How you found Dragon Ball, and what you thought it initially was

[Ronin]

Anything I can say results from doing detective work to place fuzzy memories on a timeline relative to externally-verifiable world events, and making inferences from there.

The first key memory is that my family and I moved from an apartment to a house only a couple of weeks into my 1st grade school year, prompting a change in schools as well, which would have been in September of 1998. I remember being at the bus stop outside of the apartment complex, thinking about DBZ (having watched it). It's well known that "Season 1 and 2" of DBZ did a few loops on Toonami before finally airing the rest of the Namek arc. If the data on Swimpedia is to be believed, it looks to be 5 loops which aired over the course of a year. Since the second loop didn't begin until November of 1998, this means that I started watching DBZ at some point during its first airing of the Saiyan arc on Toonami, either in August or September of 1998.

I just used that to try to find the date of the first thing that I watched and I think it was August 28th 1999 or May 31st 2000. Because I remember that I was 8 and it was late at night on Toonami Midnight Run. I wanna say it's the August 28th date because I remember talking about it at school in 2nd grade and 2nd grade would've been over by the May 31st date. That's awesome that I can pinpoint a date, though!

[JulieYBM]

So, I'm going through and doing the math here. It looks like the first episode I ever saw was Episode #50 (Edited Episode #38) A Collision Course on 1998.10.21, which I remember because it's the episode where Vegeta slaughters that Namekian village. Talk about a funny first episode to watch lol

[hembro]

when I was a toddler in the 90's about two blocks behind my house there was a library and a video store. my mom was self employed as a real estate appraiser so after preschool (we got out at like noon) she'd take me to both real fast before we went home. she had some sort of membership for unlimited rentals for $10 a month or something. we'd get home and I'd sit with her while she worked on one computer and play games on the other one (reader rabbit and those Disney storybook teach you how to read games and stuff) and then I'd go watch whatever tapes I got and read my picture book for the day. we also had a little tv/vcr that could plug into the car's cigarette lighter so if she had appraisals to go do in the afternoon I'd sit in the backseat and watch them.

I think between the ages of 2-6 I rented the entire children's section of the video store there. at some point I ended up going through those Saga of Goku tapes and loved them. around that time I'm pretty sure afterwards I caught some of DBZ on Kid's WB also. I would have been around 3 or so. around this time my dad went and spent a shitload of money on a DVD player and surround sound system. In what I assume he probably thought was a genius move in order to justify this to my mom he decided to say he got it for me and my older brother as if we as kid's knew what that was or gave a shit. so with it he bought Dead Zone (which I assume he bought recognizing the name Dragon Ball from those Saga of Goku tapes I kept renting) the first Batman movie and a Pokemon DVD along with whatever couple of movies he bought for himself. Dead Zone might have been my first exposure to Z. I was like 3/4 so I can't remember but I remember being shocked Goku was grown with a kid. My mom of course was pissed so my dad was told to sleep on the couch with us and have a movie night, not that we knew that he was forced out there at the time haha.

by that point I was hooked though and from then on once a month my grandma would take me to K-Mart when I was with her and I'd get whatever new uncut Z, DB, and GT tapes had just come out until those were done. I had almost all of them at one point. after the shows were all out I can remember the last new Dragon Ball video I got was Broly Second Coming. I didn't get that one as soon as it came out but I remember I was sick home from school and we went to get something at the store and I got 2 videos that day, that and Batman Begins which had come out that week.

I watched it on toonami too, but back then all of my chore money went to comic books when we went to the grocery store, and those tapes and star wars action figures when I got to go to K-Mart. My dad got me the games on birthdays and stuff and whenever I had holiday money from grandparents or whatever I'd go to a bookstore and buy superman comics and the viz db tankobon volumes. Before GT came out my older brother had found out about it online and told me Goku gets turned into a kid and goes super Saiyan 4 and I thought he was full of shit. this was probably during the androids here. and then one day he came home from somewhere with a copy of final bout on ps1 and was like here's the proof and I was like what the fuck and so I remember waiting like 3 years for GT to come out.

