Was the dragon ball series your first anime ?

[voltlunok]

Kinda...I caught bits and pieces of it on TV but could never pin it down to really invest watching it back in 97. It wasn't till later on Toonami I fully saw it but by that time I saw the whole of gundam wing and I consider that my first anime. So I guess you could say DBZ was my second series.

[Hellspawn28]

Nope, mine was My Neighbor Totoro. I knew it was from Japan due to my love of Godzilla. As a kid, I loved Godzilla and I can tell that the Japanese letters were from Japan. I also grew up watching Speed Racer and G-Force on CN during the mid 90's. I also grew up watching anime on the Sci-Fi channel during the late 90's as well.

[JackyBoi99]

My first anime were sailor moon, knights of the zodiac aka saint seiya and one of the gundam series before dragon ball.

[UpFromTheSkies]

Technically, the first Japanese produced cartoons I watched were Transformers, Thundercats and Speed Racer...although I didn't realize they were produced in Japan back then. The first cartoons I watched that I knew were Japanese were Ronin Warriors, Dragon Ball, Teknoman, and the movies that were shown throughout the 90's on SciFi channel's "Saturday Anime" (Akira, Venus Wars, Dominion Tank Police, Iria, ect)

[Barunks]

Akira was what introduced me to anime, but it was DBZ that made me fall in love with it.

[Tzigi]

By far it wasn't my first anime. I had the pleasure of experiencing more or less the standard set of animes for a Pole born in the 1980s (of course all had the displeasure of getting a voice-over):
1. Italian dubbed versions of many old-school animes. The ones that I can think of now are: Tiger Mask, Ippatsu Kanta-kun, Himitsu no Akko-chan, Tōshō Daimos, Attacker You!, Sally the Witch, Yatterman and Yattodetaman. There were of course many others but I remember those ones best.
2. Sailor Moon with an abysmal translation but luckily the original Japanese version present (just marred with the voice-over)
3. A whole set of animes that Dragon Ball was but one of. I remember liking Saint Seiya best at first. All those animes were sadly using the atrocious French AB Group versions - only the second half of GT had the original voices preserved. And don't even speak about the translation - in comparision to this version of DB, every stupid idea of Funimation's was a small thing.

[dbboxkaifan]

Nope.



Gatchaman and I still remember it very vividly as if it were the early 90's still, there was also another show which had a monkey and it used to scare the shit out of me as a kid but I don't even know its name to google it.

[Ajay]

Nope, it was probably Pokémon and then Dragon Ball.

My parents gave no shits about ratings either so I was also watching Ninja Scroll and Akira alongside it.

[Luso Saiyan]

I honestly can't say for certain, but it was either Dragon Ball or Saint Seiya.

Dragon Ball was certainly the most memorable.

EDIT: Dogtanian is an anime, right? If so, then that was definitely my first anime.

[Hellspawn28]

Though it's one of my favorites, Dragon Ball was by no means my first exposure to anime.

Thanks to my local Blockbuster Video and the Sci-Fi Channel's "Saturday Anime" block during the mid-to-late 90's, I already had titles like The Guyver, Project A-Ko, Macross, Sailor Moon, Galaxy Express 999, and Dominion Tank Police under my belt. I did run across the occasional episode of the FUNi/Ocean/BLT dub of Dragon Ball in syndication around late '95-'96, but I was never able to catch DBZ consistently on air until Toonami started running in 1998.

Then I fell into the rabbit hole and here I am now.

Nice, someone else other then me grew up with Sci-Fi Channel's Saturday Anime block. 90's Sci-Fi rocked with tons of classic movies, MST3K, reruns of Adam West Batman, reruns of the 70's Hulk TV show and tons of cool anime shows. I haven't watch Sci-Fi since 2011 when their anime block was gone for good. I still watch Destination Truth at the time since it was only show on that channel that I cared about the most. Sci-Fi would play awful original movies, movies and shows that had nothing to do with Sci-Fi. I remember they played The Last Street Fighter since it's a PD film.

[Doctor.]

No, I very much doubt so. It was probably Pokémon or Captain Tsubasa, I'm inclining more to Pokémon, I was really, really obsessed with it when I was younger. Still am a big fan, since I still buy the games when they come out and play the game competitively with some of my online friends. I remember I watched Dragon Ball like 3 times when I was in 3rd or 4th grade, I even had a movie tape (I still have it, it's the Super 13 one, unfortunately it doesn't work anymore) but I never paid too much attention to it, never really liked it that much, oh how foolish I was.

My real earliest interaction with Dragon Ball was with the first Shin Budokai game for the PSP, around 08- 09, I think? I was like in my 7th grade by then, close to it. That's when I started to like the franchise, but I didn't know anything about it (I thought Gohan was Goku's father xD). I was then introduced to the anime by a friend of mine who told me in which channels I could watch it and where to check it out online. He even let me borrow some of the movies (Movie 12, 13 and... DB Evolution, thank God I never touched that one) and we used to play Raging Blast together at his house. I ended up becoming a much bigger fan that him over time, don't know if that's good or bad.

