When did Dragon Ball reach the height of its popularity in America?

[dario03]

Also keep in mind this is the early 2000's, you HAD to watch the show on TV (or buy the VHS or DVDs), because this was the pre-youtube or streaming era. It's hard to believe but youtube didn't even come out till 2005, which was after all of Dragonball's dub run in the U.S. was already over. The redub of Season 1-2 were airing in 2005.

Back then there was no streaming media, few people watched shows online, there was no youtube, etc. You either bought FUNi's overpriced $25 VHS/DVDs with 3 episodes each on them (lol, that would never fly today), or you watched it on TV. I miss the days when you were sort of "forced" to watch things on TV at a certain time...nowadays it feels like everyone just catches things online instead.

Or you could just... buy fansub tapes.

Youtube wasn't the first means ever in existence of seeing unlicensed or unreleased material. TV wasn't the sole and only end-all-be-all option. VHS existed, and bootleg tape trading was a massive, massive thing since the early 1980s. People circulated tapes of all kinds of things, from unaired pilots, to rare and foreign/exotic films, to all kinds of TV shows from all around the world, etc. Even personal home videos or security cam footage and all sorts of similar such oddities would sometimes find themselves out in the wilds, copied onto countless tapes passed around people's personal collections and get seen by thousands upon thousands of people and become something almost akin to "memes" before that idea existed in the online sense. To say nothing of peer to peer sharing and direct downloads of video files on the internet, which also existed since the latter half of the 90s.

People on this site desperately need to get the fuck outside of themselves and their own personal firsthand experiences and view of the world and more specifically get over this preconceived view of the world that all media across the entire United States in the 1990s and early 2000s was as gated-in and narrowly limited for everyone as it was for a lot of you guys because you were still largely small kids at the time (and evidently, going by some people's testimonies on here, some fairly sheltered kids at that).

Just because Youtube and Streaming didn't exist yet, doesn't mean that kid's TV channels were the sole gatekeepers of Dragon Ball and most/all other anime. That wasn't even vaguely close to true back then, either for Dragon Ball or other anime in general. Plenty of stuff got licensed here (uncut and subbed) since the mid 80s, and stuff that didn't get licensed, like DB/Z, was still plenty findable for anyone who didn't live in the middle of podunk nowhere. You'd be AMAZED at how plain as day out in the open a lot of anime-related media was in North America as far back as the late 1980s (albeit NOT in very many child/family-friendly outlets).

All you simply had to do was go to a video store, go to comic book/sci fi/anime/horror conventions, go to a local Chinatown (if you lived in or near a major city, as more than a lot of people did), make friends and connections (which you never needed the internet to do: we used to have this thing called "going outside and talking to people", its still a thing even today and I recommend it highly), hell go to a fucking head shop, ask about "stuff in the backroom/under the table" etc.

This wasn't rocket science back then nor was any of this some deeply concealed, arcane secret kept far away from the masses, nor was this some sort of elite club that only people with a lot of money back then could get into (I was largely dirt-ass poor back then myself), and I get sick of this narrative about both Dragon Ball, broader anime, and even general media as a whole always being presented on here solely from the vantage point of people who were INCREDIBLY small and naive children with HEAVILY and abnormally (even for an average kid) restricted and tightly-leashed exposure to media, not to mention evidently didn't have very many friends or talk to a lot of people in general (again, going by most average accounts that people discuss in here over the years).

Most of you were RIDICULOUSLY little back then and (going by your own accounts) apparently a lot of you also had some fairly overbearing helicopter parents who over-regulated the living fuck out of your media diets and exposure to things, along with maintaining some generally heavily insulated and introverted lifestyles on average. Also I've noticed over the years that there are apparently also a lot of people here who grew up in the deeply rural midwest of the United States, which apparently had absolutely ZERO pop culture to speak of compared to virtually anyplace else that was closer to civilization.