[RandomGuy96]

Is it just me, or has this topic been posted like 5 times this year already? I swear somebody asked this question only a couple of weeks ago.

The focus of the thread was more so supposed to be "misconceptions you had about the premise of the series when you first discovered it", with the "how" being secondary. Maybe I should've worded the OP differently.

[Kamiccolo9]

My first exposure to DB was flipping through channels and hitting the title card of "Goku vs Vegeta: A Saiyan Duel." Back when the Ocean Dub did those, I dunno, "foil" titles.

Was blown away, loved the show, watched straight through until the Ginyu stuff, and then the reruns started. Didn't actually see the Raditz-Nappa stuff for years.

[TechExpert2021]

My first exposure to DB was flipping through channels and hitting the title card of "Goku vs Vegeta: A Saiyan Duel." Back when the Ocean Dub did those, I dunno, "foil" titles.

Was blown away, loved the show, watched straight through until the Ginyu stuff, and then the reruns started. Didn't actually see the Raditz-Nappa stuff for years.

Were you in the U.S. in the mid-to-late-1990s when the Ocean/Saban dub was airing on syndication (and then on Cartoon Network in 1998-1999)?

[Saiya6Cit]

It is funny that you ask because I met the show at the android saga, particularly in the Episode where they meet at the island and they found out about Baby Trunks and Yamcha got chest pierced up [align=](why does it feel like a pleonasm?).

DB was already huge in mexico since early 90s. But my parents (catholics) did not allow me to watch the show because it was satanic.

Thanks to my puberty hitting in I rebelled and started to watch it and I was hooked since day one. After watching DBZ and DBGT on regular first-aired time on mexican TV by Televisa Chanel 5, I watched a DB rerun and then the movies last. Never watched DBKai or Super.

Fun fact: I would know about goku and freezer and the SSJ by immersion, since at school it was all the kids would talk about non stop. I used to think SSJ Goku was Gohan hahahahah funny days.

Dragon Ball changed my life in ways you guys can not even imagine.

I learned the value of economics and savings due to my collection in DB cards and DB stuff. I gave most of it away in my early 20s when I had my first supervisor job, moved out from my parents house and starting adulting very hard

[Danfun64]

DB was already huge in mexico since early 90s. But my parents (catholics) did not allow me to watch the show because it was satanic.

Well there's a past I could relate to. Even though I didn't really get into dragon ball until my early 20s (because of an animation of the Angry Video Game Nerd fighting I M Meen of all things) I know my parents wouldn't have approved of it, considering the things they were aware of and did ban as satanic, including Dragon Tales of all things (which, for point of reference, is a preschool show).

Before that moment in my 20s I was only aware of bits and pieces. I saw the original run of Super Mario Bros Z in more or less its entirety (ironically involving two things my mom would dismiss as, well.....). There was a clip I saw of someone playing one of the Budokai games with Broly kicking Kid Goku's ass, but I didn't recognize the characters at the time. I was also aware of the over 9000 meme (of course), while also hearing "the balls are inert" from a YTP without knowing anything of the original context. I also noticed a couple commercials for Kai when it was running on Nicktoons (which would have been when I was a teenager) but wasn't interested at the time.

It honestly felt like chance that I got interested in DB at all. (Also would have suspected my parents wouldn't have approved of AVGN because of how vulgar it was, but, they weren't paying attention at the time.....)

[Fizzer]

My first encounter with Dragon Ball was Dragon Ball Z on Cartoon Network (UK) in I'm guessing around 2000, whenever it started airing. I was 7.

I'd been seeing the adverts for it ("Dragon Ball Z is an ACTION CARTOON"), and honestly I wasn't interested. They impression they give of what it was, some very macho serious boy thing, wasn't for me and I didn't plan on watching it.

I just happened to change the channel one day to what was either the first or second episode of the Ocean Dub, and saw Raditz flying through the air. The design of this long-haired dude with the cool wearable scanner struck me immediately and I started watching it. It very rapidly, by the end of the episode I saw even, became my favourite show, and I was drawing characters from it that evening.

