When did Dragon Ball reach the height of its popularity in America?

[TheUltimateNinja]

I'm referring to the pre-revival era.

[Cure Dragon 255]

It was probably the Frieza and Cell era of the Toonami airings. Buu was massively popular as well.

September - Dragon Ball Z Number One on all cable TV.
* Dragon Ball Z was the #1 program of the week on all cable television
with tweens 9-14, boys 9-14, and men 12-24.
* The Wednesday, Monday and Tuesday telecasts of Dragon Ball Z
ranked as the top 3 programs in all of television - broadcast or cable -
for delivery of boys 9-14. (The closest competitor was CBS' Survivor
Thailand.)

Also please ignore its gamefaqs and check out the ratings data!

https://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/2000113 ... l/72424846

[precita]

I imagine 1999-2003 were the peak years, were they not?

The Season 3 dub came out in 1999. By the end of 2003 they had aired the Cell and Buu arcs. After that all we had left was Dragonball dubs, GT dubs, and then the redub of Seasons 1-2.

[sintzu]

I'd say when it aired on Toonami. It was popular before when Funimation first dubbed it but I think that's when it truly took off.

[TheUltimateNinja]

It was probably the Frieza and Cell era of the Toonami airings. Buu was massively popular as well.

September - Dragon Ball Z Number One on all cable TV.
* Dragon Ball Z was the #1 program of the week on all cable television
with tweens 9-14, boys 9-14, and men 12-24.
* The Wednesday, Monday and Tuesday telecasts of Dragon Ball Z
ranked as the top 3 programs in all of television - broadcast or cable -
for delivery of boys 9-14. (The closest competitor was CBS' Survivor
Thailand.)

Also please ignore its gamefaqs and check out the ratings data!

https://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/2000113 ... l/72424846

Hot damn, that's huge.

[precita]

The ironic thing is most of us were kids/teens and some younger fans were only babies when this was going on.

Hell I think I was only 13 years old in 1999.

[KBABZ]

I would have been 9 when it first started getting popular. For me DBZ was a staple for after-school content alongside other anime like Pokémon, Digimon and for a short moment, Shinzo. Lighter stuff like Cardcaptors, Sailor Moon and the original Dragon Ball were reserved for Saturday airings. It was popular enough that at school there'd be lunchtime DBZ trading card game duels at a set location.

[Hellspawn28]

Probably in 1999 when the show finally got the new episodes airing on Toonami. After a year of re-runs, people got hype up when new episodes aired and Goku going SSj for the first time in the dub really created a lot of buzz with kids around that time. I remember when kids at my school was talking about it like if it was the return of Jesus.

[precita]

Also keep in mind this is the early 2000's, you HAD to watch the show on TV (or buy the VHS or DVDs), because this was the pre-youtube or streaming era. It's hard to believe but youtube didn't even come out till 2005, which was after all of Dragonball's dub run in the U.S. was already over. The redub of Season 1-2 were airing in 2005.

Back then there was no streaming media, few people watched shows online, there was no youtube, etc. You either bought FUNi's overpriced $25 VHS/DVDs with 3 episodes each on them (lol, that would never fly today), or you watched it on TV. I miss the days when you were sort of "forced" to watch things on TV at a certain time...nowadays it feels like everyone just catches things online instead.

[sintzu]

Also keep in mind this is the early 2000's, you HAD to watch the show on TV (or buy the VHS or DVDs), because this was the pre-youtube or streaming era. It's hard to believe but youtube didn't even come out till 2005, which was after all of Dragonball's dub run in the U.S. was already over. The redub of Season 1-2 were airing in 2005.

Back then there was no streaming media, few people watched shows online, there was no youtube, etc. You either bought FUNi's overpriced $25 VHS/DVDs with 3 episodes each on them (lol, that would never fly today), or you watched it on TV. I miss the days when you were sort of "forced" to watch things on TV at a certain time...nowadays it feels like everyone just catches things online instead.

There was always something special about seeing things on TV as it was a one time thing that if you missed it then you'd be stuck for a long time before being able to see it.

[VegettoEX]

Without access to in-depth numbers across a range of industries, and going strictly off observation from the time, I'd say it was 2003 precisely, if not even just before that in 2002 actually. Roughly as the Z dub was coming to an end for the first time.

