Fandom in the 1980s and early 1990s

[JulieYBM]

I seem to recall Kunzait once mentioning that fandom--perhaps merely a vocal sect if not in general--was quite upset when Toriyama began easying out of gags and laying on the drama and battles with his comics. This has me wondering just what the full spectrum of feelings were amongst pre-1994 fans. It's an era we don't hear much about, mostly because that generation seems to have not quite grown up with the double-coding late 1990s North American fans have.

If you have any stories, no matter the nation, about the original run of Dragon Ball please post them.

[Cure Dragon 255]

I think you might need help from Japanese fans then, because Dragon Ball wasnt a thing in America until specifically the late 90's and with the exception of Kei there arent any Japanese fans here. There could be fansub fans from that era though.

I can help you with what I know as a Latin American fan that knew Dragon Ball since the beginning of 1995, the halfway point of the 90's. We didnt mind the excess of gags or seriousness, because we got the first Dragon Ball series from the very beginning and it was very good at balancing both. We didnt complain when Z came along and was really serious though.

[precita]

Aren't the people from back then now 40 year olds?

[Hellspawn28]

I think you might need help from Japanese fans then, because Dragon Ball wasnt a thing in America until specifically the late 90's and with the exception of Kei there arent any Japanese fans here. There could be fansub fans from that era though.

Dragon Ball have fans in the US long before 1996. The series was very popular on fansubbed VHS tapes of that era.

[VegettoEX]

Aren't the people from back then now 40 year olds?

Being in your 40s doesn't mean you're suddenly unable to retain memories or post on the Internet. :/

(Not that I'm there yet, but still.)

[omaro34]

From what I can remember, when Toriyama decided to do a time jump until the 23rd world martial arts tournament, many fans who followed the manga were surprised to see Goku no longer a kid.

Back in the late 80's, everybody who followed this series were so used to the main character as a naive, innocent monkey tailed boy.

Another thing that really stood out to me back in the day was the perception of earth in the series. The series back then wasn't looked at as only fighting. It had such a mystical vibe to it, and the earth had so much to explore. I actually enjoyed Dragonball more than I enjoyed Z.

I remember reading a magazine nearly 15 years ago saying that King Piccolo and his sons were originally intended to be demons. This makes sense since Tambourine, Cymbal, Drum, and Piano (who are all technically Piccolo J.r's brothers), look nothing like a member of the Namekian race. This idea that King Piccolo, Kami, and Majunior were Namekians didn't occur to Toriyama until later on.

The disappearance of Launch still baffles me to this day. From what I can remember she was a rather popular character in the late 80's and early 90's, especially the blonde version of her. Its sad that Toriyama even admitted himself that he forgot about her as time went on.

Goku's backstory was still a mystery to fans back then. His will to win for his friends and not giving in was something many fans love. His innocence used to have me belly laughing. I remember one scene Goku went back in time and ran into a young Master Roshi, who was checking out this girl going for a swim. She heard Goku and left. Young Roshi scolded him for making so much noise and accidentally hitting him. Goku then says "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hit you. Here, you can sit back and watch me swim, ok"? Goku then proceeded to take off his shirt with Young Roshi furious. Ah, his innocence knows no bounds. Ill never forget that he did everything in his power to wish back Upa's father, Bora.

It's hard to believe that this same kid now trains with deities and has God power.

[Akira]

I was around back then, but I did not get into Dragonball until 1995 or so via fansubbed tapes. Before that, all I can recall is occasionally seeing the random mention of the series in magazines, hearing someone talk about it, or seeing these things called "wall scrolls" in comic shops that had Dragonball characters on them. The only late 80's, early 90's Dragonball general consensus thing I can remember is the "Super Saiya-jin" term being mentioned a lot by people in the know about the series at the time. I recall it being a huge deal to the point that the number of people that ever mentioned Dragonball seemed to increase, and this "Super Saiya-jin" thing, whatever it was, meant something huge had happened that really thrilled people who were fans.

To think that even back then, in the pre-internet days, that word of mouth regarding the series was as common as it was, is really a testament to its global popularity, which would explode exponentially with the information sharing capabilities the internet would bring a few years later. Being that I didn't get into it myself until I was a teenager, that's all I can really remember about it before then. I can answer any questions about mid 90's fan-sub era, but before then would require someone older than me (34) who somehow had access to the series during that period. Only ways I really see that being possible would be someone who had a parent in the military stationed in Japan back then, or lived in Hawaii or the west coast where some of the popular stuff coming out of Japan had poorly translated "engrish" subtitles on a random UHF station where they lived at the time. Or, possibly, someone who grew up near a metropolitan city that had a china-town where some raw bootleg VHS were available to them. At least, those are the conditions I can think of that would have had to occurred for someone to have been a major fan in the United States back that far before the internet existed (or more specifically, existed as far as the general population was concerned).

