So, How Did YOU Get Into Dragon Ball?

[NeoKING]

If this thread exists already, can someone please close it?

So yeah, how did you get into Dragon Ball? For me, it was sometime in... first grade, I think? I had been flipping through the channels until I came upon Cartoon Network and DBZ was on(in fact, it was the Freeza vs. Piccolo, Gohan, and Krillin) episode. I remember thinking, "Wow, this cartoon looks different from everything else." From then on, I learned time on my own just so I can know when Dragon Ball Z(and all other CN/Toonami shows) would air. Seriously, I learned time because of/thanks to Dragon Ball.

I'm particularly interested in the response of those who've been fans since the "hard-to-find VHS days with the bad quality and fansubs" days in the 90's. I hear a lot of people back then got into anime/Dragon Ball through college? How did that work?

[The Time Traveller]

Around the time NTL (Phone, Internet, Cable service in the UK) became popular in Hertfordshire, like 1998 or 1999, they made cable TV cheeeap, so once my mum got it I was watching Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon all day, every day.

Cartoon Network made DBZ seem to be an ultraviolent, bloody, pornographic Japanese mess, they even had their own Warnings about how violent the show is before each episode, until Toonami came along in like 2000 with Batman of the Future and Gundam Wing, they didn't need warnings then I guess...

Then CNX came along after the Trunks Saga and you had to get NTL DIGITAL, not cable, to see it. I got digital around the time Cell came along and I missed too much to care by then... but I watched most of the Majin Boo sagas. CNX had a lot of Kung-Fu films, J-Horror, Hong Kong films and cool shit as well.

When I learned that we were missing things and stuff had been cut I just wanted more!

In 2005 (I think) the manga got a UK release by Gollancz every Manga Monday! (first monday of the month) and it gave me a chance to properly get acquainted with the original version, names like Tenshinhan, Kuririn, Son Goku, Nyoi-bo, Kinto'un... Though before then I had gotten a few other manga series from Tokyopop who were getting popular around that time too...

Then I got a debit card in 2007 and was planning on buying all the US volumes, but then just after I found em all and was ready to buy, Season One came out so I got that instead! And the regular way to watch anime around here is with Japanese audio and English subtitles, so I gave that a whirl and haven't cared about the dub at all since then.

All of my experiences with anime, foreign films, books, comic books and what not came about because I was looking for more Dragon Ball to fit in my brain.

[penguintruth]

It was in syndication on UPN or WB or one of those stations nobody cares about, along with Ronin Warriors and Samurai Pizza Cats. This was back during the Ocean cast years. My friend Jon watched the show and I was over at his house with some frequency so I decided I might as well watch the show, too. The Namek episodes were already airing and I was having trouble keeping up with various things. So I consulted the internet, pretty much for the first time, to look up stuff about DBZ.

By the time Cartoon Network aired season 3 of the dub, I'd already found out what happened in the rest of the series, saw clips of Goku becoming a Super Saiyan, watched fansub VHS of later arcs in the anime, and read scanlations of the manga. I already preferred the Japanese version by then, though I still watched it on Toonami because I still liked the action.

[CODii]

In middle school I had a few friends who would talk about Dragon Ball Z a lot. I thought it sounded really cool, but other than a few episodes watched at their houses, I wasn't able to watch because my cable provider did not have Cartoon Network. When we finally did get cable Toonami was showing the Buu saga. If I'm not mistaken after coming to the end of the series they went back and replayed the Buu saga. After that they showed the Namek and Freeza sagas I believe. Somewhere around this time I also began buying the viz graphic novels. That has long been my primary source of Dragon Ball. (In fact I still have not seen most of the anime for the Cell saga, but the Dragon Boxes will soon take care of that.) Eventually I bought the first three seasons of DBZ in orange brick form. I am still not sure why I never finished buying them, but now that the Dragon Boxes are out I am glad I didn't. When I began watching my orange bricks, I turned on the Japanese audio thinking to myself "Since I would never watch a foreign film dubbed, why should I watch my anime dubbed?" and have never listened to the Funi dub since.

[LloydSSJ4]

I first got into DBZ when it was airing on Cartoon Network/Toonami/CNX in the UK. it was around 2000/2001 when I first saw it, and damn was I amazed.
We had the Ocean dub (Except the Frieza saga, obviously) and I always felt a little disenfranchised with FUNimations cast.

I got into Dragonball through manga. It was not in production at the time, but i was picking up these 2 chapters issues from a little book shop we had, that is sadly gone now.

