How long did it take you to get into Dragon Ball/Z?

Gabool The Wild · Post by **Gabool The Wild** » Mon Dec 15, 2008 2:21 pm

One day, I turned on the tv to see Freeza punching Piccolo right in the face.
I've been hooked ever since, and that probably explains why Freeza is my favorite character, besides that fact that he is the most badass villain of all time.

saiyanprincess · Post by **saiyanprincess** » Mon Dec 15, 2008 5:39 pm

I first saw one of the episodes of the Radditz saga and by the end of the episode I was practically drooling for more. Every day after then I rushed home from school to see what happened next. - Or set the VCR compiling myself some lovely black video tapes. It got a little out of hand when I decided I needed to record all the re-runs, with the result of 40 or so videos stored in my room...

Years on... Here I am.. Almost 21 now (Gulps) When the special was released a few weeks back I was jumping about like a school kid again!

The Time Traveller · Post by **The Time Traveller** » Mon Dec 15, 2008 8:26 pm

Kendamu wrote:
The Time Traveller wrote:When I saw the adverts on Cartoon Network, we were all amazed, and it became a heavy topic in the playground.

"You guys see that AWESOME advert on CN last night?!"
"Dragon Ball Zee?! What the heck is it?!"

And then we actually watched it the week after, and the entire playground was full of boys doing yelling "CARMAYHARMAYHAAAAA!" and trying to name all of the characters that appeared, I was the only one who remembered which was Goku and which was Gohan.

The girls had no clue...

I started getting into Anime properly when I was 12, watching Fansubs and such, and started getting DVDs and VHS tapes when I was 14, and later that year also started buying Tokyopop manga and then Dragon Ball once I found out the manga was coming out in England, I bought it every single month on the day it was out.

I couldn't import anything until I was 17, and my first American Anime DVD was Dragon Ball Z Season 1.
Kinda makes me with I was a little younger when Dragonball became popular. That was a really funny story. I'm sigging your "CARMAYHARMAYHAAAAA!" by the way because it made me laugh so much. The younger kids around here were doing the same thing once Dragonball Z became popular. They usually said something more along the lines of, "KAMA KAMAY YA!!!" or something like that. Y'know, something that would make Goten's rendition sound correct.

I'm embarrassed of the early years of being a fan... I remember one time new episodes of Dragon Ball Z were on (Trunks Saga) and I HAD to watch it, but my dad was round and he had to watch sports, I ended up crying like a baby, eventually getting my way...

I think it was 11...

He brought it up years later when he saw the remastered Seasons on my shelf in a feeble attempt to embarrass me, I told him he shouldn't have laughed when he saw planes go into the Twin Towers on the news.

There were the common playground rumours too, many of the real ones disputed, and some were just plain retarded.

The most retarded one at the time was that there's a Live action Dragon Ball movie coming out...

Kingdom Heartless · Post by **Kingdom Heartless** » Mon Dec 15, 2008 9:02 pm

It got a little out of hand when I decided I needed to record all the re-runs, with the result of 40 or so videos stored in my room...

I remember the days of taping the episodes on DVD...

And I never had much order... they were all over the place and mixed in with Orphen, Trigun and stuff like that.

Raki · Post by **Raki** » Mon Dec 15, 2008 9:33 pm

Hmm, it took a few episodes from the Buu saga and playing Budokai 1.

SSJ2bardock · Post by **SSJ2bardock** » Mon Dec 15, 2008 9:54 pm

I don't even remember, I've kind of been a fan for so long that it's hard to even remember anything from the times before I was a fan of Dragonball.

Tanooki Kuribo · Post by **Tanooki Kuribo** » Mon Dec 15, 2008 10:03 pm

I was a huge Street Fighter fan back in the 90's like every kid my age. I used to buy these Street Fighter cards in a machine in China town. One day I went there and the machine was gone and replaced with a DragonBall card machine. I bought the DragonBall cards cause I didn't wanna go to China town for nothing. About a year later they started airing the first FUNimation dub of DragonBall at 6 am. I watched it because I had the cards and I thought I'd be cool to see them in moving... form...

I didn't know anything about DragonBall but I was hooked once I saw that first episode "Keep An Eye On The DragonBalls". That was my first taste of the series. Then I moved from buying DragonBall cards to buying the bootleg subtitled videos that were recorded off of TV and copied 10 times over. The quality was horrible and sometimes you couldn't read the words but, I loved it. My first video was movie 3.

sailorspazz · Post by **sailorspazz** » Mon Dec 15, 2008 11:28 pm

It didn't hook me right away. I saw a random episode of the Dragonball dub at 5:30 in the morning in the summer of 1996, but it didn't really interest me at the time. But sometime in 1997/98, I started watching DBZ on Saturday mornings (don't remember why....maybe I decided to give the series another chance, or saw people talking about it online) and I got totally hooked from the first episode I saw (random Namek stuff....I had no idea what was going on, but I just saw Vegeta going around being a dick to everyone and instantly felt he was awesome).