Because of that, the average collective perspectives of most (American at least) people on this site are HEAVILY unreliable and filtered through a VERY skewed and insulated lens, one that in NO way comes even vaguely close to universally applying to or being indicative of EVERYONE ever who was alive in North America during the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, nor even a sizable plurality thereof.

The world back then consisted of VASTLY more than just heavily introverted, shy, awkward elementary/middle school kids who barely had any kind of social life, may or may not have lived in the deepest southern backwoods barely a head above Amish country, and spent most or all of their non-school hours largely huddled alone in their room watching crappy kids' cartoons on regular basic cable TV. Just because you weren't aware of the world as a kid doesn't mean it wasn't still going on spinning, same as it continues to today.

...You having a bad day there Kunzait? Also after all that you didn't even mention that youtube and streaming shouldn't have stopped the "heavily introverted, shy, awkward elementary/middle school kids who barely had any kind of social life" people from getting DB since downloading existed in the early 2000's.

Oh and for VHS fansubs, some might have just skipped them because that wasn't always a great deal either. And maybe they gave up after finding a few not so good deals. I know the first place I went to that had them was $15 for 3 episodes of the worst audio/video quality you could find. Like a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, etc, etc, of the show airing on TV recorded with a busted VCR over some kids ball game video.

[ABED]

What's your basis for believing the fansubs were anything other than a niche within a niche? I was around back then and it wasn't uncommon for even avid collectors to have holes in their collection, especially of such a long series.

[Vorige Waffe]

Most of you were RIDICULOUSLY little back then and (going by your own accounts) apparently a lot of you also had some fairly overbearing helicopter parents who over-regulated the living fuck out of your media diets and exposure to things, along with maintaining some generally heavily insulated and introverted lifestyles on average. Also I've noticed over the years that there are apparently also a lot of people here who grew up in the deeply rural midwest of the United States, which apparently had absolutely ZERO pop culture to speak of compared to virtually anyplace else that was closer to civilization.

Because of that, the average collective perspectives of most (American at least) people on this site are HEAVILY unreliable and filtered through a VERY skewed and insulated lens, one that in NO way comes even vaguely close to universally applying to or being indicative of EVERYONE ever who was alive in North America during the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, nor even a sizable plurality thereof.

The world back then consisted of VASTLY more than just heavily introverted, shy, awkward elementary/middle school kids who barely had any kind of social life, may or may not have lived in the deepest southern backwoods barely a head above Amish country, and spent most or all of their non-school hours largely huddled alone in their room watching crappy kids' cartoons on regular basic cable TV. Just because you weren't aware of the world as a kid doesn't mean it wasn't still going on spinning, same as it continues to today.

Just wanted to echo a lot of this post; guys, just because you discovered pirated media via a streaming outlet, that doesn't mean foreign media was altogether gated off from the rest of the world during the VHS era; even as one of those little kids who primarily consumed anime via broadcast television out in Nowheresville, TN, you could find assorted gaming and comic stores selling both official and unofficial Dragon Ball merchandise--including VHS fansubs--by 1997, if not earlier.

[Kunzait_83]

...You having a bad day there Kunzait? Also after all that you didn't even mention that youtube and streaming shouldn't have stopped the "heavily introverted, shy, awkward elementary/middle school kids who barely had any kind of social life" people from getting DB since downloading existed in the early 2000's.

1) No, not really. Its just that this whole meme of "No one anywhere in any corner of America had ever known that any kind of Japanese cartoons were a thing until Pokemon and Toonami first entered the lives of small children in 1998" is something that has grown INCREDIBLY tiresome due to how ubiquitously widespread and thoroughly untrue it is, to say nothing of how badly its warped and distorted the entire view of the history of anime in North America, which is MUCH bigger and goes back WAY farther than just the Pokemon/DBZ Toonami blitz of the tail-end of the 90s/early-most 2000s.

