DragonBall: Where we started

Mr.Piccolo · Post by **Mr.Piccolo** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 8:44 pm

I don't know if this thread was done before but I'm just curious to know how the members of the Daizex's forum got into DragonBall. This is basically a copy of that one podcast episode but I think it would be fun to exchange stories

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I will start it off. It was the summer of 1997(?) at my cousin's house in South Jersey. I wake up to something strange: my cousins screaming that "DBZ" is on. Needless I was basically forced watch. It was giving the episode in which Chaozu sacrificed himself. This was on Channel 11, WPIX look it up, so its understood this was the worst time to get into the show. I was soo damn confused: How come this dude with three eyes can survive with one arm and how come this kid 'travels' through dimensions again and again. From that one episode I hated the show. That's right, Mr. Piccolo hated DBZ.

That is until it aired in Toonami (Cartoon Network). I caught the episodes when Piccolo fought Freeza. That really brought me into the series. That is also why I'm a Piccolo fan. From there with the help of some other fans and the internet, I got more information on the series and learned the truth so to speak. I don't know if it is just me or usually the people that introduce you to DBZ get out of it before you do..?

So people, how did you get into the DragonBall universe. I'm sure there are great stories out there.(With much better sentence structure then mine..

)

-edit-Could this please become a sticky..? This is probably my most relevant thread so far and as you can see, all the posts stick to the subject at hand. *gets up from hands and knees*

future_trunks · Post by **future_trunks** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 8:58 pm

Well, I was just into 5th grade, when I overheard my friend talking to another friend about someone named "Cell" and " Goku". I had no clue what they were talking about so I asked. They told me it was a show called "Dragonball".

I had seen one episode of Dragonball Z before( it was the one where Vegeta is killed by Freeza.) by accident and didn't no a lot about it. So one night, I was spending the night at my friends house, and he turned on Dragonball Z.(It was where Gohan kills Cell, so that is my favorite episode).

Soon I was watching it all the time, and became a huge fan of the show. Then this summer I typed in Dragonball on itunes and found my gateway to the forum through the podcast.

Thats about it

jwimz · Post by **jwimz** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 8:59 pm

I was at my Grandma's house and my cousin was watching Cartoon Network (back in the day my cousin and I would spend the afternoons at my Grandparent's house). The next show came on and it was DBZ, it was the episode where Gohan and Krillin fight against Gildo. I thought it was really cool and continued to watch it since then. At the time I thought that Krillin was a child the same age as Gohan (since he was so short), it wasn't until I heard about DB that I realized that he was an adult.

The only reason why I started watching the show was because my cousin (who is older then me) was watching it.

fps_anth · Post by **fps_anth** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 9:21 pm

I started right when the dub started in Canada (95? 96?). I was watching YTV, and tuned into a show called "Dragonball Z". I saw Raditz, Goku and Gohan for the first time. The next day, my cousin and three friends asked me "Did you watch that show Dragonball Z yesterday? It was cool!". And since then....well....I've loved the show!

GI_Judd2287 · Post by **GI_Judd2287** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 9:24 pm

I started watching it ever since episode 1 (Saban) premiered on Cartoon Network. I must have been in 5th or 6th grade. I remember some kids in my class (who must have watched the early monring broadcast) talked about it a lot and it looked very interesting. I saw commercials for it while watching Robotech and Sailor Moon and have been hooked ever since.

trunkschan90 · Post by **trunkschan90** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 9:26 pm

I started watching DBZ after I was introduced to the first three DBZ movies in high school.

Slickmasterfunk · Post by **Slickmasterfunk** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 9:35 pm

Flashback to 5:00am on Saturday, February 22 1997 (which happened to be my tenth birthday and why I remeber the exact date.). I awoke early and stumbled on to this funny looking cartoon called "Dragon Ball Z" on my local Fox network. Who was this scrawny looking Goku guy, why did he have a yellow cloud, and why did he want to fight that huge guy with a tail named Nappa? I was about to change the channel when all the sudden the small guy beat the snot out of the huge guy while flying around and shooting balls of light out of his hands. "Whoa, this is awesome!" I watched every Saturday morning until one day it wasn't on anymore. Sadly, I moved on. Fast forward one year. While flipping around I ended up on Cartoon Network's Toonami and to my surprise Dragon Ball Z was on! I got hooked all over again and saw all 53 episodes of the Ocean dub. Then I saw all 53 again. And again. And again, and again, and again. Then I saw the commercial for "Z Day" where they would show all new episodes, the now infamous "Season 3". So since then I've introduced myself to the Dragon Ball and GT dubs (which led me to the original Japanese language version with Daimao's subtitles, the manga, now many other animes.

