom, I was a late-comer to the series. And even though it was all new and fresh to me, plenty of people then had a good number of years to grow exceedingly bored and sick of it.
By the time GT ended, I remember
plenty of voices on the web breathing sighs of relief that the series had finally ended conclusively, and apart from the then-new Saban-produced English dub polluting the airwaves with it’s sanitized mediocrity at obscure hours, things grew incredibly quiet on the Dragon Ball front for a good few years (look to the giant stretch of time between the release of Final Bout and Budokai 1 as exhibit A) up till late ‘98/early ’99 when it hit Cartoon Network, exposing the mass mainstream U.S. to it for the very first time.
The revitalization it received via it’s explosion on Toonami was a microcosm almost exclusive to the U.S. that was infectious enough to eventually spread it’s way back to Japan and other areas that had been long since burnt out on Dragon Ball (albeit after they had a good five or six year break from it), thus helping kickstart the mini-revival it got over there circa 2002/2003, which thus spawned the new video games, the Dragon Boxes, and so forth.
It was a shot in the arm that likely would either never have come, or would’ve at least taken a bit longer to come were it not for America being so late to the fucking party and going as utterly bonkers for the show as everyone else already had during the second half of the 80’s and first half of the 90’s. It also led to people like me getting to relive numerous fanboy Dragon Ball cycles of interest all over again, such as the typical fan's complete SSJ obsession followed by the inevitable total SSJ burnout/backlash… further proving that one man’s new and exciting rush of an experience is another man’s detached déjà vu.
But yeah, my point is simply that, just because the Toonami crowd got its first taste of the Dragon Ball bug in the late 90’s/early 2000’s and may still be riding high off it today
doesn’t mean that that level of interest and enthusiasm magically backtracks to the ass-end of the series’ original 11/12 year Japanese run.
The U.S. revitalization at its all time height only lasted for so long itself… the series is now long past it’s second nadir in the Western market, and has basically more or less come back full circle to the point it was already at during the very timeframe you described as it being considered still “fresh” in the eyes of the world. I don’t mean to come off like an asshole or burst your bubble or anything, but the “world” and it’s barometer for what’s “new and fresh” doesn’t encompass solely the U.S.
The franchise had basically for all intents and purposes “died” in the eyes of the Eastern market during the mid-90’s, with many long time fans (both Japanese, American, or otherwise) being more than happy to take a long earned breather from it… only for it to wind up getting resuscitated in the U.S. a few years later, mainly because it took us so damn long to get it, thus giving it a brand new second life cycle amongst a completely new (and much larger) generation of anime fans... a life cycle that it’s now about reached the end of once again, just like it did in the mid-90's.
Don’t get me wrong; I certainly don’t think that Dragon Ball, much like many of it’s characters, will ever truly “stay” dead; I think that it’s far too much of an icon and it’ll thus always get revived in some capacity over the years. But it’s INCREDIBLY rare for this type of franchise to get two whole consecutive life cycles one after the other, and IMO it was a remarkable fluke stemming from a combination of the virgin anime market in the U.S. mainstream, and the unparalleled magnetism of the series itself.
Ok! but let me ask you this. Compare Yu Yu Hakusho, Rurouni Kenshin, and Dragon Ball. In Japan right now which is still the most popular even though all three series have been completed for years in Japan ? I don't know man for a show that's been over for years it still gets a lot of attention. It might not be as popular as it used to be back in the 90's but I bet a lot of companies wish their products were as marketable and as fresh. All I was getting at is that it's starting to get stale again. You got VIZ constantly re-releasing the manga over and over again. They're teasing us with Daizenshuu. You got Funi constantly re-releasing the show on DVD. Then you have the video games where the developers are just re-releasing old games and putting out more and more rehash! How many times do I keep fighting Raditz!? Like I said before...We're complaining about box art. Not because the Japanese version of something had a better box art and they changed it for the american version. We're just complaining about regular ass box art....Box art dude.... 
