Was Dragon Ball really completely unknown in America in the late 1980's?

[Soppa Saia People]

I don't see why it wouldn't be. Don't think they were airing the subs, or whatever dub around that time, and if they were, it was probably on like a horrendous air time, or didn't last very long. Not to mention just the generally fact that anime wasn't huge in America around that time from what I know.

[Puaru]

I don't see why it wouldn't be. Don't think they were airing the subs, or whatever dub around that time, and if they were, it was probably on like a horrendous air time, or didn't last very long. Not to mention just the generally fact that anime wasn't huge in America around that time from what I know.

Yes, Dragon Ball was completely and utterly unknown in the U.S in the 80's. That much is indisputable. There did exist a devoted anime/japanimation fanbase, but outside of that, nobody knew about Dragon Ball.

[Kunzait_83]

I don't see why it wouldn't be. Don't think they were airing the subs, or whatever dub around that time, and if they were, it was probably on like a horrendous air time, or didn't last very long. Not to mention just the generally fact that anime wasn't huge in America around that time from what I know.

Again: Television WASN'T the conduit through which people (apart from small kids watching stuff like Voltron and Robotech without even knowing that it was anime) were engaging with anime back then. People mainly viewed anime through VHS tapes back then, be it on traded bootlegs or officially licensed releases. The fact that people here keep continually defaulting back to television airings as their defacto position on what does/doesn't constitute counting as anime being "known" to any degree is part of the broader slant on U.S. anime history that I was babbling on about on the previous page.

Yes, Dragon Ball was completely and utterly unknown in the U.S in the 80's. That much is indisputable. There did exist a devoted anime/japanimation fanbase, but outside of that, nobody knew about Dragon Ball.

Gyah. Maybe I need to make my definitions more clear here.

"Completely and utterly unknown" to me constitutes literally NOBODY ANYWHERE knowing that something exists, including within niche fandoms. Where something is SO thoroughly obscure that even the most hardcore fanbases for underground media don't generally know that this is a thing that exists. A complete blackout on anyone anywhere being able to tell you anything about this entity whatsoever in any capacity. And yes, once in a great while something ends up getting discovered out there that DOES fall into this category. Dragon Ball however, in the late 80s, was NOT one of those things.

Dragon Ball, while yes of course NOT being mainstream (as in John Q. Public in America has no idea about it whatsoever), also at the same time does NOT fit my, or any reasonable, criteria for "completely and utterly unknown" since there WAS an underground audience for anime back then that knew about it, discussed it, traded bootleg tapes and manga raws for it, etc.

The title of the thread isn't "Was Dragon Ball mainstream in America in the late 1980s?" Its "Was Dragon Ball completely unknown in America in the late 1980s?" The answer to the former is "no, obviously not" and the answer to the latter is also "no, it was indeed reasonably well known by some if you walked within the right circles". BOTH of these things can be, and indeed are, true.

The point being that something not being a mainstream household name doesn't mean that whatever following it does have doesn't somehow count for anything, as that seems to be the underlying assumption: "Yes Dragon Ball may have had an underground cult audience back then, but they weren't throngs of millions of kids watching it on national TV in an official capacity, so they don't count. Hence, no one anywhere knew about Dragon Ball... even though some people did. But they didn't really." Or something along those lines.

Which I contend is a fucking silly and downright idiotic argument to make. Obviously some people knew about it back then (just not on a widespread mainstream capacity), hence no, Dragon Ball was NOT in fact "completely and utterly unknown". Underground, niche audiences certainly count as "someone", even back in the 80s. In the 80s there were a LOT of other things that had cult followings across niche, underground media. Both the 80s and 90s (pre-public democratizing of the internet) were, once again, MASSIVE decades in the proliferation of niche, underground media. So much so that a TON of formerly-cult properties from back then had built up enough over time to where they're now today genuinely mainstream and well known.

Everything from movies like The Evil Dead (when it was just a drive-in movie staple) to comic books like Eastman and Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (before the cartoon when it was just a small-press black and white indie comic) to bands like Guns 'N Roses (before their debut release of Appetite for Destruction, when they were gathering a ton of buzz mainly among music fanatics who collected bootleg demo tapes of fresh new bands; which yes, was indeed a thing back in the 80s), or directors like John Woo (who in the late 80s and early 90s was a darling of foreign film fans who followed his work on both bootleg tapes as well as art house releases, but is today, and has been for the past 25-ish years now a mainstream Hollywood director and wouldn't have gotten to that point without that devoted cult fan interest prior: ditto Hong Kong stars like Jackie Chan and Jet Li for that matter) just to name some quick off the cuff examples of things that everyone today knows about, but at one point were known only to devotees of niche media who helped build them up over time through word of mouth to get to the point where they eventually DID become mainstream household names.

Anime was no different than any of those above examples: anime rose up from the depths of TRUE "nobody anywhere knows that this existed" obscurity in the mid/late 70s, and gradually gathered steam and build-up across the 80s, culminating in the release of Akira, which brought anime into a sort of pseudo-mainstream in the early through mid 90s among largely older film fans, before finally reaching full-blown undeniable mainstream among small children nationwide in the late-90s via Pokemon and DBZ.

Dragon Ball's level of notoriety in the late 80s among that gradually gathering storm of anime fans within more cult circuits was anything BUT non-existent. No, hoards of children all across the country obviously weren't tuning into it on national television. That doesn't therefore equal "nobody anywhere at all knew about it and thus it was totally and completely and utterly unknown", as mobs of small children watching cartoons every week on TV are not the be-all end-all of gauging whether or not something counts or qualifies as a "known" entity: on either a mainstream or non-mainstream niche level.

This is the false-narrative about anime in the U.S. that I'm trying to squash here: the notion that "ground zero for everything anime and Dragon Ball was the FUNimation dub, and everything and everyone prior to that point doesn't count because me and my middle school classmates weren't aware of it, hence nobody who matters was aware of it."