Dragon Ball was big in the VHS Fansub era? (A question for the old guard)

[Hellspawn28]

I got into tape trending late than most people did, but I was only born in 1991. So I was lucky enough to experience it before the rise of Internet fan subs and bootleg DVDs. Before Dragon Ball, I did track down other Japanese movies and shows along with Hong Kong Kung Fu movies and other random stuff that I get my hands on. My first fansubbed experience was Ultraman Tiga & Ultraman Dyna: Warriors of the Star of Light back in May 1998 and later saw a random episode of Rurouni Kenshin in Japanese later that year at my local comic book shop. I had a few Japanese collector shops that sold imports and bootlegs. I even got to see information on Pokemon Gold & Silver a year before it was released in the US and brag about it around my friend's XD. I was even able to finish all of DBZ on tape before the dub wraps up on Toonami and I spoiled a few things to other kids. Other people didn't believe me, I remember one kid was like "You are wrong! Gohan will be back and he will kill off Majin Buu. Not Goku!!!".

It was not that hard for a kid in the late 90s and early 2000s tracking down these types of stuff. I even had a VHS copy of Battle Royale that my friend had in the 5th grade (He and his older brother was into tape trading) with bad subtitles. I was even lucky enough to watch the Heisei Godzilla movies in subs before Tristar/Sony released them. If you knew the right places to go, it was not that hard. When I was a kid, I was into all types of stuff besides the typical Saturday and Weekend cartoons (I did watch and like those stuff as a kid).

[Kunzait_83]

Oof, I've spend more time talking about myself than anything.

With all due respect, I think that this kind of gets to the heart of a lot of the disagreements that both you and I have had on here, as well as a lot of the disagreements that I've seen you have with other people on this forum over the years overall. If I can put this as delicately and respectfully as I possibly can (and I think we may have even discussed this once before in PMs awhile back now): I think one of the biggest issues with many of your postings on here (and for sure you've gotten way, WAY better about this over the years) is that you personalize things WAY too much and that tends to cause you to be incredibly (over) defensive in many discussions or more heated debates.

Your reaction over the years to many critical points people have sometimes raised on here seems to often end up boiling down to some variation of "Is... is this person talking about ME?! Are people judging me?" And thus you often used to tend to frame many of your replies in many threads as if you were being personally attacked in some way and were needing to defend yourself. And don't get me wrong: A) you're FAR from alone on that (a LOT of folks here have been guilty of doing exactly this over the years) and B) again, I grant that you're nowhere near as bad about it in more recent years compared to how you were with it back in the day. But I think its possible you might well be doing that again here.

And I say that because (and sincerely, not to be snide or dickish about it at all) as you said yourself: you seem to have made this into largely a point about you, and about defending your own fandom from a perceived personal attack from me. When the reality of course is that I didn't have you specifically in mind whatsoever when I wrote what I wrote up above. Nor really, most of pretty much anything I write on here.

Simply put: this isn't about you. Nor about ANY specific individuals. This is about a MUCH broader shifting in social/cultural trends in overall fandom going back nearly two decades now. This is a topic that is WAY INFINITELY bigger than any specific person or persons in this (or any other individual) community.

But my point is, I think we need to be far less quick to judge people based on whatever dumb cartoons they watch.

Of course I agree with that point in principle. That's incredibly obvious and self-evident I would think.

Once again though, my views on this issue aren't based on my reading and overreacting to some message board posts: they're based partly on my following closely the direction and trends in the broader anime industry in North America going back to well before many people here were even born, much less active in fandom themselves.

And they're also partly based on a FUCKTON of experience I've racked up interacting not only with the fanbase on this community, but on a TON of other communities over the past 15+ years now. And when I say "interacting with" I don't just mean exchanging some paragraphs on an internet forum: I've personally gotten to know (in many cases, quite well and quite personally) a LOT of folks on not just Kanzenshuu over the years, but also plenty of the other communities I've spent time on. I don't just base what I say here on some random stuff people say online on a public forum: I'm going by in some cases a good many YEARS (well over a decade and a half) worth of one on one direct communications. On Skype, on Discord, on the phone, and even some folks who I've met with personally in real life.

Other than a few interactions we've had on the main forum here and on the IRC chat way back in the day, you jj aren't one of those people. So I would never act like or claim that I know you very well personally. I don't, obviously, hence you generally are never someone who enters into my mind very much when I write about these things. Again, I'm not trying to be rude or passive aggressive or anything: that's just how it really is.