[Kunzait_83]

Oh dear.

This is a topic I very, very nearly created a thread for at several points in the past: years ago at some point back in my days as a true regular here, and also much later on as a part of my wuxia thread (as it currently stands, the subject is barely scratched upon in said thread to the barest minimum I could get away with). I was supposed to finish off the whole behemoth wuxia post(s) with a spiel going on about my own personal history as a fan of the genre, which would thus naturally extend to my history as a fan of Dragon Ball.

I'd have likely NEVER gotten into Dragon Ball at all in any way, shape, or form were I not a wuxia fan first and foremost (and even if I did, it damn sure wouldn't have been to anywhere remotely near the same obsessive degrees), even beyond just being a general anime fan - particularly due to the nature of the North American landscape at the time. This would thus naturally also require me to talk about what said North American anime/manga/Dragon Ball fandom landscape was like in those days.

Even now in recent months, I've sort of still been mildly hanging around the periphery here if only because somewhere in the back of my mind what I set out to do with that thread technically isn't “finished” yet, as I've put off writing all that stuff for awhile now: in part due to vastly more important obligations in real life getting in the way, and also partly due to just what a colossal pain in the ass it would be trying to cobble together a version of such a writeup that wouldn't somehow push a LOT of highly sensitive buttons among present day fans here and potentially start some asinine shit storm that I frankly don't have the patience, energy, or inclination to trudge through.

For the record by the way, a bunch of this stuff is directly connected to a large part of the reason for why I one day suddenly deleted all my old posts and extricated myself from the community here years back.

To begin with, let me just respond to this with:

I think you might need help from Japanese fans then, because Dragon Ball wasnt a thing in America until specifically the late 90's and with the exception of Kei there arent any Japanese fans here. There could be fansub fans from that era though.

This could not be more wrong. So far as DB “not being a thing in America until the late 90s”, the fact that you even within the same breath mention “fansub fans from that era” undermines your own point as those fansubs didn't get made nor were they being circulated within a vacuum: many of of those very fansubs date back WELL before the late 90s.

Was Dragon Ball a nationwide, inescapably super mainstream phenomenon among practically all middle and high school kids everywhere in those earlier years? Obviously not, of course. Was its fanbase back then far, FAR more culty and niche in comparison? Of course it was. Without a doubt.

Now was that cult/niche fanbase a SMALL or difficult to find one on the scale and spectrum of cult/niche fanbases for weird oddities? Absolutely not. Not even fucking close. On the spectrum of “small, cult fanbases for arcane nerd obscurity”, Dragon Ball in the early 90s was nowhere even vaguely NEAR the most underground or unseen that you could go.

If you were getting into Dragon Ball circa 1992 purely for the hipster-esque “bragging rights” of being into one of the most profoundly obscure and unknown things anyone could conceivably dig up, you'd be in for a fairly rude awakening of being laughed at mercilessly if you brought that to the attention of people back then who were into REALLY and legitimately unknown and undiscovered apocrypha of the time (like fans of Aldo Lado movies, completionists for the early back catalog of the band T-Square, or the more extremely fucking ooold-old TVB Wuxia shows, or something similarly tiny and odd).

Being a Dragon Ball fan in the early 90s was the rough anime/manga equivalent of being an Evil Dead fan at the time (when those movies were only relatively less known and less immediately mainstream than they are today): not as immediately up front and mainstream on the anime spectrum as being into the output of Katsuhiro Otomo, Kazuo Koike, or Masamune Shirow - who were practically the holy trinity of faces for the anime & manga mediums back then among Western fans of the time - but it wasn't like you were digging for a lost, pristine copy of Shojo Tsubaki either. In terms of other anime, it was roughly on the same level of notoriety and visibility of something like, I dunno, say... maybe 3x3 Eyes (which no one knows anymore today, but was pretty damn huge at the time)? And 3x3 Eyes actually HAD officially licensed and advertised North American releases back then, unlike DB.

Put it this way, there were “web shrines” (please tell me at least someone else here's as old as I am and remembers those) dedicated to A list celebrities and then-popular teen stars that got less hits than a lot of the bigger English language Dragon Ball sites of the time routinely did.

A Dragon Ball thread on an anime or manga Usenet Newsgroup was bound to attract, at bare minimum, something like more than 30 to 50+ responses on any given week at the very least (which for parts of the web back then, was fairly substantial). So far as unlicensed, fansubbed anime titles went, Dragon Ball was routinely among the absolute “hottest” and most clamored after of them all throughout the entirety of the early half of the 90s.

