Alex Kidd was a Dragon Ball game?!?

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Re: Alex Kidd was a Dragon Ball game?!?

Post by gokaiblue » Thu Sep 05, 2019 5:18 pm

I think what I'm trying to say is Voltron's success seems mainly about Voltron, whereas the anime boom started in the mid to late 90s seemed to open the flood gates for even more anime on American television, kinda like how The Beatles becoming a hit in America lead to more British rock groups having their moment over here too.
Looking for these rare items/information:

Any information or recordings pertaining to Dragon Ball Z's syndicated run on WAWB
Any information regarding the stations that carried the origin Dragon Ball in the USA
Dragon Box (any deals would be nice)
Shonen Jumps with Dragon Ball in them

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Re: Alex Kidd was a Dragon Ball game?!?

Post by Kunzait_83 » Thu Sep 05, 2019 5:20 pm

gokaiblue wrote: Thu Sep 05, 2019 2:45 pmOn this issue, you kinda miss the point. Yes, it was available, but it didn't become a huge global phenomenon until much later. It was just a niche thing. It's like saying yes, the music of The Beatles was available to Americans before 1964, but Beatlemania in the US didn't truly hit until they landed here.
There's two major false premises/assumptions here that I've long taken issue with.

The first is the presumption that something only officially becomes a "global" or "mainstream" success when it hits it big in North America. As if being a major success in not just Japan, but China, Europe, Latin America, etc. count for absolutely NOTHING in comparison. No, something ONLY officially "counts" once we here in the U.S.A. finally acknowledge its existence: even if (like in the case of Dragon Ball) we're the DEAD LAST ones to notice it LONG many years after its already conquered the ENTIRE rest of the world.

It doesn't matter HOW big and successful something gets throughout the ENTIRE rest of the planet outside the U.S. - when its big everywhere else BUT the U.S., its still often considered "niche". Only once it gets big in the U.S., or hell even if its big ONLY in the U.S. and NOWHERE ELSE - only then is it considered "mainstream" and a big deal. :roll: :roll: :roll: That in and of itself is preposterously idiotic and myopic on its face for a boatload of obvious, self-evident reasons.

And the second false premise of course is this community's long-standing bizarre insistence of confusing "children's merchandising phenomenons" with "The Mainstream".

The assumption stems from people in this community (and really, broader anime fandom and "geek culture" starting from around the early/mid-2000s or so) making the assumption that all (or the vast majority) of mainstream culture begins and ends with what people who were small children circa the late 90s/early 2000s and onward were invested in and aware of.

There's no distinction whatsoever that's made between children's pop culture (things like Disney films, Power Rangers, Ninja Turtles, Transformers, G.I. Joe, and other assorted children's toy phenomenon) and literally the entire rest of mainstream culture that isn't tailored specifically to children (which is frankly speaking, MUCH bigger and broader-ranging overall). Hell, oftentimes this community treats the latter as if it simply does not fucking exist. And furthermore the fact that children's pop culture in the 80s and 90s was nowhere NEAR as prevalent overall in the wider mainstream to the degree that its been throughout the 2000s and 2010s.

So in other words: yes, children's media had major phenomenons within its sphere like Power Rangers and Pokemon, etc. back in the 90s, and Transformers and Voltron, etc back in the 80s. But when you focus SOLELY on those, you neglect VAST TONS of other mainstream pop culture phenomenons that aren't in any way connected to the realm of children's media and merchandising; and which frankly had a MUCH bigger cultural impact at the time. Be it films like Pulp Fiction, Seven, Aliens, Robocop, The Thing, Blade Runner, etc. or TV shows like Twin Peaks, NYPD Blue, Oz, The X Files, The Larry Sanders Show, etc. just for a scattered handful of random, off-the-cuff examples.

There's a DEEPLY ingrained bias within this community toward viewing and treating children's television media as if that was and always has been THE primary if not lone sole embodiment of mainstream pop culture: and the reality is that that was nowhere NEAR the case back in the day (though its certainly a fair bit closer to being the case in today's pop cultural media realm). The bias seems to generally stems from the false perception that "this is what I as a kid knew of and was invested in back then, ergo this is all that EVERYONE EVERYWHERE largely cared about by and large overall as well, and anything that I wasn't aware of back then must've been very niche; otherwise I would've heard of it".

Again though, the reality of what the broader pop cultural sphere of the 80s and 90s was actually like bares VERY LITTLE resemblance to the incredibly warped, skewed perspective of it that online communities like Kanzenshuu and numerous other internet fandoms for current geek media have tended to have for much of the past 15 years or so.

Even Pokemon is another example of this. Yes, Pokemon was indeed a MASSIVE phenomenon among VERY small children back in the late 90s and early 2000s. But if you were of ANY age beyond that of I dunno... 11 or 12 maybe (and I'm being particularly generous there)? Yeah, Pokemon was generally NOT that big of a thing that very many people cared about or were interested in back then. In the late 90s and early 2000s (which were certainly Pokemon's "salad days" as it were as a major phenomenon), broader mainstream culture outside of the purview of 3rd graders was primarily much, much, MUCH more concerned with things like The Matrix, The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Fight Club, Scream, Good Will Hunting, American Beauty, etc.

People at the time certainly knew what Pokemon was and were VAGUELY aware of it through general osmosis: but if anyone here genuinely believes that ANYONE circa 1999/2000 who wasn't hanging around elementary school playgrounds had ANY care for or investment in Pokemon as a media franchise, you're without question unbelievably deluded in your childhood biases and haven't the foggiest bit of an accurate, sober perspective of what actually constituted "the mainstream" back then, much less what was "niche" at the time.