We eventually stopped talking because he started to fail multiple years and we got separated from our class, and I ended up changing schools when I got to the 10th grade, 2 years ago. It's a shame, really, he was my best friend for a long time. Sorry for this (mini) life story, just thought I'd share, :p

I have to say DB was the first anime (and manga) that I've completed, though.

[Logan]

Probably Sailor Moon and G-Force (Gatchaman) or possibly Gigantor on Scif-Fi Channel. Transformers first, if you count an American show animated by Toei. I know Sailor Moon was the first time that anime really caught my attention. I was probably seven or eight and remember getting a different vibe from it over other toons at the time. It had some... bite to it. It was kind of scary, edgy maybe, in a way that my other cartoons never tried to be.

[dbboxkaifan]

EDIT: Dogtanian is an anime, right? If so, then that was definitely my first anime.

Yes, indeed it is.

It's interesting that the Japanese version seems to be a lot different than the International and to this day I still haven't watched an episode of it in Japanese, but well, perhaps the only changes are within the OP/ED while the rest could be pretty much the same.

As a kid I was also obsessed with Knight Rider but this isn't the place to talk about it.

[Sshadow5001]

My first anime was Laputa: Castle in the Sky (Streamline Dub) when I was very young. I'd recorded most of it on VHS but had no idea about anime and the like. My second was either Pokemon,Yu-Gi-Oh or Dragonball Z (Whichever aired first in the UK)

[MCDaveG]

I had to painfully sit trough the last minutes of Dragon Ball, waiting for Digimon to air on RTL II
So nope, I already saw Pokémon, Digimon and Monster Rancher and saw anime as this entertaining stuff for kids, with monsters, tied to a merchandising.
Until I saw Slayers, DBZ and Saint Seiya, which reformated my view on anime in positive sense, which got later trashed by the modern clichéd and ugly trash with creepy Japanese pop music.

[TheBlackPaladin]

The first anime that I ever watched was one that I watched when I was very little (I believe 4 years old), and it was an anime called Superbook. Basically an anime adaptation of the bible (animated by an actual Japanese animation company but commissioned by an American Christian TV network), with some kiddie time travel elements thrown in, meant to get the largely non-Christian population of Japan interested in Christianity.

Actually, the acting in the dub was fairly good, but now that I'm older, it's difficult for me to watch given how painfully blatant a propaganda effort it was on the part of the producers (a statement that I make against the producers, to be clear, and not religion).

My introduction to the Dragon Ball universe was when my friend brought over the video game, "Dragon Ball GT: Final Bout." By coincidence, I was channel-surfing a few weeks later and landed on a Toonami airing of the episode where Vegeta kills Cui. I thought, "This guy's a total badass...what's this show about?" And the rest was history!

[DB_Fan1991]

It wasn't DB for me. My first Anime was Pokemon in 1999. Digimon followed a year later then I saw Spirited Away 3 years later after that was DB 5 years later, a few months later came Fullmetal Alchemist, and within the last 5 years I've gotten into Sailor Moon, Yu Yu Hakusho & Howl's Moving Castle.

[ParkerAL]

Like others here, I'm pretty sure I started my anime viewing hobby with Pokemon.

To this day, I still love the show for how graciously goofy it can get. Yes, it follows an unbelievably repetitive formula. Yes, the main characters never really develop and their story arcs often get dumped from the narrative without satisfying conclusions. Yes, it exists almost solely as a vehicle for advertising the games and other merchandise. But at the same time, it provides consistent, harmless, cheesy nostalgic fun. I can't blame the creators for sticking with a successful template, especially given the noticeable improvements they've made with the latest XY season. Personally, I think Pokemon's current animation arguably looks more aesthetically pleasing than a lot of Toei's recent Dragon Ball work.

Spoiler:

[DBZAOTA482]

Like others here, I'm pretty sure I started my anime viewing hobby with Pokemon.

To this day, I still love the show for how graciously goofy it can get. Yes, it follows an unbelievably repetitive formula. Yes, the main characters never really develop and their story arcs often get dumped from the narrative without satisfying conclusions. Yes, it exists almost solely as a vehicle for advertising the games and other merchandise. But at the same time, it provides consistent, harmless, cheesy nostalgic fun. I can't blame the creators for sticking with a successful template, especially given the noticeable improvements they've made with the latest XY season. Personally, I think Pokemon's current animation arguably looks more aesthetically pleasing than a lot of Toei's recent Dragon Ball work.

Spoiler:

That's one of the first things I noticed with the XY season. The quality animation for the is a huge step up from the usual stiff-ass, moving static cels-reliant shit we get from the Pokemon anime.

[Friezacooler]

Some anime called Gun dam wing, and samurai pizza cats I guess lol. Hahaha Shin Chan,
I guess too. whatever anime was earing on foxkids and Cartoon Network. Before DBZ came out on Cartoon Network.