Dragonball Back in the Day

[samuraix123]

Hello Everyone!
Does anyone else miss back in Dragonball's Hey day when the Internet wasn't as crazy as it is now and you would look for Dragonball Z stuff and find crappy images and Gifs? I remember seeing poor quality Gifs for some of the movies and I'm like ''That'll never come to america'' I miss being amazed by stuff like this


I mean, It sucked having low quality images and stuff but I miss it so much! Me and my brother used to print picture after picture of Dragonball stuff and try to draw them.(I still have a lot of those papers)
I'm going to put this in the spoiler thing.

Spoiler:

I remember downloading movies on Dial up and it'd take over a week to download! and the quality was just awful But I miss it. I still have a couple of cds where I burned the movies/episodes on them.

I remember seeing stuff like this and thinking ''What's going with the series over in Japan?''

This was actually taken from a VHS rip that a friend at a video store got me a long while back. it is ''Fusion Reborn'' In Japanese and it had this little introduction in it. and as far as I know it's never been released onto DVD.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxtQVM1nmKk
What about you guys? What do you miss about the old days of Dragonball?

[Shiyonasan]

I guess the thing I miss the most about the old days is the newness of everything. At the expense of sounding cheesy, watching new episodes come out on Toonami was a pretty magical experience. It seemed like it took forever for batches of new episodes to come out, and to be fair, they sometimes did.

It is nostalgic to think back to those days, but I'm glad were in a time now where most merchandise is more easily accessible.

[Hellspawn28]

It was fun back then as a kid when you first become a fan. You learn so much about the series and what exist outside of the US. I remember I became so in love with it that I did anything to get my hands on any DB related. Unlike most fans around my age, I was able to play with Japanese Bandai figures and was able to watch stuff uncut in Japanese on VHS with subs. I knew people who give me stuff and stores that can see Japanese imported merchandise. I even played DBZ Legends at my friends neighbors house and it was so awesome back then since it would never be released in the US.

While those days are fun and all, I like things are now. You can easily find DBZ uncut and watch it in Japanese thanks to the season sets then you would 10 or 15 years ago. You have more ways to learn more about DBZ now then you did in the past 10 years. Most American kids without Internet would have to use Beckett for DBZ info and even the Internet back then was still limited for information.

[UpFromTheSkies]

I remember seeing really terrible quality vhs fansubs that looked like 10th gen copies encoded in real player format, and the frame rate was so low that it looked like you were watching a slide show. I wonder if anyone actually watched the series that way.

[Tanooki Kuribo]

I really miss my Sunday nights, watching DBZ in raw Japanese on the International Channel back in the late 90's. I would always look forward to that.

[Metalwario64]

Man, oh man. Early this year I went on a search through Angelfire, Tripod, and Geocities archives for all of the old images and whatnot I could find from way back in the day.

I'm still searching regularly. Man, it's crazy and awesome at the same time how many old pages about DBZ still remain. Unfortunately, I can't find any of those "OMG HQ" clips on any of these sites, but I actually found all of the ones I had downloaded back in the day on Youtube with some thorough searching (and I may link them here when I gather the URLs for them all) I still remember downloading the Vegetto episodes back in the day, along with the Super Saiyan 3 Goku vs Kid Boo episodes in Raw Japanese and horrible quality. :p I also had movies 8 and 12 in Japanese, and movies 4-6 in English.

I remember being in 5th grade when some kids printed out lots of random images from Dragon Ball Z, and that's what led me to discover Geocities and start getting tidbits from later in the series, in addition to seeing all sorts of cool artwork.

Those were good times. I miss the layouts and colorful designs of the late 90s-early 2000s internet websites, especially all of the gifs (which I guess still thrive, but it's mostly just through crappy memes). Most websites are all too uniform and samey these days.

[sangofe]

I miss the really old days, from about 20 years ago, from when I was 10-12 years. I would go to holidays in France during summer and catch as much Dragonball as possible on TV. The best part about even going on holidays was to watch Dragonball, and they even had two episodes a day!

[DBZASHKACHU]

What I really miss is walking into a Suncoast, FYE or Sam Goody store and seeing Dragon Ball dominating the shelves. As a Kid getting into DB I would walk into those stores being overwhelmed, in a good way of course. I mean it was like a sea of material that my eyes had never seen before. I remember those stores promoting the new releases and I know for Suncoast's case they promoted them in a way that made new DB releases such a big deal. Sometimes they would run the trailers or sometimes the movies on their monitors. I would carry those images and scenes in my head for the rest of the day. Seeing old Funimation trailers and Toonami promos would also have the same affect on me. Those places really knew how to promote Dragon Ball. You know walking in there you would find something DB related.

Other things would be bringing home a volume and anxiously waiting to watch it as soon as I got home. Looking up images of DB on Google or Yahoo and looking up episode summaries and titles on the old website. If I had the episode title I could just imagining what would happen.(which I did for DBGT) What Shiyonasan said about the newness of everything pretty much hit's the nail on the head for me. If I could revisit those days I would in a heartbeat. It was like one big Mystical Adventure.