It had the benefit of everything before it setting the stage, allowing catch-up time with rebroadcasts and staggered home releases. Video games were ramping up. There was still "new" material to look forward to (DB and DBGT), even if it wasn't Z-proper.

Malls were still filled with toys. Malls were. Uhh. Still a thing. Hot Topic was filled with DBZ before they made the full anime transition. Suncoast was king. Suncoast. Uhh. Still existed.

I'd say it all plateaued after that, eventually dropping.

[Kunzait_83]

Without access to in-depth numbers across a range of industries, and going strictly off observation from the time, I'd say it was 2003 precisely, if not even just before that in 2002 actually. Roughly as the Z dub was coming to an end for the first time.

It had the benefit of everything before it setting the stage, allowing catch-up time with rebroadcasts and staggered home releases. Video games were ramping up. There was still "new" material to look forward to (DB and DBGT), even if it wasn't Z-proper.

Malls were still filled with toys. Malls were. Uhh. Still a thing. Hot Topic was filled with DBZ before they made the full anime transition. Suncoast was king. Suncoast. Uhh. Still existed.

I'd say it all plateaued after that, eventually dropping.

This all sounds about right.

Its height in the days before the dub (since in many ways, the dub felt like almost something of a delayed "reset" and rebooting of the U.S. fanbase as one era of fans transitioned out in favor of another) was probably around 1996, when GT was first starting. It says a LOT about the level of awareness and anticipation of something when Japanese promotional material for an entity never at all before released or licensed officially in America is prominently displayed in store windows and within chain retail outlets (like FYE and Suncoast) and when imported merchandise for it was also readily and easily findable, as was the case with GT when it was first gearing up.

Plus by then, pretty much everyone you could find anywhere who was even marginally interested in anime was overly familiar with and had seen at a bare minimum some relatively large stretches of the series by then, as it was a near constant and ever present staple across mixed fansub tapes that rounded up any kind of "best of/most popular/most essential" collections of various anime series and titles.

If anything, this was also the same period where enthusiasm for the series was also simultaneously on the wane, with franchise fatigue beginning to set in for a lot of folks, particularly those who'd been around the longest. '96 was an odd mixture of the series being at its most ubiquitous and highly visible (within the fansub era), as well as about the crest of where it was also starting to become something that some people were also kinda sick of and felt had overstayed its welcome over the past decade or so.

This of course would all go completely out the window, and the entire paradigm would be completely restarted, almost seemingly from scratch, around 1998/1999 or so, once it blew up among the broader mainstream of non-anime fans and anime-virgins on Cartoon Network, and much of the "old guard" of fansub-era fans would begin to gradually bleed out over the next several years following.

[precita]

Also keep in mind this is the early 2000's, you HAD to watch the show on TV (or buy the VHS or DVDs), because this was the pre-youtube or streaming era. It's hard to believe but youtube didn't even come out till 2005, which was after all of Dragonball's dub run in the U.S. was already over. The redub of Season 1-2 were airing in 2005.

Back then there was no streaming media, few people watched shows online, there was no youtube, etc. You either bought FUNi's overpriced $25 VHS/DVDs with 3 episodes each on them (lol, that would never fly today), or you watched it on TV. I miss the days when you were sort of "forced" to watch things on TV at a certain time...nowadays it feels like everyone just catches things online instead.

There was always something special about seeing things on TV as it was a one time thing that if you missed it then you'd be stuck for a long time before being able to see it.

I still remember the days of using VHS tapes to record all my favorite shows because I knew besides reruns, if you didn't catch it on TV you were out of luck until overpriced VHS and DVDs were released at $25 a pop for only 3 episodes.

I guess the young kids/teens of today will never know what it's like to be forced to watch something on TV at a certain time. They used to call it "appointment television" because people would make sure they were home and out of school or work just to catch their favorite shows, or have someone record it. These days most people don't even bother to watch shows on TV anymore, they just catch them online at any time streaming. Even if a lot of these shows are uploaded illegally to youtube or other streaming sites.

The whole television landscape has changed dramatically since the early 2000's. I'd say it was probably somewhere around 2008ish where TV started to be less of a thing and people started to watch more shows online. And now here we are 10-15 years later in 2018.