Its incredibly egocentric and embodies this sort of bizarre notion that "all works of media and all pop culture were frozen in time inside of a vacuum until me and my friends as kids had first heard of them" that seems to be an overarching and inescapable thought-virus among even some of the smartest and otherwise best informed of the Toonami generation of anime fandom.

And its stunningly incorrect and more than EASILY provably so with little more but a ten minute Google search for even the most thuddingly BASIC information about North American anime industry history; something that I find to be utterly inexcusable that seemingly NOBODY on either this site nor in broader anime/Dragon Ball fandom among this particular generation (i.e. people who carry a torch for Cartoon Network at the turn of the millennium as "ground zero" for all of anime awareness in North America) has somehow managed to EVER bother to do in ALL these many years (decades) now.

And 2) I actually DID mention early downloading on the internet right here:

Youtube wasn't the first means ever in existence of seeing unlicensed or unreleased material. TV wasn't the sole and only end-all-be-all option. VHS existed, and bootleg tape trading was a massive, massive thing since the early 1980s. People circulated tapes of all kinds of things, from unaired pilots, to rare and foreign/exotic films, to all kinds of TV shows from all around the world, etc. Even personal home videos or security cam footage and all sorts of similar such oddities would sometimes find themselves out in the wilds, copied onto countless tapes passed around people's personal collections and get seen by thousands upon thousands of people and become something almost akin to "memes" before that idea existed in the online sense. To say nothing of peer to peer sharing and direct downloads of video files on the internet, which also existed since the latter half of the 90s.

What's your basis for believing the fansubs were anything other than a niche within a niche? I was around back then and it wasn't uncommon for even avid collectors to have holes in their collection, especially of such a long series.

I never said at any point that people didn't have holes in their collections. Of course people did, I certainly was no exception either. But as far as anime fandom went, virtually almost EVERYONE who was into anime in the 1980s and 90s also had at least SOME measure of exposure to and some part of their collection dedicated to fansubs. The "niche within a niche" I would say were people in anime fandom back then who somehow DIDN'T get into fansubs or had somehow avoided them completely. THAT was WAY more rare within the U.S. anime landscape at the time.

Now obviously anime fansubs weren't something that stretched very far (hardly at all) OUTSIDE of anime fandom back then (like if you didn't hear of or weren't that interested in anime period, then you probably didn't see or know much about fansubs, because of course you probably didn't give enough of a shit to seek them out)... but yes, WITHIN anime fandom of those years, fansubs were all but impossible to completely avoid.

And furthermore, anime fandom as a whole in those years was hardly AS obscure or niche as people here often make it sound like it was. It was certainly A niche, sure... but hardly anywhere close to a microscopic or invisible one. It was a fairly, decently large sized "cult" audience; and if you were in the "cult" you probably also had some degree of experience with viewing and collecting fansubs.

Honestly, it wasn't all that much smaller of a niche than diehard music fanatics who collected unreleased bootleg recordings of rare demos and early incarnations of famous bands, or noteworthy upcoming ones (like, to pull a random example out of my ass: the folks who got into Guns 'N Roses a year or two prior to Appetite for Destruction's release due to their demo material, much of which wound up on GnR Lies later on, which had made the rounds into fairly wide circulation among music collectors and enthusiasts well before then).

A niche for sure, yes, but not one that was so obscure as to be utterly impossible for mere mortals to lay eyes on nor hidden away from all existence like some kind of dorky, neck-bearded Paradise Island.

Well I just turned 32. I'm one of the older people on this forum, but even then I never got into the whole fansub/VHS trading thing. Also keep in mind I was just a casual anime fan back then, anime was "new" and I was a big Ninja Turtles fan like most kids in the 80's, as well as into Batman, Spiderman, X-men, etc. At the time most anime was this new or foreign thing, most of us were introduced to it by Pokemon, Dragonball, Sailor Moon, etc...and all those other first popular anime show dubs that came to the U.S. around the late 90's.

