So, How Did YOU Get Into Dragon Ball?

[DemonRin]

Started on FUNimation's re-version of the show.

Was there for the original Ocean eps, watched all the way through FUNimation's in-house stuff.

Picked up my First uncut DVD, Babidi: Rivals. Decided to watch it in Japanese. Started out liking the opening a LOT better in Japanese (it had actual vocals and a good tune!)
Started watching it in Japanese but switched to English and turned the subs off (this forced the original singles to play the eps dubbed with the Japanese op and end)
Very quickly started watching it Exclusively in Japanese with subs.
Learned Japanese.
Started watching it Japanese without subs.

Never looked back.

Had a stumbling block when my cousin wanted to see the movies "Dubbed" while only Movie 5 was out in English. He bought them all "Dubbed" despite my insistence that a dub didn't exist and he was being ham-stringed.
Then I saw the glory that is the Malay English dub... still have those tapes... I gained a little bit of my respect for FUNimation back at that time...

[Great Saiyaman I]

@VegettoEX: Well, the edit in my post at least shows it couldn't possibly be released til after 1996, for what its worth. My bad on that being the DVD.

[Marcus Carr]

When it first began to be shown on Toonami, even with all the edits. Took a few episodes to grow on me. The cliffhangers were torture!

[kaialone]

When I was a kid (around six year old) I saw the german version of the first series,and it was quite popular in my school,after Dragonball was over they started broadcasting Dragonball Z but my paretns didnt allow me to watch it cuz they said it was too brutal and violent.Around summer last year I started watching DRagonball Z the Abrigded series after I already loved Yu-Gi-Oh the abridged series,and I recognized some characters and so I thought F*ck it I'm gonna watch DBZ now,Sis care to join me? Sis:YAyyyyyyyy.... And so we watch all the DB episodes in german english and japanese in about 5 weeks and I found this forum and read trough all of Herms´ guides and through most of the old topics and here I am...yeah thats about it

[Kiyza]

Interestingly enough,mostly through my local library. I watched a lot of TV back when Toonami aired the show, but I tended to gravitate heavily towards Pokemon, considering those were pretty much the golden days of it, and I never really like Dragon Ball Z. I did however think the show was pretty interesting when the original Dragon Ball aired, due partiallyI didn't consider the Pokemon anime really interesting after the age of 7 and didn't have that to watch when it was on. It was nice and all, but as soon as it finished its North America broadcast, it more or less disappared from my memory, with exception perhaps the Budokai games I liked to play with my neighbor from time to time.

Eventually, my friend started reading manga, and she got me into it too. Most of the stuff she was fond of was really shoujo stuff, and a good number of nieche series. She told me she got them at the local library, so natually, I went to the library to see just what it was. I remeber it was probably Dragon Ball and Dr. Slump that I liked best at that point in time, though I read a few other series I can't remember that I think were published by Tokyopop. I just found that they appealed to my childish sense of humor and adventure, which really hasn't changed all that much at this point in time.

A while after that, I bought a few volumes of the manga, but didn't exactly understand what was going on since I'd never watched the series in order like most people, and just thought, "eh, whatever." At some point in time, I got into Naruto, but gave up my liking for it as the stock market crashed and I had very little spare cash to spend on my hobbies. Thus, Dragon Ball, Naruto, and a lot of other series I liked at that time, were packed up in a box and put somewhere in the basement.

Later on in time, I started seeing advertisements for Dragon Ball stuff again, like the Tenkaichi games and the infamous orange bricks. It was often brought up in my karate-do classes as well, which tended to make for some interesting jokes, considering our instructor was a fan of it. Somehow, I wound up waking up one morning wondering just how many episodes of Dragon Ball there actually were, so I went online and eventually found this site. Daizenshuu EX kind of renewed my interest in the series, and made me like anime and manga again, eventually expanding to all of the other wonderful series beyond Dragon Ball.

I went looking on YouTube for clips from the anime so I could get a general feel for what things were like in the anime. At this point, I'd already read most of the manga, and I had a lot of things predetermined in my head at that point. When I saw the FUNimation dub for the first time in at least five years or so, I just simply decided that I hated it, because a lot of the voices didn't sound good to me and I detested the ridiculous changes to dialogue, because I know that more proper dubbing can be done. (I believe my main basis for comparsion might have been Naruto's dub, since I had read the manga and could tell that most of the lines weren't exactly changed, at least, not to that extent) Then I found clips of the Japanese version and began to gravitate heavily towards that.

I stalked the forums for a very long time because my parents tend to be restrictive and still don't like me posting things on the internet, you know, despite the fact I'm a good way into my teens now. Around a year ago, I joined up, started posting on occasion, and here's where I am today.

[BluezaBladeNZ]

Back in 2000 I think, my brother and I was just looking at different programs to see what was on and we saw this on TV3. I believe it was during the Namek Saga, around the time when Vegeta fights Zarbon. The only anime I was use to at the time was Pokemon so it felt very different, but after an episode or two, I was hooked. After the last episode of Namek Saga, I always assumed that was the last episode considering they hadn't played any more after that. Until around a month or two later, they started FUNimation's inhouse dub. At first we were confused by all the changes but we still regularly watched.

For Dragon Ball I think, it was around 2004-2005 when it played on Cartoon Network. The first episode I think I saw was when Goku was on Karin's Tower training to defeat Tao Pai Pai. The series felt different to what it was for Z but it still interested me. Though I didn't get to see many episodes because of my family wanting to watch other stuff. It wasn't until I got the collections where I could see the entire series.

But now when I look back at it, never realised how horrible Z was during the inhouse dub. Then again, this was in the age where 3-4 episodes were $30-40 so getting the series was almost impossible for me so I was oblivious to the uncut version and japanese track. It wasn't until when the Season Sets came out I learnt about the japanese version. What actually turned me more towards it was when I randomly turned on the subtitles and seeing that the dialogue was completely different and even had profanity. As well as some lines that I did find irritating from the start not being present in the original. So I had gotten to a point to check out the japanese track and I loved it. The quality was crap but was still easier to watch. Now the japanese version is the only version I watch via the Dragon Boxes. Occassionally I'll watch the Ocean Dub just to relive memories but it's not my preferred version.

Well I think that's about it.

[OutlawTorn]

I think it was either 96 or 97, I was flipped onto YTV late at night and happened upon the third episode of DBZ, the episode in which Goku died. During this time period, it wasn't a whole lot of fun to watch DBZ on Canadian TV as it seemed to just keep repeating the first 13 episodes quite a bit, especially Teletoon which only showed the first 13 episodes.

Eventually, though, all of the Ocean dubbed episodes would air and DBZ would disappear from YTV until FUNimation began production of season 3, at which point would once again air the Ocean dubbed episodes (with a horrific new opening theme) and... repeat the damned thing once they had got to where they left off. So, I bought the uncut dubbed VHS tapes through to the conclusion of the Frieza battle and waited for YTV to show the episodes after that.