By this same token, even though Voltron was very popular among small children in the 1980s, I guarantee you that outside of the range of small children, anime like Akira, Ninja Scroll, Vampire Hunter D, and Ghost in the Shell - hell, even Guyver and Urotsukidoji - were VASTLY bigger, more relatively (relatively mind) mainstream, and more widely known by comparison. Hell, Guyver was popular enough that it got not one, but TWO live action adaptations (produced by Brian Yuzna, who was not exactly some super unknown nobody back then) in the mid 90s, more than 5 years prior to the Cartoon Network boom.

Anyone who wasn't a small child (or the parent of one) back in the late 80s/early 90s had ZERO clue what Voltron was and could've cared less about it. Media and pop culture in the 80s and 90s were NOT solely the domain of K through 8th grade children: those ages made up a SIGNIFICANTLY smaller slice of the mainstream media's focus during and throughout those years.

I think what also further fuels this false perception is that whenever younger people today try to look back at the media landscape of the 80s and 90s in order to get an accurate bead on what was "big" at the time, they further overlook a LOT of very major and massive non-children's titles in part because they aren't familiar with them and don't know to look for them, and also even due to their often looking almost solely at things like box office numbers as an indicator of mainstream visibility and awareness while having a VERY warped, skewed perspective on what those numbers actually tell you about a film's popularity and whatnot at the time it was still new (due to a combination of there no longer being such a thing as a "mid range" box office hit from the 2000s onward, and also due to overlooking things like home video sales and general word of mouth at the time).

Basically, people on this forum (and numerous other present day fan communities) look back in the 80s and 90s through a VERY heavily filtered and biased prism of both their own childhood perspectives as well as that of a broken present day paradigm of what constitutes a "successful" piece of media, not realizing that a film or TV show or whatnot back in those decades didn't necessarily HAVE to break a billion dollars worldwide (or the 1980s & 90s equivalent thereof) and sell a shitload of action figures to throngs of shrieking children in order to be deemed successful, mainstream, and well known/popular.

I mean, comparing Pokemon to fucking Beatlemania of all things shows you what an unbelievably slanted perspective y'all are looking at this stuff from. Pokemon was well known and made a shit ton of money: it was NOT anything even APPROACHING THAT degree of widespread cultural embrace and popularity among non-grade schoolers. Pokemon and its similar ilk simply made a boatload of money selling plastic shit to children: they were NOT anything even RESEMBLING culturally "beloved" at the time: it only may have seemed that way to small kids who were overly media-sheltered and didn't pay any attention whatsoever to anything that wasn't on Cartoon Network and Fox Kids and so on.

When it comes to anime as a broader whole: the main thing that Pokemon and Toonami and the like did for it in the late 90s/early 2000s was turn them onto the attention of the same groups of children who were too sheltered and insulated to even know of the existence of most any given conventional R rated film franchise of the time, no matter HOW big and mainstream it was, much less something as home video-centric as anime was at the time.

I'm not saying that anime's reach didn't grow or wasn't broadened by that burst at the turn of the millennium. Of course it did and was, obviously. I'm saying though that people here (and modern fandom as a whole) VASTLY and downright hysterically overestimate and overstate the width of the gap that existed between anime's level of Western popularity & awareness from pre to post-Cartoon Network bubble.

The picture that's painted of anime by fandom for much of the past nearly 20 years now is that while anime may have existed in North America, it was deeply underground and extremely hidden away to the point of near invisibility from anyone and everyone but for like 5 or 6 super "in the know" hipster cool kids, and literally almost NO ONE across the rest of the 99.9999% of the populace would've ever heard of its existence were it not for Pokemon and DBZ on Toonami throwing the floodgates open.

When the ACTUAL reality bears almost NO resemblance to that image whatsoever, and much of the people across 2000s and 2010s fandom who are most vigorously pushing this narrative almost WITHOUT FAIL tend to be people who were some of the most media-sheltered and walled-off children on the planet back in those years (to a degree that was NOT AT ALL normal or commonplace back then).
gokaiblue wrote: Thu Sep 05, 2019 5:18 pmI think what I'm trying to say is Voltron's success seems mainly about Voltron, whereas the anime boom started in the mid to late 90s seemed to open the flood gates for even more anime on American television, kinda like how The Beatles becoming a hit in America lead to more British rock groups having their moment over here too.
Yeah no, even THIS variation of the "Beatles" analogy is completely wrong on its face. Even though it hadn't reached the awareness of the more media-sheltered small children of the 90s yet, the VHS anime market was still INCREDIBLY diverse and packed to the gills with releases well prior to the Cartoon Network boom. Again, the MAIN thing that the Cartoon Network bubble did was turn an overwhelming slice of elementary school children onto anime, and thus it helped open the floodgates for more CHILDREN'S anime to be brought here than ever before: non-children's anime was a market that was already LONG well covered since more than a decade pre-Toonami.

This is a LARGE part of the reason for why the Western anime licensing industry transformed so wildly post-Cartoon Network and went from very adult and art-house dominant to instead becoming populated and overwhelmed largely by Shonen Jump fodder and Otaku-bait. The market went from already robust and wide-ranging pre-Cartoon Network to almost instantly over-saturated with and drowning underneath gobs upon reams upon torrents of largely vapid children's slop and harem/ecchi nonsense almost overnight.