Back in 1998 I'm pretty sure I was only 13. At the time I had no idea dubs cut things out from the original, or that there was a way to get original Japanese fansubs. And given internet communities were much smaller back then, and everyone was a hell of a lot younger 18+ years ago, it's a different world than today.

For what its worth, I'm only around two years older than you. I was 14 in '98, and 15 in '99. I was just a kid myself for much of the latter half of the 80s and throughout the 90s.

And that feeds into my point: there wasn't anything particularly "special" about me back then. I was only 5 years old when I first got into anime in '89, and I wasn't some particularly bright, ahead of the curve wunderkind by any stretch either, nor was I the only kid my age getting into this stuff at the time. Granted the average age of most anime fans back then was a LOT older (usually anywhere from 18 to 32-ish), and kids my age within them were definitely a minority among them... but we were hardly non-existent either.

Myself a a fair amount of other elementary school kids (alongside the more sizable majority of college-age folks who made up the bulk of fandom at that point) had seen Akira, and from there got pulled into Bubblegum Crisis, Battle Angel/Gunnm, Gunsmith Cats, Dirty Pair, Guyver, Devilman, Area 88, Wings of Honneamise, Vampire Hunter D, Ninja Scroll, Ghost in the Shell, Dominion Tank Police, and on and on and on down the list.

I wasn't bright, I wasn't rich, I wasn't privileged... I was a regular-ass 5 to 6 year old kid living in a shitty slum area in a major city, as were most of my friends. The only thing it took was A) not being chained strictly to kids' media 24/7 and B) having an interest in the wider, broader world of creative media beyond the boundaries of what is deemed "all age appropriate" and having the initiative to actually go out and look around at what else is out there. All you had to do was leave the Disney aisle of the video store behind and look around at literally everything else. Voila. You were in the "club" as it were. There really wasn't a lot more to it than that.

That's generally the overwhelmingly consistent narrative that this community has always put forward since even the mid-2000s ten years ago: because most people here, by their own fairly consistent testimonials on here going back years and years and years now, were within an age bracket and of a particular home situation and personality persuasion where what was consumed was HEAVILY restricted and they obediently did as told, there's this view of the 90s and early 2000s pop culture as consisting almost solely and exclusively of whatever heavily sheltered 8 year olds were interested in.

As if the rest of the population that was 18 and over were all either somehow as invested in Transformers, Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, Pokemon, Yu Gi Oh, and the Cartoon Network and Kids WB lineups as the average 20 to 30 something of today is and was back then as kids, or else otherwise they may as well have not existed at all. And that as such, the rest of wider culture in America is often portrayed and thought of within these kinds of conversations in this community (and others like it) as somehow being as closed off and insulated from media that existed outside of those child-centric realms as it was for a lot of you guys as children.

People, both kids and adults, were never so exclusively chained to children's broadcast TV in the 80s and 90s that NO other outlets for media existed ANYWHERE else. They obviously did, and they attracted their own dedicated and devoted fandoms (of a wide variety of sizes, big and small). Shit doesn't exist in a vacuum just because you as a kid either lacked the agency, the intellectual curiosity, the permission among your parents, or some combination thereof, to actually look at what existed across media beyond the Saturday Morning Action Cartoon lineup.

I know that that sounds INCREDIBLY, blitheringly obvious (because it is) but this is how all of these conversations about how media was delivered and absorbed by people in the pre-streaming days always tend to go on here: with people waxing wistfully about their insanely narrow and stiflingly limited elementary school experiences passively absorbing only the fluff that their parents permitted them to from network kids' TV, and then projecting that stiflingly limited experience onto the whole entirety of 90s and early 2000s pop culture.

Almost virtually damn near close to EVERYONE that I've ever encountered or come across ANYWHERE (both on this site and countless others, as well as IRL) within the last decade+ who hails from that tail-end 90s/early-most 2000s Cartoon Network-era of anime fandom seems to universally share this irritating quirk (operating as if the whole of modern pop culture, outside of mainstream U.S. children's media, was forever put on hold just waiting for them to be born and grow cognizant before actually starting up), and its long, long, LONG ago grown beyond tiresome.