[ABED]

Basically what everyone here has said. I don't think I started looking online for release dates until a few years later, so I walked in to Suncoast, Sam Goody, or Best Buy looking for new DBZ stuff. I remember being so happy when the two Ginyu VHS's came out. I got my mac and cheese and watched it in one fell swoop. The first thing I noticed was how different the voices and music was but didn't care, it was DBZ. I must have watched those episodes so many times that when I got the "season 2" dvd and watched the re-dub, I knew exactly which lines were redubbed and which ones weren't. I probably knew even then how bad the quality of the dub was, but I didn't care, it was DBZ. Part of me misses the newness of those days and would've loved to have had the releases like we do now (30-40 episodes per set) instead of the individual volumes, but I'm happy where things are at now. I just wish that even if they did move the cast to TX, what the dub would've been like had they gone in a more faithful direction with their adaptation.

[DBZAOTA482]

I loved the days of watching DBZ videos on Newgrounds before YouTube existed, and I tried to get every video game that I could.

[The Time Traveller]

I remember back before YouTube existed and trying to watch 1 minute quicktime clips from movies in Japanese, took forever for the video to load.

[Chibi Mystic Gohan]

I really miss my Sunday nights, watching DBZ in raw Japanese on the International Channel back in the late 90's. I would always look forward to that.

Ditto, except I was watching GT, which made it even more awesome, because I was watching something that wasn't even out in English.

I also miss feeling like a badass playing Final Bout using the old "disk swap" trick.

[samuraix123]

I remember back before YouTube existed and trying to watch 1 minute quicktime clips from movies in Japanese, took forever for the video to load.

Same! I remember seeing stuff like this and saying it was fake

Man, oh man. Early this year I went on a search through Angelfire, Tripod, and Geocities archives for all of the old images and whatnot I could find from way back in the day.

I'm still searching regularly. Man, it's crazy and awesome at the same time how many old pages about DBZ still remain. Unfortunately, I can't find any of those "OMG HQ" clips on any of these sites, but I actually found all of the ones I had downloaded back in the day on Youtube with some thorough searching (and I may link them here when I gather the URLs for them all) I still remember downloading the Vegetto episodes back in the day, along with the Super Saiyan 3 Goku vs Kid Boo episodes in Raw Japanese and horrible quality. :p I also had movies 8 and 12 in Japanese, and movies 4-6 in English.

I remember being in 5th grade when some kids printed out lots of random images from Dragon Ball Z, and that's what led me to discover Geocities and start getting tidbits from later in the series, in addition to seeing all sorts of cool artwork.

Those were good times. I miss the layouts and colorful designs of the late 90s-early 2000s internet websites, especially all of the gifs (which I guess still thrive, but it's mostly just through crappy memes). Most websites are all too uniform and samey these days.

Dude that was me! haha Me and my brother use to print out so many pictures and mom would get mad because we wasted all her ink! haha I still have them actually..talking about this last night made me dig them all out. and I found two cds where I had downloaded ''The Dead Zone'' ''Tree of Might cartoon network airing'' ''lord slug'' and ''Cooler's Revenge'' with....awesome quality

[Hellspawn28]

Sam Goody was really awesome and I would go there a lot during the 1st grade to buy Godzilla VHS tapes. There used to be so many cool Japanese stores that would sell stuff during the 90's and early 00's. Sadly those stores are very rare now these days and I think the Internet could kill them off since most anime fans would rather buy there stuff online then going to a store to buy them.

[Polyphase Avatron]

I remember right before the Buu saga started on Toonami I went to the Toonami website and saw some titles of upcoming episodes, one of them had Videl's name in the title and I didn't know who that was at the time so I thought it might be a new villain.

[Hellspawn28]

I was ahead of everyone else at the time. No one at my school believe me that Goku was going to kill Buu with the Spirit Bomb and people were like "Gohan and Vegeta are dead. Goten and Trunks are going to kill Buu when they learn how to fuse".

[dbboxkaifan]

Back in the day I just enjoyed it for what it was not caring for the dub or the picture quality, but now that I've grown things changed and so I've become picky with Dragon Ball and its releases.

Now I can watch all the episodes of DBZ whereas back then I didn't own them nor knew where to download them illegally, or at least with decent quality (Anime-HQ was the fansub I downloaded eps from but then got screwed due to them turning back to the English dub for a couple of episodes which I didn't like).

One last thing is, there was so much Dragon Ball merchandise whichever shop I visited but now it's the internet or nothing.

[Avenged]

Yeah, even made my first DBZ fan site back in 1997.

[samuraix123]

Sam Goody was really awesome and I would go there a lot during the 1st grade to buy Godzilla VHS tapes. There used to be so many cool Japanese stores that would sell stuff during the 90's and early 00's. Sadly those stores are very rare now these days and I think the Internet could kill them off since most anime fans would rather buy there stuff online then going to a store to buy them.

Dude I remembered going to a mom and pop store around here(Since we don't have best buys and stuff like that around here to this day!) and I'd rent VHS tapes all the time, and there was a guy in there I knew(The one who gave me ''At the time'' rare movies such as Fusion Reborn in Japanese with crap quality) and sometimes he would record Dragonball Z on VHS from Toonami and he'd rent it out for people who missed it. I don't believe that was legal but whatever. But there was an old crappy computer in there as well and he'd set it up for us to play games and that's where I got to play Dragonball Z Hyper Dimension.

[Quebaz]

I remember back before YouTube existed and trying to watch 1 minute quicktime clips from movies in Japanese, took forever for the video to load.

Same! I remember seeing stuff like this and saying it was fake

OH MY GOD! I remeber that gif! I believe at the time both Movie 12 and 13 were released in VHS in my country and I picked it up whereas my firends only did later. I remeber a kid who a phone wit that gif on it and at the time we were like "WHOAAA", nobody knew where it was from except me who had seen the movie.