And the older, pre-Cartoon Network licensing landscape had already had its very decent share of dumb Shonen and ecchi/harem shit to begin with: it was just MUCH more balanced out alongside titles of actual substance and creative/artistic/cultural importance (as opposed to the latter becoming almost totally drowned out by the former in order to pander to the Cartoon Network audience).

But again: if you're coming at this from the perspective of someone who A) had NO IDEA WHATSOEVER that this stuff existed prior to late-1998 at the absolute earliest and B) has never cared to look into or expand one's field of interest beyond Shonen and children's action series, then this entire framework is going to be 1000% lost on you. And sadly, this is the broken framework that the overwhelming majority of mainstream Western anime fandom for much of the past 15 years and change has been operating under.

Again: people here WILDLY overestimate, overstate, and over-embellish exactly how small and niche anime actually was pre-Cartoon Network; and a lot of the reason is due to the MASSIVE blind spot that people here tend to usually have for most media that's outside the realm of children's merchandising material.
Last edited by Kunzait_83 on Thu Sep 05, 2019 5:44 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Journey to the West, chapter 26 wrote:The strong man will meet someone stronger still:
Come to naught at last he surely will!
Zephyr wrote:And that's to say nothing of how pretty much impossible it is to capture what made the original run of the series so great. I'm in the generation of fans that started with Toonami, so I totally empathize with the feeling of having "missed the party", experiencing disappointment, and wanting to experience it myself. But I can't, that's how life is. Time is a bitch. The party is over. Kageyama, Kikuchi, and Maeda are off the sauce now; Yanami almost OD'd; Yamamoto got arrested; Toriyama's not going to light trash cans on fire and hang from the chandelier anymore. We can't get the band back together, and even if we could, everyone's either old, in poor health, or calmed way the fuck down. Best we're going to get, and are getting, is a party that's almost entirely devoid of the magic that made the original one so awesome that we even want more.
Kamiccolo9 wrote:It grinds my gears that people get "outraged" over any of this stuff. It's a fucking cartoon. If you are that determined to be angry about something, get off the internet and make a stand for something that actually matters.
Rocketman wrote:"Shonen" basically means "stupid sentimental shit" anyway, so it's ok to be anti-shonen.

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Re: Alex Kidd was a Dragon Ball game?!?

Post by Cure Dragon 255 » Thu Sep 05, 2019 5:24 pm

Kunzait_83 wrote: Thu Sep 05, 2019 5:20 pm
gokaiblue wrote: Thu Sep 05, 2019 2:45 pmOn this issue, you kinda miss the point. Yes, it was available, but it didn't become a huge global phenomenon until much later. It was just a niche thing. It's like saying yes, the music of The Beatles was available to Americans before 1964, but Beatlemania in the US didn't truly hit until they landed here.
There's two major false premises/assumptions here that I've long taken issue with.

The first is the presumption that something only officially becomes a "global" or "mainstream" success when it hits it big in North America. As if being a major success in not just Japan, but China, Europe, Latin America, etc. count for absolutely NOTHING in comparison. No, something ONLY officially "counts" once we here in the U.S.A. finally acknowledge its existence: even if (like in the case of Dragon Ball) we're the DEAD LAST ones to notice it LONG many years after its already conquered the ENTIRE rest of the world.

It doesn't matter HOW big and successful something gets throughout the ENTIRE rest of the planet outside the U.S. - when its big everywhere else BUT the U.S., its still often considered "niche". Only once it gets big in the U.S., or hell even if its big ONLY in the U.S. and NOWHERE ELSE - only then is it considered "mainstream" and a big deal. :roll: :roll: :roll: That in and of itself is preposterously idiotic and myopic on its face for a boatload of obvious, self-evident reasons.

And the second false premise of course is this community's long-standing bizarre insistence of confusing "children's merchandising phenomenons" with "The Mainstream".

The assumption stems from people in this community (and really, broader anime fandom and "geek culture" starting from around the early/mid-2000s or so) making the assumption that all (or the vast majority) of mainstream culture begins and ends with what people who were small children circa the late 90s/early 2000s and onward were invested in and aware of.

There's no distinction whatsoever that's made between children's pop culture (things like Disney films, Power Rangers, Ninja Turtles, Transformers, G.I. Joe, and other assorted children's toy phenomenon) and literally the entire rest of mainstream culture that isn't tailored specifically to children (which is frankly speaking, MUCH bigger and broader-ranging overall). Hell, oftentimes this community treats the latter as if it simply does not fucking exist. And furthermore the fact that children's pop culture in the 80s and 90s was nowhere NEAR as prevalent overall in the wider mainstream to the degree that its been throughout the 2000s and 2010s.

So in other words: yes, children's media had major phenomenons within its sphere like Power Rangers and Pokemon, etc. back in the 90s, and Transformers and Voltron, etc back in the 80s. But when you focus SOLELY on those, you neglect VAST TONS of other mainstream pop culture phenomenons that aren't in any way connected to the realm of children's media and merchandising; and which frankly had a MUCH bigger cultural impact at the time. Be it films like Pulp Fiction, Seven, Aliens, Robocop, The Thing, Blade Runner, etc. or TV shows like Twin Peaks, NYPD Blue, Oz, The X Files, The Larry Sanders Show, etc. just for a scattered handful of random, off-the-cuff examples.

There's a DEEPLY ingrained bias within this community toward viewing and treating children's television media as if that was and always has been THE primary if not lone sole embodiment of mainstream pop culture: and the reality is that that was nowhere NEAR the case back in the day (though its certainly a fair bit closer to being the case in today's pop cultural media realm). The bias seems to generally stems from the false perception that "this is what I as a kid knew of and was invested in back then, ergo this is all that EVERYONE EVERYWHERE largely cared about by and large overall as well, and anything that I wasn't aware of back then must've been very niche; otherwise I would've heard of it".