SuperGokuMan · Post by **SuperGokuMan** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 9:52 pm

I was at my aunt's house like at 11:00 at night about seven years ago. i was flipping channels and put it on cartoon network and found the episode where goku was fighting vegeta in the saiyan saga. it's funny now i found dbz at my aunt's house but now shes super religous and doesn't allow us to watch it when i go over there.

Taku128 · Post by **Taku128** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 9:52 pm

I got into it diffrently then you guys did. Back in 2002 I went over to my friends house one day and he was playing some game on his PS2. I asked him what it was and he said Dragon Ball Z: Budokai. I thought it looked cool, and it was a fun game, so I tried to watch Dragon Ball Z when it was on Toonami, but I was 10, and DBZ was on at around 9, and I wasn't allowed to watch tv that late, so for a while my only source of Dragon Ball was the video games. A couple years later a friend at school showed me this cool magazine called Shonen Jump. It had all kinds of Japanese comics in it, and one of them was Dragon Ball Z! I had my mom subscribe for me, and the local library had the issues of Dragon Ball Z that took place before where the manga was at, so I used those to catch up with Shonen Jump, and over the years I read all of Dragon Ball Z, and all of Dragon Ball too. I also saw a few of the movies and one of the TV specials throughout my Dragon Ball fandom.

Eat Snow · Post by **Eat Snow** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 10:11 pm

I think I began getting into the Dragonball trilogy in 2001 - I remember turning on the TV and right there was that filler episode with #'s 17 and 18 and 16 in their little pink truck driving through the forest. I instantly thought they were cool, but then my mom changed the channel so I couldn't figure out who they were or what the show was. I think my brother got me into it, and everything after that is a really long story I almost completely forget, yet I remember perfectly how I got obsessed with the Red Ribbon Army. But that's another story.

Bardock the Mexican · Post by **Bardock the Mexican** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 10:21 pm

Right about the time that rights to DBZ and several other anime shows came and were dubbed hastilly by Mexican dubbing companies. The concept of the Mexican dubbing was still a new thing then with little interest in Japanese anime prior to it. Yeah and then I discovered somthing known as DB after I got into DBZ and then learned DB was a backstory for DBZ. A little while later I found this site and nothing has been the same since.

Maker777 · Post by **Maker777** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 11:05 pm

I was watching Cartoon Network one morning and I caught the last 5 minutes of the last Raditz episode where Vegeta and Nappa are eating people and it sorta went on from there.

BlueSky · Post by **Kaboom** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 11:07 pm

Hmm... let's see. It all started about 5 years ago...

It was a dark and stormy night. I was alone, the glow from the television nearly as dull as my senses had become. But not quite. I was pretty much a vegetable at the moment. ::ahem::

Suddenly, a blonde dame walked in the door. Quickly she approached me, giving me no time to think or react.

And she handed me something to eat.

Grandmoms tend to do that a lot.

Long story short, I was at my grandparents' for some reason or another (Thanksgiving or Christmas family get-together, methinks.) Either way, DbZ was on Toonami that evening, and it caught my attention. Being a still relatively new otaku at the time, I'd really never paid much attention to DragonBall, other than to make a reference to it or poke fun at the cool spikey hair and huge, planet-destroying, drawn-out fights. But that evening, after I watched (and I remember vividly,) Videl vs. Spopovich during the 23rd Budokai Tenka'ichi saga, I thought...

"Hey... this is pretty cool."

And I was hooked, folks. Since my youth, I'd been a nerdy superhero and kung-fu action fan, and had recently become a nerdy anime fan as well. Within a few months, I discovered that Dragonball was to be the perfect fusion of both (Get it? Fusion? Gotenks was about to show up at that point? Get it? Ge- aw never mind).

Just last year, I discovered DaizEX, thanks to watching a bunch of Mike's AMVs, and being drawn here by the alluring, butterscotch scent of further DragonBall knowledge.

And here I am today. A DragonBall 'veteran,' to use game-based experience lingo, and still a 'restrained otaku' in most other titles.

Thank you, thank you. And yes, I do have issues, thankyouverymuch.