However, without naming names or going into pointless, crass gossip and schadenfreude: there are a LOT of people on this community (and others) who I HAVE indeed gotten to personally know fairly well and who, yes, I can indeed confirm are without a doubt people who don't have very much experience with almost ANY kinds of media that aren't largely and overwhelmingly for children, and who furthermore go to active lengths (consciously or subconsciously) to AVOID exposing themselves to/experiencing them. And there's more than enough of them where I can safely say that its an issue that's largely community-wide (at least in terms of many key figures and recurring "regulars" who've been predominant names here), with of course some outliers and exceptions along the way.

Whether people here realize it or not, whether they want to face or admit to it or not, there has for a long, long time now been a MASSIVE problem with people, both on Kanzenshuu and out in wider anime fandom throughout the 2000s to now, who predicate and center most of their viewpoints and ideas about art and media as a whole predominantly around children's television and have an inordinately unusual lack of exposure, experience, or curiosity for very much anything else outside of that narrow focus.

Sometimes, at the best of times, this can be annoying but ultimately harmless (though certainly makes more fruitful and educated discussions about art plenty frustrating): other times though, it can be indicative of someone with MASSIVE personal/emotional/psychological issues in their own lives that can be harmful to either themselves or others. And yes, I've seen more than my fair share of BOTH those extremes over the years: having grown close bonds of personal, real life friendship with some otherwise excellent, eminently awesome people from the community whose views and overall taste/sensibilities in media I could not possibly have less in common with, while also coming across plenty of others to whom that lack of intellectual curiosity and lack of interest in personal growth and maturity were indicative of something MUCH darker and toxic inside of them as people. Obviously this isn't the forum, much less the thread, to delve too deeply into anything that heavy.

In either case though, I certainly think that this skewing of focus favoring immature children's works over anything else makes a fandom/community for ANY kind of creative media as a whole (even one otherwise dedicated TO children's works) to be overwhelmingly weaker and problematic with regards to having a more healthy, informed, fruitful discourse on any given related subject. Even on a topic as otherwise featherweight and silly as Dragon Ball, yes I think that the over-fixation on children's media over anything else is something that damages and skews the discourse (as I think that that's one of the key factors as to why something as otherwise obviously intrinsic and centrally key to DB as martial arts fantasy/wuxia has been off the table of discourse for as long as it has: Wuxia being a genre that's been prevalent within the Western world WAY more so through adult-aimed works than children's overall).

And its also been damaging to wider anime discourse as well, as I think that this is DEFINITELY one of the key reasons (though certainly not the only one) why the pre-Toonami era of U.S. anime fandom has been mostly buried and swept aside in broader consciousness and why the Cartoon Network boom was almost something of a "hard rebooting" of U.S. fandom overall. And this also, as was my main point throughout this entire thread, has had the net effect of massively skewing the broader focus and discourse on anime away from more adult-aimed works and more overwhelmingly predominantly towards children's.

There's a concept in politics known as "the overton window". For those who might not be aware of it, what it means basically is the range of what ideas or concepts are considered "popular, mainstream, and acceptable" in political thought and discourse.


(A pretty good visual representation of it.)

Its a concept that can be applied to pretty much ANY topic outside of just politics: anything that's widely known or discussed over a long enough period of time by a broad enough array of people is something that will inevitably develop its own overton window. Various fandoms for various forms of media are no exception.

Am I saying that absolutely NOBODY in ALL of anime fandom in its ENTIRELY across the last 15 to 20-someodd years are 100% totally ignorant and in the dark about ALL adult media, both in anime and overall? Of course not. That'd be insane, ridiculous, and demonstrably untrue. What I've been trying to say here is that the "overton window" of broad, popular, and moreover accepted critical and casual discourse across Western anime fandom since the early-ish 2000s has been increasingly, heavily, and demonstrably drifting away from focusing on titles for more mature audiences (which is key because it was at one time largely titles for mature audiences that were once the biggest main draw for Western interest and attention in anime for some time) and overwhelmingly more towards children's works.

That doesn't mean that adult works are NEVER EVER discussed or NEVER EVER a focus: just that they are MUCH more increasingly a niche interest and a sidebar within the broader fanbase's main focus of interest, as opposed to the central focal point that they once were. Same goes for children's/Shonen/Shojo anime: even in the olden days, they were definitely A point of focus... just not THE point of focus that they've now increasingly become since the Pokemon/DBZ explosion at the turn of the millennium.