Again though, the reality of what the broader pop cultural sphere of the 80s and 90s was actually like bares VERY LITTLE resemblance to the incredibly warped, skewed perspective of it that online communities like Kanzenshuu and numerous other internet fandoms for current geek media have tended to have for much of the past 15 years or so.

Even Pokemon is another example of this. Yes, Pokemon was indeed a MASSIVE phenomenon among VERY small children back in the late 90s and early 2000s. But if you were of ANY age beyond that of I dunno... 11 or 12 maybe (and I'm being particularly generous there)? Yeah, Pokemon was generally NOT that big of a thing that very many people cared about or were interested in back then. In the late 90s and early 2000s (which were certainly Pokemon's "salad days" as it were as a major phenomenon), broader mainstream culture outside of the purview of 3rd graders was primarily much, much, MUCH more concerned with things like The Matrix, The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Fight Club, Scream, Good Will Hunting, American Beauty, etc.

People at the time certainly knew what Pokemon was and were VAGUELY aware of it through general osmosis: but if anyone here genuinely believes that ANYONE circa 1999/2000 who wasn't hanging around elementary school playgrounds had ANY care for or investment in Pokemon as a media franchise, you're without question unbelievably deluded in your childhood biases and haven't the foggiest bit of an accurate, sober perspective of what actually constituted "the mainstream" back then, much less what was "niche" at the time.

By this same token, even though Voltron was very popular among small children in the 1980s, I guarantee you that outside of the range of small children, anime like Akira, Ninja Scroll, Vampire Hunter D, and Ghost in the Shell - hell, even Guyver and Urotsukidoji - were VASTLY bigger, more relatively (relatively mind) mainstream, and more widely known by comparison. Anyone who wasn't a small child (or the parent of one) back in the late 80s/early 90s had ZERO clue what Voltron was and could've cared less about it. Media and pop culture in the 80s and 90s were NOT solely the domain of K through 8th grade children: those ages made up a SIGNIFICANTLY smaller slice of the mainstream media's focus during and throughout those years.

I think what also further fuels this false perception is that whenever younger people today try to look back at the media landscape of the 80s and 90s in order to get an accurate bead on what was "big" at the time, they further overlook a LOT of very major and massive non-children's titles in part because they aren't familiar with them and don't know to look for them, and also even due to their often looking almost solely at things like box office numbers as an indicator of mainstream visibility and awareness while having a VERY warped, skewed perspective on what those numbers actually tell you about a film's popularity and whatnot at the time it was still new (due to a combination of there no longer being such a thing as a "mid range" box office hit from the 2000s onward, and also due to overlooking things like home video sales and general word of mouth at the time).

Basically, people on this forum (and numerous other present day fan communities) look back in the 80s and 90s through a VERY heavily filtered and biased prism of both their own childhood perspectives as well as that of a broken present day paradigm of what constitutes a "successful" piece of media, not realizing that a film or TV show or whatnot back in those decades didn't necessarily HAVE to break a billion dollars worldwide (or the 1980s & 90s equivalent thereof) and sell a shitload of action figures to throngs of shrieking children in order to be deemed successful, mainstream, and well known/popular.

I mean, comparing Pokemon to fucking Beatlemania of all things shows you what an unbelievably slanted perspective y'all are looking at this stuff from. Pokemon was well known and made a shit ton of money: it was NOT anything even APPROACHING THAT degree of widespread cultural embrace and popularity among non-grade schoolers. Pokemon and its similar ilk simply made a boatload of money selling plastic shit to children: they were NOT anything even RESEMBLING culturally "beloved" at the time: it only may have seemed that way to small kids who were overly media-sheltered and didn't pay any attention whatsoever to anything that wasn't on Cartoon Network and Fox Kids and so on.

When it comes to anime as a broader whole: the main thing that Pokemon and Toonami and the like did for it in the late 90s/early 2000s was turn them onto the attention of the same groups of children who were too sheltered and insulated to even know of the existence of most any given conventional R rated film franchise of the time, no matter HOW big and mainstream it was, much less something as home video-centric as anime was at the time.

I'm not saying that anime's reach didn't grow or wasn't broadened by that burst at the turn of the millennium. Of course it did and was, obviously. I'm saying though that people here (and modern fandom as a whole) VASTLY and downright hysterically overestimate and overstate the width of the gap that existed between anime's level of Western popularity & awareness from pre to post-Cartoon Network bubble.

The picture that's painted of anime by fandom for much of the past nearly 20 years now is that while anime may have existed in North America, it was deeply underground and extremely hidden away to the point of near invisibility from anyone and everyone but for like 5 or 6 super "in the know" hipster cool kids, and literally almost NO ONE across the rest of the 99.9999% of the populace would've ever heard of its existence were it not for Pokemon and DBZ on Toonami throwing the floodgates open.

When the ACTUAL reality bears almost NO resemblance to that image whatsoever, and much of the people across 2000s and 2010s fandom who are most vigorously pushing this narrative almost WITHOUT FAIL tend to be people who were some of the most media-sheltered and walled-off children on the planet back in those years (to a degree that was NOT AT ALL normal or commonplace back then).
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Re: Alex Kidd was a Dragon Ball game?!?