Stuff like Nadia, Tylor, Macross, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Patlabor TV, Galaxy Express 999 TV, Harlock, the Lupin stuff we didn't have yet, City Hunter, Space Adventure Cobra TV, Dirty Pair TV, Kimagure Orange Road, Urusei Yatsura TV, Saint Seiya, various bits of Tenchi Muyo stuff, the parts of Ranma Viz didn't get to yet, Hokuto no Ken TV, Sailor Moon, and Yu Yu Hakusho (and a few years somewhat later on Slayers, Utena, Escaflowne, Rayearth, and Evangelion) were the sort of thing that were in the same ballpark of extremely high demand in the fansubbing circuit as Dragon Ball was then: and those titles represent a fairly broad, diverse outlook of the “A-list” of the most widely demanded and distributed titles in the fansub scene of the day.

Meaning if you got as far deep enough into anime as venturing anywhere even at all remotely near the fansubbing circuit, DB/Z was among the upper-most layer of stuff you were bound to hit upon almost immediately amongst and alongside stuff like the above list. If you dipped a toe in, chances were pretty safe that you weren't going to miss it.

Which is saying something, as the fansubbing scene of the time (which had been around and steadily growing for more than 10/15 years prior) ran pretty damn deep and pretty damn vast and broad-ranging and which, unlike today, catered to an even wider assortment of types of fans than just the hardcore Otaku-types (though as can be seen from the popular list of titles, there were still sure as hell plenty of those back then of course).

Hell, even the 16 bit-era DBZ video games were among the most widely imported of the time (yes we did in fact import a whole lot of Japanese video games that far back then too: game magazines of the time had entire catalogs for you to legitimately and easily – albeit damn expensively – order them) competing against the likes of Ranma ½ and the then-unreleased in the West Final Fantasy games (the latter of which in particular reigned supreme in the early 90s game importing market), and were also among the most oft requested for a Western release in spite of the actual DB series not being brought here in an official capacity just yet. Unlike Ranma which had actual ad campaigns, so the high demand for the DBZ games was purely though word of mouth as well as game magazine coverage.

By 1993 and 1994, you couldn't own a fansub “mix tape” without at least a FEW episodes of the DBZ anime or one or two of the movies finding their way in there somewhere. It had certainly earned the moniker of “ubiquitous”, at least insofar as somewhat deeper anime fandom of the time went.

It was conventional enough wisdom as early as 1992/1993 that any licensing company that got their hands on DB/Z was guaranteed a mint: save for idiotic shit like what Saban ended up doing with it in '96/'97 by sticking it on syndicated kids' TV in the absolute worst possible timeslot of Saturdays and Sundays at 5 to 6 am at the crack of dawn, right when practically every kid in the country is still sound the hell asleep. And even then with that dumb handicap (not to mention the terrible dub and overwrought censorship), it STILL managed to attract at least SOME significant amount of brand new fans: such as, for instance, the guy who started and currently still runs the very site we're all yacking about this on.

Most anyone who was into anime and manga as even slightly more than a passing fling of a hobby back then at least knew OF Dragon Ball and was well acquainted with the the basic concept of it as well as the palpable hype around it.

Case in point:

To think that even back then, in the pre-internet days, that word of mouth regarding the series was as common as it was, is really a testament to its global popularity, which would explode exponentially with the information sharing capabilities the internet would bring a few years later.

As a minor quibble: 1995 technically wasn't “pre-internet”. Late 1994 is when the web really became “the internet” as we know it now and had first begun to escape office & government buildings and college campuses, finding its way out into the wilds of common households across America (with '96 through '98 being especially landmark years of MASSIVE growth in number of users across the nation): but otherwise this sentiment's about right.

But yeah, with Dragon Ball's then-notoriety it was enough so that there was even a backlash against it with droves of anime fans at the time claiming to be sick of the series starting as far back as even before the damn dub ever came about. Particularly in 1995 – 1998, '98 being just prior to the series' CN debut (and the dawn of a totally new generation of U.S. anime fandom), Dragon Ball “burnout” was a thing that existed in wider anime fandom, in a fairly large enough of a capacity relatively speaking. The series was, by the time of the release of Final Bout and the end of GT in '97, considered by most of then-anime fandom to be “dead & buried” as well as over-exposed.

The “second renaissance” of the series from late '98 and '99 onward with the CN airings amongst an entirely new (and unfamiliar with anime) audience was, for people who were around with the series long enough beforehand, frankly more than a bit surreal and deja vu-like in its freakish repetition of the “new discovery/honeymoon/backlash/sick of it” cycle that the rest of us had literally JUST finished going through ourselves throughout that very decade prior.