And yes, I have vast, vast problems with this broader development: I think that its bad both on a personal level for individual fans (in terms of personal growth and challenging themselves both intellectually as well as emotionally) as well as on a more macro, broader level for fandom as a whole as I think that it weakens the broader fanbase's level of intellectual awareness for various (non-Japanese and non-children's centric) artforms that are likewise key towards anime's artistic development and renders it incredibly myopic, insular, and even downright anti-intellectual.

One of the all time best summaries of this phenomenon comes from an old Cartoon Brew article from some years ago regarding the perceived maturity level of animation in a wider, cultural sense. I think that every word of the following, despite referring to broader animation fandom outside of just Japanese anime, is dead-on precisely on the money with regards to pretty much everything I've been trying to articulate on here lately with regards to anime fandom (which I think is also symptomatic of a MUCH broader and deeper cultural issue, but that's neither here nor there):

If animation was greatly affected by television, then the coming of the Internet shook things up even more. The effects of the online revolution are twofold: firstly, sites such as YouTube provide unprecedented access to animation old and new. Secondly, it has increased communication between animation viewers by providing new ways for fans to gather and share recommendations.

The Internet emerged as the ideal home for what can be termed the geek demographic, with TV Tropes being a prime example of a website put together by and for self-proclaimed geeks. The site prides itself on covering as broad a range of fiction as possible, emerging as a sometimes fascinating form of populist, open-access media scholarship. In theory, this would make it the perfect place to cover lost gems of animation, but in practice it has many blind spots. There is little discussion about Svankmajer or Norstein, while juvenile mediocrities such as Disney’s Gargoyles are treated as masterpieces on a par with the television dramas of Dennis Potter and David Simon.

TV Tropes has a page devoted to what it calls the Animation Age Ghetto, which gives a reasonable if scattershot overview of the subject. The page’s “examples” section, however, consists in large part of people filibustering about how their favorite superhero cartoons never caught on. The main reason that most of these cartoons never attracted adult audiences, of course, is that they are simply not for adults.

That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with having guilty pleasures. The humorist Stephen Fry summed things up well: a fan of Doctor Who, he commented that “every now and again we all like a chicken nugget.” As he continued, however,

"If you are an adult you want something surprising, savory, sharp, unusual, cosmopolitan, alien, challenging, complex, ambiguous, possibly even slightly disturbing and wrong. You want to try those things, because that’s what being adult means."

The ever-enthusiastic geek demographic certainly does not see animation as being merely for children. But it suffers from an inverted snobbery, with more inventive or experimental animation dismissed as “pretentious” or “arthouse”, and from a view of the medium that is built largely on nostalgia for beloved childhood cartoons. Even dedicated animation enthusiasts can overlook much of the best work which is out there: perhaps it is in human nature for audiences to stick to the films which they think they might enjoy rather than try anything new.

The bolded and underlined bit there is my own emphasis: I think that "inverted snobbery" is a PERFECT term for this.

But no, its not that I have any interest whatsoever in judging people personally based purely on what stupid shit they watch in their spare time. That's preposterously petty, pointless, and stupid in itself: plus hey, I'm as guilty as the next person of watching stupid shit when I want to relax and unwind. Most of us are.

This is more about closely examining and being much more honest and up front with ourselves about a MUCH deeper, more broadly sweeping problem in "geek culture" (however you wish to quantify or define that) over the past nearly 20 years now with a collective (even outright cultural) over-focus and over-emphasis on wallowing in childish, immature fluff and putting a VERY dangerously unhealthy amount of time and focus on growing and expanding our breadth of intellectual and creative horizons: about fandom as a broader overall entity over-indulging in the comforting safety and familiarity of what people "grew up on" and under-developing and under-expanding our adult minds.

And its a problem (a crippling one even) within fandom because, whether people consciously realize it or not (and I certainly think that most people don't), this ends up ultimately manifesting itself - however unintentionally - as a warped kind of anti-intellectualism and a bias against innovation and intellectual, artistic, and emotional growth and development.

It is inherently self-stunting and self-kneecapping, and I think it's at least in some small part grown out of a wildly misplaced and disproportionately overblown backlash against the once-popular perception that "dark and gritty is inherently more mature" that some people had back in the 90s: which itself was a backlash against a dominance of overly safe and family-friendly media in many popular corners in prior decades, making this now a backlash against a backlash. In other words, as a broader fandom/geek culture over the past 15+ years now, we've thrown away the art house/avant garde/genuinely mature and thoughtful baby with the dudebro/grim n gritty/Limp Bizkit bathwater.