[sintzu]

If you didn't catch it on TV you were out of luck until overpriced VHS and DVDs were released at $25 a pop for only 3 episodes.

They used to call it "appointment television" because people would make sure they were home and out of school or work just to catch their favorite shows, or have someone record it.

Nowadays we get 13-26 box sets and complain about them. If you told someone that's how things would release in the future they'd think you were crazy, especially who were buying Z's 85+ sets.

There was nothing worse then missing an episode that continued a cliffhanger from the previous one.

[Hellspawn28]

Back then there was no streaming media, few people watched shows online, there was no youtube, etc. You either bought FUNi's overpriced $25 VHS/DVDs with 3 episodes each on them (lol, that would never fly today), or you watched it on TV.

You could always rent stuff at the time. Blockbuster didn't fall under until 2007 when Netflix started to blew up with streaming.

[ABED]

Back then there was no streaming media, few people watched shows online, there was no youtube, etc. You either bought FUNi's overpriced $25 VHS/DVDs with 3 episodes each on them (lol, that would never fly today), or you watched it on TV.

You could always rent stuff at the time. Blockbuster didn't fall under until 2007 when Netflix started to blew up with streaming.

The Blockbuster stores in my neighborhood had a few DB VHS tapes, but never the whole set.

[Vorige Waffe]

I'd say 2002 or so, as by that point most of the show was dubbed, airing on TV with consistently high ratings (even beating out some of Cartoon Network's original programming), and available on home video (albeit in a very fractured form) plus the merchandise was rampant with action figures at Walmart and Toys R Us (which were already available since the late 90s, but it was around 2001 that Irwin started crafting more playable, higher quality figures with better articulation instead of repackaging old Bandai models), trading cards, clothes, and even video games. 2002 was also when we first heard rumblings of a live action movie being made, though we all know how well that turned out.

I would say the popularity started ramping up around 1998 or 1999, thanks to the constant repeats of the Ocean dubbed Saiyan and Namek arcs on Toonami building up an audience--specifically in its demographic of 8-12 year olds, as I'm sure by that point older anime fans were already familiar with the franchise thanks to VHS fansubs and the like--and really taking off with the premiere of the Funimation in-house dubbed episodes of the Freeza arc in September of 1999. I can definitely remember, around the age of 9, when the first commercial for those episodes aired, my friends and I were waiting for them like a fresh shipment of crack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnqQo7HhcSA

[Kunzait_83]

Also keep in mind this is the early 2000's, you HAD to watch the show on TV (or buy the VHS or DVDs), because this was the pre-youtube or streaming era. It's hard to believe but youtube didn't even come out till 2005, which was after all of Dragonball's dub run in the U.S. was already over. The redub of Season 1-2 were airing in 2005.

Back then there was no streaming media, few people watched shows online, there was no youtube, etc. You either bought FUNi's overpriced $25 VHS/DVDs with 3 episodes each on them (lol, that would never fly today), or you watched it on TV. I miss the days when you were sort of "forced" to watch things on TV at a certain time...nowadays it feels like everyone just catches things online instead.

Or you could just... buy fansub tapes.

Youtube wasn't the first means ever in existence of seeing unlicensed or unreleased material. TV wasn't the sole and only end-all-be-all option. VHS existed, and bootleg tape trading was a massive, massive thing since the early 1980s. People circulated tapes of all kinds of things, from unaired pilots, to rare and foreign/exotic films, to all kinds of TV shows from all around the world, etc. Even personal home videos or security cam footage and all sorts of similar such oddities would sometimes find themselves out in the wilds, copied onto countless tapes passed around people's personal collections and get seen by thousands upon thousands of people and become something almost akin to "memes" before that idea existed in the online sense. To say nothing of peer to peer sharing and direct downloads of video files on the internet, which also existed since the latter half of the 90s.

People on this site desperately need to get the fuck outside of themselves and their own personal firsthand experiences and view of the world and more specifically get over this preconceived view of the world that all media across the entire United States in the 1990s and early 2000s was as gated-in and narrowly limited for everyone as it was for a lot of you guys because you were still largely small kids at the time (and evidently, going by some people's testimonies on here, some fairly sheltered kids at that).