For the simple reason that it is COMPLETELY disconnected from and disassociated with the actual reality of what the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s were actually like for the rest of us who weren't living solely within that mainstream kids' TV bubble that people here don't even seem to recognize or realize that they'd been living within for so long.

[VegettoEX]

While the input and analysis is certainly worth reading and appreciated from someone who shares similar sentiments, it's no longer really about "hey so when did the series hit its peak popularity over here?"

[DBZAOTA482]

1999-2002 was Dragon Ball at its most popularity within the states. It was even at one point the highest-rated show on Television even outing The Simpsons.

[ABED]

1999-2002 was Dragon Ball at its most popularity within the states. It was even at one point the highest-rated show on Television even outing The Simpsons.

It outdid The Simpsons audience with the target demo. That's not the same thing as outdoing The Simpsons overall. I know this is splitting hairs, but it's not what the article said. DBZ was popular, but it was never the highest rated show on TV. I don't even think The Simpsons was the highest rated show on TV at that time. It was probably Friends which rarely dipped below 20 million viewers in its entire run. But yes, DBZ was popular during that timeframe. I would've thought DBZ was at its most popular from the Freeza arc to the Cell arc. Granted this is based on anecdotal evidence, but I remember DB being talked about the most during 99-01

[DBZAOTA482]

1999-2002 was Dragon Ball at its most popularity within the states. It was even at one point the highest-rated show on Television even outing The Simpsons.

It outdid The Simpsons audience with the target demo. That's not the same thing as outdoing The Simpsons overall. I know this is splitting hairs, but it's not what the article said. DBZ was popular, but it was never the highest rated show on TV. I don't even think The Simpsons was the highest rated show on TV at that time. It was probably Friends.

It was a hyperbole... but nevertheless, you have to admit it's quite a feat.

[Cure Dragon 255]

But I JUST posted data that DID say DBZ indeed was the highest rated thing on ALL of television.

Ignored again. LOL.

[Attitudefan]

Height is definitely when the PS2 era hit and Budokai 1 and 2 hit the shelves. DBZ was everywhere. But in 1998 it was still a really hot commodity. I had this really sick Saiyan arc T-Shirt as a kid (1998 to be exact). Wish I still had it...

The episodes on VHS were $25 American, more here in Canada, and that would be like buying 3 episodes for $60 today at least!! I had 3 VHS tapes from the anime and the Dead Zone film and I cherished those until they became unplayable and broke. Dead Zone is the only one that survives in decent quality. But man, I knew it would be impossible to own the entire series (which I thought would never change; I really believed the 3 episode tape scam would exist forever) so when the orange bricks hit, I had to have them no matter how bad the quality is and was. The orange bricks was a revolution in owning anime, because it was really the first affordable box set for such a long show. Youtube in those days had full films and episodes of DBZ (with the original dubs, Ocean included). That was my first exposure, around 06 or 07, to the other DBZ films. The internet was finally becoming something viable to see those things outside of the overpriced tapes (the Orange Bricks broke around this time too, changing the game forever).

Streaming anime (and music) for free on Youtube became way too big and there was that whole WMG crackdown and huge take-downs of copyrighted material. I mean, Megavideo had full episodes of series before Youtube existed, I believe, but it was a paid service. Only 15 minutes were free on Megavideo. Looking back, no wonder Megaupload and Megavideo no longer exist... But thankfully rights holders finally have a platform to host their shows. I am extremely thankful for all that.


Shortly after the early 2000s, I believe the Beyblade hype/craze took over around 2003-2005. I remember how packed the malls were and people had booths set up outside stores so people could buy beyblades or good enough knock offs. Those toys became so hard to get at one point here... Stuff like that never happens anymore with the internet being what it is today. You people born in the 2000s and beyond really missed out on some crazy going-ons.