Do You Feel Old Yet?

[DragonBoxZTheMovies]

I seem to recall hearing on one of the older podcasts that K-Zone (or maybe it was Mania) contacted Meri for permission to use information on her website for the magazine. Anyone know which episode this was?

[Super Sonic]

It's weird to think there's an entire group of fans of DBZ that doesn't remember the Ocean dub. They may have heard about it, or even seen it, but they weren't there when it was happening.

Wow that does make feel a bit old. I was born in 1991, so I did watch the Ocean dub back in 1998. I didn't become a fan until around 2001. I was one of those people who could not stand DBZ at the time.

Now you're making me feel old. To me 1991 was starting 3rd grade, playing Ducktales and Rescue Rangers on NES, and skipping home from school singing Ninja Rap.

[Majin Buu]

Sometimes the 90s don't seem like that long ago to me, but whenever I remember that the time period was over a decade ago (and in the case of the early 90s, over two decades ago), I start to feel old and I say to myself: "Has it really been that long?"

[Thanos]

It's more of a sense of wistfulness about certain things. For instance, Budokai 3 is closing in on ten years, which really effects me because at that time, all the weird puberty shit started happening to me and it was a big change in my life. And of course, I was playing Budokai 3 a lot. Unlocking everything, listening to that amazing music... ahhh...

[AnimeMaakuo]

.

[Hellspawn28]

It makes you feel old when you read the Nick Toons boards on the Kai and GT section. It seems like most of them had no idea what Dragon Ball was until Kai came out.

[OutlawTorn]

No, I don't feel old. Personally, I don't subscribe to letting my life be dictated around a number. While you cannot prevent yourself from growing older, we are in full control over whether or not we "grow old." I think the only way you would really feel old is if you had regrets over being a fan for so long.

[Payne222]

No.

[WesMan23]

I guess this is a good time for a first post, like someone else stated earlier in the thread.

I certainly do feel old with some of these dates. I'm barely 24, and Dragon Ball has been around for a few years before me. I remember watching the old Saban/Ocean dub of DBZ way back in the mid-late 90ds on TV. I'm not sure if it was the original run, but I'm pretty sure it was. I clearly remember the fight with Son Goku and Vegeta being the first episodes that I saw, and I thought, "wow, this is awesome." I remember getting on our dial-up internet and looking up everything I could find about it. As I became more interested, I bought figures, clothing, and whatever merchandise I could find. Somewhere I still have a couple of DBZ posters, one being the red-tinted one with a huge Goku head in the background and rest of the cast up front, as well as a shiny/holo poster of the cast. I was simply hooked. Once the Namek ark hit, Ian James Cortlett didn't voice Goku anymore, and I think it was Peter Kelamis, and then the series started over. I was so surprised and upset. Eventually, I remember seeing "Season 3" and not really knowing too much about how everything actually should be, thought it was awesome. Of course, I know much better now, that Season 3 was "subpar" to put it exceedingly nicely. Into the 2010s now, and being a fan for well over a decade, yes I do feel old, but I still am just as much into Dragon Ball as I was back during my elementary school days, and I feel that my fandom for it has aged far better than I have myself. I will definitely feel old once I've been a fan of it for over twenty years, which I'm sure I will be.

[Kunzait_83]

Didn't Kunzait get into the series in the early 90s?

Ass-end of '92 to be precise. Though technically speaking I knew that Dragon Ball was a thing that existed even further back from that: maybe '90 or '91-ish? The Freeza arc was still happening when I was first made aware of DB I know that much, and it was at least during or just past all the Ginyu stuff; I mainly remember that due to a handful of specific newsgroup discussions that I remember as some of my first or earliest exposure to the series. But at that point to me it was just another in a fairly long list of hot-button titles that sparked its share of discourse in anime/manga circles of the time.

'92 going into '93 (midst of the Cell arc) is about when I started actually watching the anime, following along with the manga on the web, importing the video games (still have my original boxed Butouden games from back then), and was generally thrown headlong into it as a full-fledged fan.

Late last year then marked my twentieth year as a fan. Despite for a few years now no longer considering myself a member of this community (honestly I've in recent years been sort of on the verge of questioning whether or not I'm even still a Dragon Ball fan at all anymore, something I've never once done before at any point within said-twenty years, and to be perfectly blunt my time spent on this site has a great deal to do with that), twenty years is still twenty years and I've toyed a bit since then with the idea of posting something fairly naval-gazing here: examining the very nature of my own fandom for this weird-ass fucking series and how it was that it stuck with me as long as it did and through as much bullshit and horrible fan-baggage as it accumulated over time and what it was that finally made me hit what I think was my breaking point with the whole thing a few years ago.

But doing so would probably require going into some serious details about my life that are entirely too intimate and personal and that I in no way in hell feel comfortable with just throwing out there randomly into the wild, so I've abstained from doing so. Though there's definitely a writer's bug in me that every now and again is still tempted pull the trigger on it regardless before common sense takes hold of me once more. I'm also on the cusp of turning 30 later this year, which probably has something to do with it. That and a much more important (and again, personal) factor that's been going on with me the last five or six months or so now have caused me to get all super-introspective and shit lately. Few things can be more irritating and insufferable for some people to put up with than a verbose writer who's neck deep in full-on self-reflection mode.

[DBZ Mick]

According to my Dragon Box book #5 today's date- 5th of May 2013 (here in Australia at least) is 20 years since the episode where Gohan turned SSJ2... It just makes me go wow more than anything...

[Cipher]

Things from my childhood are now as old as a portion of or all of my life?!

Oh no I AM SO OLD HOW WILL I EXPLAIN NINTENDO 64 TO THE GRANDCHILDREN I WILL PROBABLY HAVE NEXT YEAR.

-- Signed millennials on the Internet, 2013