I started watching Dragon Ball when the first episode of the Saban dub aired during the Summer holidays in 2000. I was 13 and I was instantly smitten with this strange anime that aired at 8am on Cheez TV. Much like Evangelion the year before, it was unlike anything I'd ever seen but in a different way. We got five episodes a week but I didn't start recording it (on tape) until they were already on Namek as by then I was missing most of the episodes due to traveling to school on the bus. It was HUGE. Everyone talked about it and then during the Freeza saga, it just died of pretty off pretty quickly because of repitition. One by one most of my friends and classmates lost interest, but I never did. I did stop recording the dub before the Cell games as the DVDs were coming out multilingual then. I remember being so disappointed that the early Madman DVDs were dub only for a long time. My first dual-audio DVD was the Bardock special.
I remember buying some of the Viz single issues for my cousin (he was 20 at the time and is one of the few people I personally know who is still into the entire franchise) for a Christmas present in that year and my best friend got a Butta Irwin figure from me, we used to play his burnt Ultimate Battle 22 all the time, until I got Legends--and even after that at sleep overs, we'd rent to the Budokai games to play together even if we stopped watching the series together. My little brother got the Beckett magazines when we were on the gold Coast for the first time in 2001. I used to print out the Planet Namek guides for attacks, and characters and movie guides and read them over and over again.