[dbgtFO]

Here in Denmark DBZ was broadcasted on the state founded channel DR1. On my mother's birthday, when preparing to get ready for the restaurant, I turned on the TV and as usual DR1 was the first channel to appear. This day however something was different. A cartoon with a green man with purple clothes, fighting alongside another man with orange clothes, against a fearsome tall man with extremely long hair and cool body armor, was being broadcasted.
It didn't take long before I was a fan, even though the danish voices weren't the best and there was some censorship edits(due to it being a dub of the French version).

After that I bought DBZ Budokai 1, which introduced me to the japanese voices(because I'm European) and because of that I wanted to own even more Dragonball stuff and see later episodes(since we were still at the Saiyan Arc). So along with a friend I saw FUNimation Episode 264(279 in the original) of DBZ, where SSJ 2 Goku fought Kid Buu and that fight was just extremely awesome.

Soon after this I also discovered that there also was a comic of DBZ, which oddly was only titled Dragonball with no 'Z', but I didn't care, so I started reading the manga as a supplement to the anime, when I wanted to see what the anime did differently.

But before the Freeza Arc came to a close, DR1 decided that they didn't want to broadcast it any longer, so to enjoy more of the DB story I decided to get all of the manga volumes. And I've been a fan of the manga version ever since!

[PuppetDoctor]

I first got into Dragon Ball by renting Legacy of Goku II for the Game Boy Advance. Prior to that I had only seen someone draw fan art of Goku in my class and always thought the art style looked very detailed compared to most cartoons. So a few years later around 2003 or 2004 I was at Rogers Video Store and rented Legacy of Goku II. I loved the game a lot and the story, and music was just really good. The next thing I remember is watching YTV (the station DBZ was broadcast in Canada) and seeing Cell had just become his 2nd form. It was the perfect place to start because I knew the story from the video game.

[Eire]

It was about 2000. 4th of 5th grade of primary school.
Honestly I don't remember how exactly it happened. For sure It was beginning of the Frieza Saga. DB had already been quite popular. The rumours about "this violent porn cartoon" had already been too, so watching it had a taste of forbidden fruit.
R.I.P. RTL7. The only one who made backyards empty that time. The release was awful (reader on French dub), but who cared?

Anime were aired about 3pm, after Brazilian TV shows. I had short way to go from school, so I usually came back to hear "cambio dolor" and I knew I had time to eat dinner, while my sister's nanny was mourning for fate of the romantic heroine.
I usually had time to watch calmly "Magic Knight Rayearth" and "Slayers". DB was aired when my parents were back, but they didn't mind my entertainment. I think it was the main reason I bore to watch Boo Saga and GT. In many of my friend's houses it was forbidden, so those a few lucky man with tolerant parents were real stars.

OK, now I can say that my mother was tolerant. I will never forget her face when she saw infamous DBZ opening, but she didn't say a word. She didn't say a word, so in exchange I made her PR of "the best mother in whole country". Daddy tried to forbid it, but she convinced him that as log as I'm clever and responsible girl I can watch whatever I want.

Just a bit later she was promoted to be the "Best Mother in the World" when she started to buy me a manga. I know she hated it- she was and is allergic to animation and comics, but she overcome it to for me . Sweet memories... In school every day I gave a relation about new episodes and my friend was trying to draw what we saw.

Was DB interesting itself for me back then? No, the really interesting things were our games, costumes we made for carnival ball, getting that few informations that could be got without Net.

Later I've forgotten about it for a while. Some years ago I was making my MAL list and I was unsure which version should I listed. I got my old VHS and captured some episodes with English dub and felt the difference. Why it was changed so much? It bothered me, so I started to look for informations and watch things I couldn't get back then. And that's how it started again.

[Son Edo]

As a boy around 2002 or 2001 that i first saw it. I eventually got tired of it and in 2009 now a Teen began to become a Fan again.

[KakaR0T]

This is going to be an interesting story so just bear with me.

In 1999, my neighbor and his neighbors were really into pokémon. They had the games and cards and so on and I wasn't really into it. But at some point I really started noticing how they were really into it and I said 'I'll give this a try'. So I got into the games, the animé series, and TCG. Before I knew it, I collected all the cards and the gameboy games.

Fast forward to 2002. I am now a senior in high school and I am in study hall. There is another kid who also likes pokémon. From that point forward, every study hall me and him would always play the pokémon TCG. I then noticed his watch. It was a Dragonball Z watch. I thought the watch looked cool and it got me curious about the series. So I read about it online and started watching one episode after another. It got me to buy all kinds of DBZ shirts, I got the DBZ watch for Christmas, and so on and so forth.

So basically, I got into Dragonball Z because of a kid's watch and I would not have known this kid if it wasn't for pokémon which I never would have gotten into if it wasn't for my neighbor. So in a sense, I got into Dragonball Z indirectly because of my neighbor. Ironically, my neighbor never got into Dragonball Z.