Post by KBABZ » Thu Sep 05, 2019 5:28 pm

Kunzait_83 wrote: Thu Sep 05, 2019 2:35 pm It wasn't that hard to find this stuff back then folks! Plenty of people at the time certainly noticed and became fans; it certainly wasn't just solely relegated to myself, a random dumb 1st grade kid back then. You just had to not be 100% beholden strictly to children's television and not stick solely to the Disney section of any given video store: which most people back then were not. Really wasn't that complicated or deeply hidden away from view the way everyone here seems to think it was and makes it sound like.
I have been curious as to how available anime was in those days for New Zealand specifically. I was born in 1990 and very much kept to myself and my limited interests so I would totally not be surprised if there was a flourishing NZ anime scene when I was a kid.
gokaiblue wrote: Thu Sep 05, 2019 2:45 pm On this issue, you kinda miss the point. Yes, it was available, but it didn't become a huge global phenomenon until much later. It was just a niche thing. It's like saying yes, the music of The Beatles was available to Americans before 1964, but Beatlemania in the US didn't truly hit until they landed here.
Having been around here for a while, I think phenomenon/popular are relative. The main point of contention that Kunzait and others like him have is the idea that anime didn't exist as a thing at all in America until Funimation did their 1999 dub and Pokemon came out, which is patently untrue but this viewpoint is unfortunately rather common, sorta like the idea that video games weren't a thing until Super Mario Bros. showed up, or that movies sucked until Star Wars came out. As he and Vegetto have said time and again, it wasn't that difficult to find anime at your local video store back in those days, or other people who enjoyed them.

This goes hand-in-hand with things like "Well Toriyama was an unknown artist until Raditz landed on Earth and he renamed the manga DBZ". Which shows a clear ignorance of not just the first half of Dragon Ball, but also the popularity of Dr. Slump in Japan.

Also CureDragon, please DON'T quote a full-length Kunzait post like that. It just takes up space and IMO is bad form.
Last edited by KBABZ on Thu Sep 05, 2019 5:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Alex Kidd was a Dragon Ball game?!?

Post by Kid Buu » Thu Sep 05, 2019 5:34 pm

gokaiblue wrote: Wed Sep 04, 2019 2:00 pm So....when are we going to have that Dragon Ball Alex Kidd reskin, hackers? :wink:

In all seriousness, it's pretty cool to think that one of SEGA's major mascots was almost Son Gokū.
Alex Kidd was never an actual official mascot. It was just a popular Master System game. Prior to Sonic, Opa-Opa was probably the closest thing to a Sega mascot.
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Re: Alex Kidd was a Dragon Ball game?!?

Post by Kunzait_83 » Thu Sep 05, 2019 5:59 pm

KBABZ wrote: Thu Sep 05, 2019 5:28 pmsorta like the idea that video games weren't a thing until Super Mario Bros. showed up
Another one that's similar, related, just as widespread, and equally untrue: the idea that JRPGs were never popular or well known to almost anyone in the West at all until Final Fantasy VII came out. Total and utter bullshit from top to bottom, considering everything from Final Fantasy 1, to Final Fantasy II/IV, Final Fantasy III/VI, Dragon Quest/Warrior 1-4, Chrono Trigger, Lunar, the Shining Force series, Phantasy Star 1-4, Lufia 1-2, the Breath of Fire series, Secret of Mana, Ogre Battle, Illusion of Gaia, Super Mario RPG, etc. etc. etc. People act like all these gobs and gobs of pre-FFVII titles were somehow released in a magical vacuum and went totally unnoticed and unplayed by hardly a single soul, anywhere, and that advertising and marketing for them somehow was never a thing.

Were they overall relatively bigger in Japan? Yes. Were they thus completely unknown, completely unpopular, totally unhyped and unmarketed, and almost totally unplayed by anyone in North America pre-FFVII the way its often painted as the past two decades? Fuuuuuuuck no. Completely and utterly flies in the face of any semblance of the actual reality from back then.

Same exact principal applies to all these examples: just because YOU didn't know about it, that doesn't mean that somehow NO ONE ELSE did either or that it wasn't a popular and well known thing before you happened to first come across it. Oftentimes you were just late to the party and were out of the loop.
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Journey to the West, chapter 26 wrote:The strong man will meet someone stronger still:
Come to naught at last he surely will!
Zephyr wrote:And that's to say nothing of how pretty much impossible it is to capture what made the original run of the series so great. I'm in the generation of fans that started with Toonami, so I totally empathize with the feeling of having "missed the party", experiencing disappointment, and wanting to experience it myself. But I can't, that's how life is. Time is a bitch. The party is over. Kageyama, Kikuchi, and Maeda are off the sauce now; Yanami almost OD'd; Yamamoto got arrested; Toriyama's not going to light trash cans on fire and hang from the chandelier anymore. We can't get the band back together, and even if we could, everyone's either old, in poor health, or calmed way the fuck down. Best we're going to get, and are getting, is a party that's almost entirely devoid of the magic that made the original one so awesome that we even want more.
Kamiccolo9 wrote:It grinds my gears that people get "outraged" over any of this stuff. It's a fucking cartoon. If you are that determined to be angry about something, get off the internet and make a stand for something that actually matters.
Rocketman wrote:"Shonen" basically means "stupid sentimental shit" anyway, so it's ok to be anti-shonen.

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Re: Alex Kidd was a Dragon Ball game?!?