MajinVegeta25 · Post by **MajinVegeta25** » Fri Sep 22, 2006 11:35 pm

Oh Gosh, time to delve into the deepest, darkest parts of my brain

Ok, lets see I remember in 4th grade being a HUGE Pokemon fan and my friends were talking about this new, great show that was like Pokemon but it was different and it was cooler. So I went home and watched some blonde spikey haired guy (Vegeta) fighting a weird looking slug dude (Cell). It took me awhile to get hooked but I did. I was a huge fan from then on. Then about 5th grade, I kinda got out of it and forgot about it. Then a couple of years later, I got back into it watching Toonami one day. I saw commercials for Yu Yu Hakusho and Rurouni Kenshin, so after DBZ I stuck around and watched those and got into them too. And now I am still into anime and have seen a lot more but am still a DBZ fan! Amazing how time flies.

Godo · Post by **Godo** » Sat Sep 23, 2006 6:07 am

It was like 6 years ago...
I was in Spain in our house where we had antenna connection and could watch a four-five channels. I used to get up early to watch the Hulk and other cartoons. Then I stumble across Dragonball. I had NEVER heard of it before, hence the creepy fact that as fast I saw the show, I yelled to my bro: "Hey, Dragonball is on!!!!". Not knowing the name of the show before. I guess I am blessed by Toriyama himself before I even was born... XD j/k
I started to watch in the androids saga, this blackhaired dude fought a creepy lizard...and a green guy was attacking and got his butt kicked. Then the blackhaired dude got eaten up by the lizards tail! Suddenly he comes out of a door with his hair in a sort of pony tail, having purple hair, with a guy with a huge widows peak!!! WTF?!!! (It wasn't until later I found out that it was actually Trunks and Vegeta, not Android 17 that exited the ROSAT).
Then I watched some more episodes, and it was time to pack the suitcases and travel back home.

During a trip to Norway, we stopped by at a gas station. I stayed at the car, and my brother returns with a pocket in his hand. "Look, it's Dragonball!!!" he said. Wow, its swedish and thus exists in Sweden too!
It was the 17'th volume and showed the Radditz fight.
First I was WTF is happening because I read the whole thing as a normal book, not like the japanese.

After that, I have all the volumes and have watched all the dub episodes. The japanese are left for me to see.

Stoney · Post by **Stoney** » Sat Sep 23, 2006 6:14 am

I saw the adverts for it on cartoon network. I thought "meh". As usual when I got home from school I would stick it on cartoon network, and I ended up sitting through the first episode. I hadn't seen anything like it, so I watched it the next day, from then on I only missed one episode of DBZ. Saw all of GT, then finally a couple of years later they shown DB and I watch all of that. (And by the time of Tenshinhan vs Goku I realised this was even better then Z)
Then they released those crappy "big green" dubs, I bought them but cause they sucked I bought myself a multi regional DVD player and started ordering the funi movies off amazon.
Then I went onto the manga and discovered how amazing it is.

Olivier Hague · Post by **Olivier Hague** » Sat Sep 23, 2006 6:25 am

I guess that was back in 1988, probably when they met Yamcha.
I can't say I really followed the first series, except maybe during the tournaments.
Come to think about it, I didn't really start watching each and every episode until... the Freeza fight? And I pretty much stopped soon after (a bit after Trunks' arrival?) to simply buy and read the manga anyway...

omae no kaasan · Post by **omae no kaasan** » Sat Sep 23, 2006 8:38 am

10 years next month.

11 if you count when I watched Dragon Ball at a GOD-AWFUL early morning hour but didn't know what it was even though I loved what I saw of it before it went off the air.

And here I am 10 years later with a Japanese woman whom I love more than I can say and working in Japan.

All thanks to a cartoon ^O^

Lesson:

Tell anyone you ever overhear saying, "TV will rot your brains out.", to go fuck themselves directly in the ass.

Mystic Jack · Post by **Mystic Jack** » Sat Sep 23, 2006 8:46 am

Well I started sorta watching when I was eight (I'm 14 now) I fully got into it when I was 12, but I didn't really have anything to base my fandom on, since I didn't have and couldn't get a job for all the DBZ stuff that was out there, now I am 15 (or I will be when you read the post it's my birthday in an hour) and my fandom has gone through the roof, I have boxsets and manga, I'm on a heap of DB Message Boards.

And I couldn't be happier.

Panda · Post by **Panda** » Sat Sep 23, 2006 9:26 am

I had to be very young (at least 5) when I first watched Dragonball Z. It was in the Freeza arc and I liked having it on late at night (when they used to do the Midnight Run? Was that what it was called?) because of the green background and how it would lighten my room (I was afraid of the dark

)

I probably got really into when I was about 9. I had made some friends that really liked it (and Sailor Moon) so I started watching the two series daily. I truly don't watch it much anymore. Occasionally an episode on YouTube maybe...

But it's in my heart and it brings back fond memories.