[Bussani]

I've always been a fan of cartoons. Never grew out of them. At some point, probably around age 10, I discovered anime, and suddenly there were so many interesting new cartoons for me to go through. The selection in the UK was a bit slim back then--it was still a few years before Pokemon even came along, after all--but that didn't stop me looking through encyclopedias on Japanese animation and picking out the things I'd like to track down. One of these (The Anime Movie Guide) was where I first heard about Dragon Ball, but ironically, it wasn't one of the shows I had an urge to track down back then; in my defense, the guide only covers the movies and is pretty vague about them!

Years later, after the Pokemon boom, I saw some Dragon Ball Z collectable cards of some sort at a convention. Not long after that it started airing on Cartoon Network. I watched it from the start and never really stopped. The funny thing is, once I started watching the series, the descriptions of the movies in my guide made even less sense to me!

[Great Saiyaman I]

I always liked the show, and DBZ Abridged actually got me really into it beyond on TV. YA HEAR THAT, TOEI? THEY ACTUALLY HELPED YOU GET MY MONEY!

[Scarz]

I don't really remember to be honest. But I think my cousin gave me a bootleg video with a few episodes on it. The first episode I saw was Vegeta blowing a hole throw Zarbon stomach, after that I was pretty much hooked.

[Piccolo Daimao]

Basically, when I was in town with my friend one day, he was telling me about Dragon Ball. I wasn't completely listening and didn't quite understand what this "Super Saiyan" was, but sometime after that and I went round his house, he showed me Ultimate Battle 22 and Final Bout. We started playing it and I really liked it.

I think that was my first real experience with DB. Sometime afterwards, I bought a DBZ magazine, which I thought was cool, and then later, I bought Budokai 2, which got me fully interested in the series.

[Hellspawn28]

This thread has been done a million times before, but I think it won't be bad if we have a new one once in a while. My story:

It was around 1997 when my Dad got me a VHS copy of Dragon Ball vol. 1 for my birthday since he bought it because he thinks I would like it since I was a huge Godzilla fan (I'm still a huge fan) and loved other Japanese movies like "My Neighbor Totoro". I thought the show was wired at the time but both of my sisters like it. Then in 1998 when I was waiting for "Beast Wars" to come on on Toonami and they where playing the episode when Goku was wish back. I had no idea what was going on and I thought the show look wired.

In 1999, DBZ was very popular in the 3rd grade and I wanted to check it out because everyone seem to love it. I saw the episode where Piccolo was fighting Freeza in his second form and I thought the show was stupid as hell. I hated DBZ at the time and I thought it was the worst cartoon ever. It was until 2000 when I was watching the Midnight run of DBZ on Toonami when they where playing the battle with SSJ2 Gohan against Cell, and I thought it was awesome.

Then my friend of mine got me into the series when the "Ano Yo-ichi Budoukai" arc was playing on CN at the time and I insanity got hook on the series. I would re-watch the older episodes on CN at the time, buy the recent issues of Beckett DBZ, and used the internet to learn more things about Dragon Ball. The rest is history .

[Ahiru77]

Cartoon Network.

[Tyro]

I have a pretty plain story.

September 13, 1996. Dragonball Z episode 1 first aired on Toonami and I had just turned 5 years old. Been hooked ever since.

Edit: So that means I've been a DB fan for 14 years, 3 months, and 23 days. I've been a fan for ~74% of my life!

[penguintruth]

This is going to be an interesting story so just bear with me.

In 1999, my neighbor and his neighbors were really into pokémon. They had the games and cards and so on and I wasn't really into it. But at some point I really started noticing how they were really into it and I said 'I'll give this a try'. So I got into the games, the animé series, and TCG. Before I knew it, I collected all the cards and the gameboy games.

Fast forward to 2002. I am now a senior in high school and I am in study hall. There is another kid who also likes pokémon. From that point forward, every study hall me and him would always play the pokémon TCG. I then noticed his watch. It was a Dragonball Z watch. I thought the watch looked cool and it got me curious about the series. So I read about it online and started watching one episode after another. It got me to buy all kinds of DBZ shirts, I got the DBZ watch for Christmas, and so on and so forth.

I was into Pokemon in high school (still kinda am, at least the games).

Needless to say, I was not popular in high school.

[Codarik]

My friends talked about it all the time, after a while I asked them what the heck were they talking about, one of them told me it was DBZ and told me to watch it on Toonami, since then I've been hooked on it.

[redlinks]

I got into it around 1996 when the first Dragon Ball VHS tapes were released. So I was about 8 years old when I got into the series and I have been hooked ever since. I used to own all 6 of the tapes as well as the movies but sadly got rid of them and replaced with DVDs.