Post by gokaiblue » Thu Sep 05, 2019 6:41 pm

The Beatles analogy was a stretch, and perhaps I don't have much perspective considering I wasn't around in the preCartoon Network anime boom era, but from what I can tell, it anime was thing in the US, but there was still a massive boost in popularity during that time towards anime of its ilk. Like you said, anime had transitioned from this art house medium to more of a appeal to the masses type thing. I'm not saying anime wasn't a thing before this boom, but one can't deny the impact it had.
Looking for these rare items/information:

Any information or recordings pertaining to Dragon Ball Z's syndicated run on WAWB
Any information regarding the stations that carried the origin Dragon Ball in the USA
Dragon Box (any deals would be nice)
Shonen Jumps with Dragon Ball in them

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Kid Buu
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Re: Alex Kidd was a Dragon Ball game?!?

Post by Kid Buu » Thu Sep 05, 2019 6:53 pm

Cure Dragon 255 wrote: Thu Sep 05, 2019 2:43 pm Anime certainly beat the Master System in Mainstream availabilty! You could count the ones that had it in the west with one hand. Only in Brazil was the Master System a major hit.
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It was a popular system in the UK too. :P
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Re: Alex Kidd was a Dragon Ball game?!?

Post by KBABZ » Thu Sep 05, 2019 7:02 pm

Kunzait_83 wrote: Thu Sep 05, 2019 5:59 pm
KBABZ wrote: Thu Sep 05, 2019 5:28 pmsorta like the idea that video games weren't a thing until Super Mario Bros. showed up
Another one that's similar, related, just as widespread, and equally untrue: the idea that JRPGs were never popular or well known to almost anyone in the West at all until Final Fantasy VII came out. Total and utter bullshit from top to bottom, considering everything from Final Fantasy 1, to Final Fantasy II/IV, Final Fantasy III/VI, Dragon Quest/Warrior 1-4, Chrono Trigger, Lunar, the Shining Force series, Phantasy Star 1-4, Lufia 1-2, the Breath of Fire series, Secret of Mana, Ogre Battle, Illusion of Gaia, Super Mario RPG, etc. etc. etc. People act like all these gobs and gobs of pre-FFVII titles were somehow released in a magical vacuum and went totally unnoticed and unplayed by hardly a single soul, anywhere, and that advertising and marketing for them somehow was never a thing.
Yeah. I've seen a lot of people say how much that list of games influenced them and their gaming tastes, whilst also acknowledging that FF7 was a massive dose of exposure for the genre and took it from popular to (almost to an annoying degree) mainstream, similar to Dragon Ball's situation.

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Re: Alex Kidd was a Dragon Ball game?!?

Post by Cure Dragon 255 » Thu Sep 05, 2019 7:04 pm

Kid Buu wrote: Thu Sep 05, 2019 6:53 pm
Cure Dragon 255 wrote: Thu Sep 05, 2019 2:43 pm Anime certainly beat the Master System in Mainstream availabilty! You could count the ones that had it in the west with one hand. Only in Brazil was the Master System a major hit.
Image

It was a popular system in the UK too. :P
DARN IT! I had read that too. But didnt have proof other than TV Tropes and they are bullshit.
Marz wrote: Wed Jul 21, 2021 11:27 pm "Well, the chapter was good, the story was good and so were the fights. But a new transformation, in Dragon Ball? And one that's ugly? This is where we draw the line!!! Jump the Shark moment!!"

This forum is so over-dramatic that it's not even funny.
90sDBZ wrote: Mon Jul 01, 2019 2:44 pm19 years ago I was rushing home from school to watch DBZ on Cartoon Network, and today I've rushed home from work to watch DBS on Pop. I guess it's true the more things change the more they stay the same. :lol:

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Re: Alex Kidd was a Dragon Ball game?!?

Post by MyVisionity » Thu Sep 05, 2019 7:53 pm

Kunzait_83 wrote:...but if anyone here genuinely believes that ANYONE circa 1999/2000 who wasn't hanging around elementary school playgrounds had ANY care for or investment in Pokemon as a media franchise...
There were actually many teenagers that I knew of at that time who were invested in the Pokemon franchise. That may not be the wider majority, but it's something.

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Re: Alex Kidd was a Dragon Ball game?!?

Post by VDenter » Fri Sep 06, 2019 10:18 am

Kunzait_83 wrote: Thu Sep 05, 2019 5:20 pm
gokaiblue wrote: Thu Sep 05, 2019 2:45 pmOn this issue, you kinda miss the point. Yes, it was available, but it didn't become a huge global phenomenon until much later. It was just a niche thing. It's like saying yes, the music of The Beatles was available to Americans before 1964, but Beatlemania in the US didn't truly hit until they landed here.
There's two major false premises/assumptions here that I've long taken issue with.

The first is the presumption that something only officially becomes a "global" or "mainstream" success when it hits it big in North America. As if being a major success in not just Japan, but China, Europe, Latin America, etc. count for absolutely NOTHING in comparison. No, something ONLY officially "counts" once we here in the U.S.A. finally acknowledge its existence: even if (like in the case of Dragon Ball) we're the DEAD LAST ones to notice it LONG many years after its already conquered the ENTIRE rest of the world.

It doesn't matter HOW big and successful something gets throughout the ENTIRE rest of the planet outside the U.S. - when its big everywhere else BUT the U.S., its still often considered "niche". Only once it gets big in the U.S., or hell even if its big ONLY in the U.S. and NOWHERE ELSE - only then is it considered "mainstream" and a big deal. :roll: :roll: :roll: That in and of itself is preposterously idiotic and myopic on its face for a boatload of obvious, self-evident reasons.

And the second false premise of course is this community's long-standing bizarre insistence of confusing "children's merchandising phenomenons" with "The Mainstream".