What I found was actually such a fantastical, vibrant world that captured my imagination, with it's aliens and deities and apparently magic powers. Not "something for people who like boxing and stuff" like they'd tried to sell it as.

I never left. I eventually switched to mostly watching in Japanese but it's stuck with me my whole life. I've read almost everything Akira Toriyama ever published, bar some of the one shots. I'd likely be quite a different person if I hadn't changed the channel that day and seen a mid-tier Toriyama character design.

[Hellspawn28]

Copy and paste my story from an older thread

I could have saw some DB related stuff before 1997, but the first time when I actually knew what Dragon Ball was back in 1997 when my Dad got two VHS copies of Dragon Ball for my birthday. I remember my dad was like "The guy at Suncoast said this is a popular kids cartoon from Japan". He knew that I like stuff from Japan like Godzilla as a kid. They were these VHS tapes:





When I was 6, I thought Dragon Ball was pretty boring compare to the anime that I was watching on Sci-Fi. My two sisters (They were 4 and 2 at the time) did like it though. Sometime in 1998, I was waiting for Beast Wars to come on TV and I stumble upon the episode where Goku was being wished back to life. I had no idea what I was watching and I end up turning off the TV. I believe this was the syndication run of DBZ because I was still living at my old house in Columbia, MD before we moved out after July 1998 and DBZ didn't air on CN until August 1998. When I was in the second grade, I remember DBZ blew up and everyone was talking about it. I didn't bother to watch it until 1999 when I watched the episode when Piccolo was fighting Freeza. I remember hating it and I was like "This is so stupid. Why do people like this?". Even as an 8-year-old back in 1999, I can tell that the dub was awful. I was already watching other anime at the time, so I didn't see the point of watching anime on Toonami (I still watched it for some anime like Ronin Warriors).

From 1999-2000, I avoid anything related to Dragon Ball because I thought it was stupid and annoying. It was not until early 2001 when I was bored late at night and I decided to check out the Toonami Midnight Run. When I was a kid, I used to stay up late and did channel surfing to watch whatever I can find on late-night TV. I remember watching the episode where Goku teleported Cell to North Kai's Planet and I was now interested in Dragon Ball. The next day, I used the Internet at home to discover more about Dragon Ball and the first fan website that I went to was DBZ Uncensored. It did me want to check out the uncut episodes of DBZ in Japanese, but I had no idea how to. I was in the tape trading community, but I was mostly watching live-action movies from Japan and Hong Kong at the time.

When I move out of Ellicott City, MD during the summer of 2001, I moved to a new house in another part of Maryland and one of my neighbors was super into Dragon Ball. We became best friends and one of his friends had DBZ Legends on the PS1. This was my first time hearing Goku's voice in Japanese and it didn't bother me. When I started the 5th grade back in late August 2001, one person in the 5th grade had Japanese episodes of DBZ on VHS and he would start playground rumors of the series. He would tell people that DBZ in Japanese is a show for grown-ups and DBZ on Cartoon Network is the baby's version. After school, we sneak inside the TV room (It was a place where the school keeps all of their TVs) and watched uncut episodes of DBZ in Japanese. This was my first time watching Dragon Ball Z in Japanese and it was DBZ Episode 29 (Goku vs. Nappa). I would later buy a VHS fan sub-copy of DBZ Movie 8 and it felt amazing to watch something before it was dubbed.

Later that year in 2001, I found out that one of my cousins had DBZ stuff that he had before the series was dubbed. He had every episode of the Cell saga and Buu saga in Japanese with fansubs along with DBZ Movie 6, DBZ Movie 7, and DBZ Movie 12. I was also able to watch GT on fansubs tapes thanks to a friend of mine and a local Japanese collector's shop. I do admit that it felt cool that I was way head of everyone else when it came to Dragon Ball. The rest is history and I'm still a big fan of Dragon Ball. I never grew out of it or move on from it as I did with many other childhood franchises.