Just because Youtube and Streaming didn't exist yet, doesn't mean that kid's TV channels were the sole gatekeepers of Dragon Ball and most/all other anime. That wasn't even vaguely close to true back then, either for Dragon Ball or other anime in general. Plenty of stuff got licensed here (uncut and subbed) since the mid 80s, and stuff that didn't get licensed, like DB/Z, was still plenty findable for anyone who didn't live in the middle of podunk nowhere. You'd be AMAZED at how plain as day out in the open a lot of anime-related media was in North America as far back as the late 1980s (albeit NOT in very many child/family-friendly outlets).

All you simply had to do was go to a video store, go to comic book/sci fi/anime/horror conventions, go to a local Chinatown (if you lived in or near a major city, as more than a lot of people did), make friends and connections (which you never needed the internet to do: we used to have this thing called "going outside and talking to people", its still a thing even today and I recommend it highly), hell go to a fucking head shop, ask about "stuff in the backroom/under the table" etc.

This wasn't rocket science back then nor was any of this some deeply concealed, arcane secret kept far away from the masses, nor was this some sort of elite club that only people with a lot of money back then could get into (I was largely dirt-ass poor back then myself), and I get sick of this narrative about both Dragon Ball, broader anime, and even general media as a whole always being presented on here solely from the vantage point of people who were INCREDIBLY small and naive children with HEAVILY and abnormally (even for an average kid) restricted and tightly-leashed exposure to media, not to mention evidently didn't have very many friends or talk to a lot of people in general (again, going by most average accounts that people discuss in here over the years).

Most of you were RIDICULOUSLY little back then and (going by your own accounts) apparently a lot of you also had some fairly overbearing helicopter parents who over-regulated the living fuck out of your media diets and exposure to things, along with maintaining some generally heavily insulated and introverted lifestyles on average. Also I've noticed over the years that there are apparently also a lot of people here who grew up in the deeply rural midwest of the United States, which apparently had absolutely ZERO pop culture to speak of compared to virtually anyplace else that was closer to civilization.

Because of that, the average collective perspectives of most (American at least) people on this site are HEAVILY unreliable and filtered through a VERY skewed and insulated lens, one that in NO way comes even vaguely close to universally applying to or being indicative of EVERYONE ever who was alive in North America during the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, nor even a sizable plurality thereof.

The world back then consisted of VASTLY more than just heavily introverted, shy, awkward elementary/middle school kids who barely had any kind of social life, may or may not have lived in the deepest southern backwoods barely a head above Amish country, and spent most or all of their non-school hours largely huddled alone in their room watching crappy kids' cartoons on regular basic cable TV. Just because you weren't aware of the world as a kid doesn't mean it wasn't still going on spinning, same as it continues to today.

[precita]

Well I just turned 32. I'm one of the older people on this forum, but even then I never got into the whole fansub/VHS trading thing. Also keep in mind I was just a casual anime fan back then, anime was "new" and I was a big Ninja Turtles fan like most kids in the 80's, as well as into Batman, Spiderman, X-men, etc. At the time most anime was this new or foreign thing, most of us were introduced to it by Pokemon, Dragonball, Sailor Moon, etc...and all those other first popular anime show dubs that came to the U.S. around the late 90's.

Back in 1998 I'm pretty sure I was only 13. At the time I had no idea dubs cut things out from the original, or that there was a way to get original Japanese fansubs. And given internet communities were much smaller back then, and everyone was a hell of a lot younger 18+ years ago, it's a different world than today.

[Hellspawn28]

I'm 26 and will be 27 next year. I found ways to watch Dragon Ball Z subbed in the early 2000's. I knew a few Japanese collector shops and I knew a couple people that knew how to get them as well. Not to mention, you could also watch anime on other TV networks too since the Sci-Fi channel was my gate way to anime when I was 5 back in 1996. Venus Wars, Green Legend Ran and Lilly C.A.T did change my life as a young kid. I also live in a Suburb area in Maryalnd for the last 26+ of my life and I was also expose to other Japanese stuff like Godzilla and Ultraman as a little kid. So I guess I was more into this stuff than most people are at a young age.