And this is a problem I've seen manifest for myself firsthand (via mountains of tangible and years-long off-forum interactions) both in broader "geek culture" and anime fandom, as well as VERY pointedly right here on Kanzenshuu as a community. Its a problem with how we conduct ourselves, function, and grow (or not) as a community and as a collective fanbase, whether people choose to recognize it and confront it or not.

The point with regards to this thread's topic being that this was MUCH less of a problem (not a wholly non-existent one, but WAY IMMENSELY less of one) for Western anime fandom in the VHS/fansub era of the 80s and early 90s: for a whole host of reasons that are an entire can of worms unto itself to delve into. And that this is an issue that not only starkly and sharply divides the different eras of U.S. fandom in terms of their defining makeup of popular and iconic titles, but also I think marks one of the key factors that helped put such a barrier of disconnect in communication between them throughout the years.

And yes for the dozenth time now, I fully understand and have always acknowledged that this problem isn't 100% universal: that there are fans from the post-Toonami years who managed to avoid this way of thinking and have managed to "grow up", so to to speak, into a familiarizing themselves with a varied and diverse array of mature, challenging stuff (a couple of them have spoken up within this very thread now). I would strongly argue however, based on overall and easy to recognize trends in the overall fanbase over the last 18 years or so, that they're the outliers and exceptions to the much greater majority of fans who by and large simply have not and are MUCH more heavily resistant to it.

Has this problem gotten AT ALL better in more recent years? Most definitely it has, yes. However, it seems to be only a VERY gradual, mild improvement. I hope its a sign of the pendulum FINALLY swinging back the other way more: but so far, despite the more frequent bursts of attention and focus on more mature works in recent years, we're still largely in the overall broader status quo of the 2000s and earlier 2010s where Shonen/children's media holds the bigger, more dominant sway in the popular zeitgeist.

[jjgp1112]

snip snap snip snap you have no idea the toll three vasectomies can have on a man

Okay, I definitely see where you're coming from here, and it's something that's always annoyed me about geek culture, particularly the endless shouting of "MY CHILDHOOD" as if the cartoons and media they liked as children somehow weren't by and large lowest common denominator nonsense and glorified toy commercials, and assuming the few cartoons that did aspire for something greater represented everything and were tremendous cultural achievements.

And yeah, the backlash against "grim dark" manifested itself at its worse in the 2000s, particularly something I saw here where people went overboard in making Dragon Ball appear like something light hearted and this philosophy of "Simpler is better" prevailing over everything. While I think there has been a shift in this thanks to the popularity of shows like Breaking Bad, it's still manifesting itself through what's in then grand scheme of things, children's cartoons.

And on top of that, the biggest franchise going right now is MCU, which despite being pretty enjoyable overall and a testament to attention to detail, knowing your audience and actually having passion about your source material...is definitely designed to be as safe and inoffensive as possible, sometimes teetering on pandering. The Backlash against the DC movies has placed way too much emphasis on the darker tone as opposed to the shoddy production, because too many people cling to "MUH ESCAPISM."

As a whole, the MCU and the wretched franchise movie era in general represents this tendency towards safe familiarity tackling a rather broad range of content and genres, while original material that's trying to say a lot more gets ignored or shunned because they're just a little uncomfortable.

And with anime, yeah I think I was trying to let the fan base off the hook, as there were some troubling aspects of it that I've noticed even as a preteen. Mainly the wheel spinning emphasis on shonen and borderline pedopilic schoolgirl shows. I can't count how many times I've rolled my eyes when browsing different sites and seeing the "Big 3" of then entire scope of anime being children's cartoons with doofy visuals and transformations, usually being touted by people outside of those demographics in the first place. Even One Piece was a show I dismissed for years as the show with all of the crying and stupid grins.

You put all of that with stuff like kids shows like My Little Pony that develop periphery demographics that are more than a little concerning, people who were children in the early 90s complaining about the franchises they were exposed to back then have passed them by (as if tine is supposed to be static or something) and dominating the conversations then yeah....it is something that needs to be talked about more, actually.

And yeah, I personalize stuff too much

[ABED]

And on top of that, the biggest franchise going right now is MCU, which despite being pretty enjoyable overall and a testament to attention to detail, knowing your audience and actually having passion about your source material...is definitely designed to be as safe and inoffensive as possible, sometimes teetering on pandering. The Backlash against the DC movies has placed way too much emphasis on the darker tone as opposed to the shoddy production, because too many people cling to "MUH ESCAPISM."

I think the pendulum constantly swings, people have short memories, and are often very bad at analysis. They will dislike something and don't know why. When they try to explain why, their analysis is often puerile and reductive. They'll point to one thing like tone.