The assumption stems from people in this community (and really, broader anime fandom and "geek culture" starting from around the early/mid-2000s or so) making the assumption that all (or the vast majority) of mainstream culture begins and ends with what people who were small children circa the late 90s/early 2000s and onward were invested in and aware of.

There's no distinction whatsoever that's made between children's pop culture (things like Disney films, Power Rangers, Ninja Turtles, Transformers, G.I. Joe, and other assorted children's toy phenomenon) and literally the entire rest of mainstream culture that isn't tailored specifically to children (which is frankly speaking, MUCH bigger and broader-ranging overall). Hell, oftentimes this community treats the latter as if it simply does not fucking exist. And furthermore the fact that children's pop culture in the 80s and 90s was nowhere NEAR as prevalent overall in the wider mainstream to the degree that its been throughout the 2000s and 2010s.

So in other words: yes, children's media had major phenomenons within its sphere like Power Rangers and Pokemon, etc. back in the 90s, and Transformers and Voltron, etc back in the 80s. But when you focus SOLELY on those, you neglect VAST TONS of other mainstream pop culture phenomenons that aren't in any way connected to the realm of children's media and merchandising; and which frankly had a MUCH bigger cultural impact at the time. Be it films like Pulp Fiction, Seven, Aliens, Robocop, The Thing, Blade Runner, etc. or TV shows like Twin Peaks, NYPD Blue, Oz, The X Files, The Larry Sanders Show, etc. just for a scattered handful of random, off-the-cuff examples.

There's a DEEPLY ingrained bias within this community toward viewing and treating children's television media as if that was and always has been THE primary if not lone sole embodiment of mainstream pop culture: and the reality is that that was nowhere NEAR the case back in the day (though its certainly a fair bit closer to being the case in today's pop cultural media realm). The bias seems to generally stems from the false perception that "this is what I as a kid knew of and was invested in back then, ergo this is all that EVERYONE EVERYWHERE largely cared about by and large overall as well, and anything that I wasn't aware of back then must've been very niche; otherwise I would've heard of it".

Again though, the reality of what the broader pop cultural sphere of the 80s and 90s was actually like bares VERY LITTLE resemblance to the incredibly warped, skewed perspective of it that online communities like Kanzenshuu and numerous other internet fandoms for current geek media have tended to have for much of the past 15 years or so.

Even Pokemon is another example of this. Yes, Pokemon was indeed a MASSIVE phenomenon among VERY small children back in the late 90s and early 2000s. But if you were of ANY age beyond that of I dunno... 11 or 12 maybe (and I'm being particularly generous there)? Yeah, Pokemon was generally NOT that big of a thing that very many people cared about or were interested in back then. In the late 90s and early 2000s (which were certainly Pokemon's "salad days" as it were as a major phenomenon), broader mainstream culture outside of the purview of 3rd graders was primarily much, much, MUCH more concerned with things like The Matrix, The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Fight Club, Scream, Good Will Hunting, American Beauty, etc.

People at the time certainly knew what Pokemon was and were VAGUELY aware of it through general osmosis: but if anyone here genuinely believes that ANYONE circa 1999/2000 who wasn't hanging around elementary school playgrounds had ANY care for or investment in Pokemon as a media franchise, you're without question unbelievably deluded in your childhood biases and haven't the foggiest bit of an accurate, sober perspective of what actually constituted "the mainstream" back then, much less what was "niche" at the time.

By this same token, even though Voltron was very popular among small children in the 1980s, I guarantee you that outside of the range of small children, anime like Akira, Ninja Scroll, Vampire Hunter D, and Ghost in the Shell - hell, even Guyver and Urotsukidoji - were VASTLY bigger, more relatively (relatively mind) mainstream, and more widely known by comparison. Hell, Guyver was popular enough that it got not one, but TWO live action adaptations (produced by Brian Yuzna, who was not exactly some super unknown nobody back then) in the mid 90s, more than 5 years prior to the Cartoon Network boom.

Anyone who wasn't a small child (or the parent of one) back in the late 80s/early 90s had ZERO clue what Voltron was and could've cared less about it. Media and pop culture in the 80s and 90s were NOT solely the domain of K through 8th grade children: those ages made up a SIGNIFICANTLY smaller slice of the mainstream media's focus during and throughout those years.

I think what also further fuels this false perception is that whenever younger people today try to look back at the media landscape of the 80s and 90s in order to get an accurate bead on what was "big" at the time, they further overlook a LOT of very major and massive non-children's titles in part because they aren't familiar with them and don't know to look for them, and also even due to their often looking almost solely at things like box office numbers as an indicator of mainstream visibility and awareness while having a VERY warped, skewed perspective on what those numbers actually tell you about a film's popularity and whatnot at the time it was still new (due to a combination of there no longer being such a thing as a "mid range" box office hit from the 2000s onward, and also due to overlooking things like home video sales and general word of mouth at the time).

Basically, people on this forum (and numerous other present day fan communities) look back in the 80s and 90s through a VERY heavily filtered and biased prism of both their own childhood perspectives as well as that of a broken present day paradigm of what constitutes a "successful" piece of media, not realizing that a film or TV show or whatnot back in those decades didn't necessarily HAVE to break a billion dollars worldwide (or the 1980s & 90s equivalent thereof) and sell a shitload of action figures to throngs of shrieking children in order to be deemed successful, mainstream, and well known/popular.