Kendamu · Post by **Kendamu** » Mon Dec 15, 2008 11:31 pm

Tanooki Kuribo wrote:I was a huge Street Fighter fan back in the 90's like every kid my age. I used to buy these Street Fighter cards in a machine in China town. One day I went there and the machine was gone and replaced with a DragonBall card machine. I bought the DragonBall cards cause I didn't wanna go to China town for nothing. About a year later they started airing the first FUNimation dub of DragonBall at 6 am. I watched it because I had the cards and I thought I'd be cool to see them in moving... form...

I didn't know anything about DragonBall but I was hooked once I saw that first episode "Keep An Eye On The DragonBalls". That was my first taste of the series. Then I moved from buying DragonBall cards to buying the bootleg subtitled videos that were recorded off of TV and copied 10 times over. The quality was horrible and sometimes you couldn't read the words but, I loved it. My first video was movie 3.

Damn you and your immediate access to a Chinatown in those days...

Tanooki Kuribo · Post by **Tanooki Kuribo** » Mon Dec 15, 2008 11:54 pm

Damn you and your immediate access to a Chinatown in those days...

And still to this day!

Kendamu · Post by **Kendamu** » Mon Dec 15, 2008 11:57 pm

Tanooki Kuribo wrote:
Damn you and your immediate access to a Chinatown in those days...
And still to this day!

True, but I have this cool thing called the Internet to make up for not being near a Chinatown for the time being.

DB_Fan · Post by **DB_Fan** » Tue Dec 16, 2008 6:10 am

It took me a couple of episodes. In late 1995 I remember watching some episodes of the Red Ribbon saga (Portuguese dub), but didn’t really understood what was going on. It wasn’t until the fight between Krillin and Draculaman that I got addicted to Dragon Ball. We had endless reruns since then, and I eventually caught everything else I missed.

fogdark · Post by **fogdark** » Tue Dec 16, 2008 7:53 am

Back when I lived in Venezuela, around 1995, I think, this TV channel announced they where going to air Dragon Ball. That announcement was around New Year festivities. So after the celebration, in the first days of the new year, they showed a preview of Dragon Ball by airing the first episode.
Imagine my surprise when i first saw Son Goku, since i had him on a T-Shirt i had a few years back. It was my favorite shirt while i had it, so seeing that character on a show I grew instantly curious.
I really liked the first episode, and then i had to wait a few months until Dragon Ball started airing officially. Never stopped liking it, all way through Z. Mid way GT i lost a bit of interest, but recently, i started getting into my DB fandom once more...

Wasted Wisher · Post by **Wasted Wisher** » Tue Dec 16, 2008 12:59 pm

My first exposure to Dragonball was either when they aired DBZ on TV in my country, or when I saw the Lord Slug movie during a comic book sale.
Either way, it was I guess a full decade before DB was picked up by FUNimation, so any info about it was in trickles. An issue of Protoculture Addicts became one of my most heavily relied-upon sources of info for the series at the time.
Dragonball was like seeing the heavens open up before me for the first time. Before that, it used to be that if you wanted superheroic action, you'd watch American cartoons, but the "action" is those shows was too held back for my taste, sometimes to the point there would be no actual fighting at all. On the other hand, if you wanted to watch something with actuall hitting, destruction, or dying, your only other recourse was to watch super-robot anime or sentai shows from Japan.
Then Dragonball showed up. Finally, a show with superheroic power levels but with the no-nonsense, no-holds barred approach to action as the super-robot shows I grew up on. It was like screaming out loud, "WELL IT'S ABOUT FREAKING TIME!"
Even after all this time, I and my friends (who even cribbed together their own Dragonball rpg from Palladium rpg rules) are Dragonball fans to this very day.

Tamagon · Post by **Tamagon** » Sat Dec 20, 2008 4:02 pm

I watched the Freeza saga. Then I really got into it after playing Budokai 1.

jjgp1112 · Post by **jjgp1112** » Sat Dec 20, 2008 4:31 pm

I actually used to hate the show. But then I changed the channel to Cartoon Network and it was on, and I changed the channel. But I noticed that everyone had blond hair instead of black and changed it back to find out why. This was the first episode of the Gohan vs. Cell fight, pre-SSJ2 transformation. I just ended up getting interested in what would happen next and kept watching from there, and eventually forgot about finding out why everyone had blond hair.

Sun_Wukong · Post by **Sun_Wukong** » Sat Dec 20, 2008 6:34 pm

Saw first airing of Freeza saga on CN in 1999, fan by Piccolo vs Freeza, hooked by Goku vs Freeza. So pretty much by Dec 99/Jan 00 i was hooked on DBZ.