I mean, comparing Pokemon to fucking Beatlemania of all things shows you what an unbelievably slanted perspective y'all are looking at this stuff from. Pokemon was well known and made a shit ton of money: it was NOT anything even APPROACHING THAT degree of widespread cultural embrace and popularity among non-grade schoolers. Pokemon and its similar ilk simply made a boatload of money selling plastic shit to children: they were NOT anything even RESEMBLING culturally "beloved" at the time: it only may have seemed that way to small kids who were overly media-sheltered and didn't pay any attention whatsoever to anything that wasn't on Cartoon Network and Fox Kids and so on.

When it comes to anime as a broader whole: the main thing that Pokemon and Toonami and the like did for it in the late 90s/early 2000s was turn them onto the attention of the same groups of children who were too sheltered and insulated to even know of the existence of most any given conventional R rated film franchise of the time, no matter HOW big and mainstream it was, much less something as home video-centric as anime was at the time.

I'm not saying that anime's reach didn't grow or wasn't broadened by that burst at the turn of the millennium. Of course it did and was, obviously. I'm saying though that people here (and modern fandom as a whole) VASTLY and downright hysterically overestimate and overstate the width of the gap that existed between anime's level of Western popularity & awareness from pre to post-Cartoon Network bubble.

The picture that's painted of anime by fandom for much of the past nearly 20 years now is that while anime may have existed in North America, it was deeply underground and extremely hidden away to the point of near invisibility from anyone and everyone but for like 5 or 6 super "in the know" hipster cool kids, and literally almost NO ONE across the rest of the 99.9999% of the populace would've ever heard of its existence were it not for Pokemon and DBZ on Toonami throwing the floodgates open.

When the ACTUAL reality bears almost NO resemblance to that image whatsoever, and much of the people across 2000s and 2010s fandom who are most vigorously pushing this narrative almost WITHOUT FAIL tend to be people who were some of the most media-sheltered and walled-off children on the planet back in those years (to a degree that was NOT AT ALL normal or commonplace back then).
gokaiblue wrote: Thu Sep 05, 2019 5:18 pmI think what I'm trying to say is Voltron's success seems mainly about Voltron, whereas the anime boom started in the mid to late 90s seemed to open the flood gates for even more anime on American television, kinda like how The Beatles becoming a hit in America lead to more British rock groups having their moment over here too.
Yeah no, even THIS variation of the "Beatles" analogy is completely wrong on its face. Even though it hadn't reached the awareness of the more media-sheltered small children of the 90s yet, the VHS anime market was still INCREDIBLY diverse and packed to the gills with releases well prior to the Cartoon Network boom. Again, the MAIN thing that the Cartoon Network bubble did was turn an overwhelming slice of elementary school children onto anime, and thus it helped open the floodgates for more CHILDREN'S anime to be brought here than ever before: non-children's anime was a market that was already LONG well covered since more than a decade pre-Toonami.

This is a LARGE part of the reason for why the Western anime licensing industry transformed so wildly post-Cartoon Network and went from very adult and art-house dominant to instead becoming populated and overwhelmed largely by Shonen Jump fodder and Otaku-bait. The market went from already robust and wide-ranging pre-Cartoon Network to almost instantly over-saturated with and drowning underneath gobs upon reams upon torrents of largely vapid children's slop and harem/ecchi nonsense almost overnight.

And the older, pre-Cartoon Network licensing landscape had already had its very decent share of dumb Shonen and ecchi/harem shit to begin with: it was just MUCH more balanced out alongside titles of actual substance and creative/artistic/cultural importance (as opposed to the latter becoming almost totally drowned out by the former in order to pander to the Cartoon Network audience).

But again: if you're coming at this from the perspective of someone who A) had NO IDEA WHATSOEVER that this stuff existed prior to late-1998 at the absolute earliest and B) has never cared to look into or expand one's field of interest beyond Shonen and children's action series, then this entire framework is going to be 1000% lost on you. And sadly, this is the broken framework that the overwhelming majority of mainstream Western anime fandom for much of the past 15 years and change has been operating under.

Again: people here WILDLY overestimate, overstate, and over-embellish exactly how small and niche anime actually was pre-Cartoon Network; and a lot of the reason is due to the MASSIVE blind spot that people here tend to usually have for most media that's outside the realm of children's merchandising material.
The best post i have read this year. This mentality that MANY on the internet have of "This didn't exist before "i" discovered it" is really annoying. Seriously, you have no idea how many times i have heard the "Dragon Ball is niche and only DBZ is mainstream" Of course this usually comes from a NA fan who's first exposure to this franchise was Toonami.

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Re: Alex Kidd was a Dragon Ball game?!?

Post by VegettoEX » Fri Sep 06, 2019 10:19 am

All good stuff, but wildly off course now from the point of the thread. Let's get it back on track - thanks!
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Re: Alex Kidd was a Dragon Ball game?!?

Post by Yuli Ban » Fri Sep 06, 2019 12:03 pm

Yuli Ban wrote: Sun Sep 01, 2019 2:03 pm Lo and behold, all our suspicions were confirmed, way back in 2017 or 2018 IIRC (there was an interview that confirmed it, and I believe I mentioned it once or twice before on the forum).
Yeah, here it is.
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Re: Alex Kidd was a Dragon Ball game?!?

Post by KBABZ » Fri Sep 06, 2019 12:58 pm

VegettoEX wrote: Fri Sep 06, 2019 10:19 am All good stuff, but wildly off course now from the point of the thread. Let's get it back on track - thanks!
You need to make it a rule that people can't quote full Kunzait posts, this is getting a little irritating!

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