If, like me, you had stuck around with the series in some capacity or another on the Western side of the world throughout both its original Japanese run (or in my particular case at least the back half of it), then its official American run following almost immediately after, and THEN followed by not one, but TWO different Japanese “revivals” of the series (a PS2-era “second wave” of video games and manga/anime re-releases, then a few years later Kai and the new movie/Super stuff)... yeah, its like its never even had a chance to really ever go away entirely, the way that most of its original contemporaries all inevitably had long, long ago. Making it hard to have really ever truly “miss” DB and allow absence to make the heart grow fonder and all that. The “downtimes” of silence in between have been there, but they've been short and fleeting relatively speaking, not at all like it would've been had the mass American mainstream not caught onto and blown up the series so late after the fact.

I'm gonna repost something I said recently in another thread about this because its perfectly apt here:

There was also plenty of online DB fan activity well before even that (1995/1996). I didn't see my first episode till late-1992, but I also remember first hearing about and learning the existence of Dragon Ball from a few game/anime magazine articles as well as internet newsgroup discussions as far back as 1990/1991-ish.

For the record, at the time I was considered part of a (fairly large at the time) wave of late-comers who came into the series via the Cell arc. There were people who'd been around well since the 80s.

I've said this elsewhere in the past, but it often feels like so many early 2000's-era fans who stubbornly have it in their heads that they were "ground zero" seem to think that all those 5th generation VHS fansubs, manga FAQs and summaries (suspiciously dated circa 1992/1993), and other assorted sources for "online spoilers" about "upcoming episodes" had all magicked themselves into existence out of thin air purely just for them to happen across.

It never for one moment ever seems to occur to any of them that not only did English speaking people have to write/translate these things oh so many years prior, but that they were also doing it for other people out there to see, not just purely for their own personal amusement.

Now, that outta the way...

I obviously could only talk about all this from the perspective of North American fandom: whatever was going on with the deeper DB fan landscape in Japan or other parts of the world I don't really have the ability to properly answer: I was a middle school kid living in a drug and gang-ridden inner city neighborhood during the early 90s who was INCREDINBLY fortunate to have had access to the then-World Wide Web due entirely to my mom's job at the time: she worked in a telecom office, which is where I learned/was taught by mom how to use a computer around the same time I was starting kindergarten and would access the then-web from her boss' office computer while she was out on days when my mom took me to work with her after school.

While I very much certainly spoke with and had some degree of “access” so to speak into international DB fan discussion back then, whatever the Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, French, German, or Italian or whatever nationality of DB fandom was like on a much deeper & more detailed level back then I had only the fleeting-most surface-level glimpses of in relative comparison to what I was exposed to day in and day out on a much more regular basis here in my neck of the globe (that being the U.S. natch).

That having been said though, as a quick sidenote I would like to also respond to this part of Cure's earlier post:

I can help you with what I know as a Latin American fan that knew Dragon Ball since the beginning of 1995, the halfway point of the 90's. We didnt mind the excess of gags or seriousness, because we got the first Dragon Ball series from the very beginning and it was very good at balancing both. We didnt complain when Z came along and was really serious though.

One of the bigger old school Dragon Ball websites from the early 90s (called simply “Kamehameha!”) was a predominantly Mexican/Latino-run and aimed DB site, whose webmasters and visitors made VERY little secret of their love and preference for early “gag manga” Dragon Ball and their distaste for the less humor and more-fighting oriented “Z” stuff. Just figured I'd also mention that.

But even (hell, especially) stemming solely from the point of view of us here in the good 'ol US of A, answering the question of what the “full spectrum” of feelings on DB was like in the early-early 90s is REALLY tricky for me to do without first going into what the general anime/manga fandom climate was like here at the time. And that's... oh boy, trust me when I say that that's a highly dense and volatile LANDMINE of a subject to even BEGIN to broach among this particular crowd with its particular viewpoints, outlooks, and specific sensitivities and baggage on all this stuff.

I still honestly don't really know how I want to approach writing about this, or if I should even bother at this point, if its even worth the effort: the only reason I even wound up finally doing that whole wuxia thing at all a few months back was mainly as a dumb, fun little activity to absorb most of my focus and help get me through a particularly grueling and nightmarish health ordeal I was going through in my personal life during those few months: that's honestly really the only reason that that thread even exists now.

The crux of the issue here is that the climate and the culture of North American anime/manga fandom during the tail-end of the 80s and beginning through middle of the 90s was on a great many levels almost the exact diametric polar opposite to what many people here who were children of the Cartoon Network era remember so fondly from the tail-most end of the 90s and throughout the early to mid 2000s.

Many old timers from those much earlier pre-CN days have long-ago since left anime/manga fandom altogether and have moved on to other things: others still hang around WAY far out on the fringes and periphery of the internet, mostly keeping quiet to themselves on a few really obscure blogs here and there. Reasons and mileages vary from person to person of course, but overall on the whole in both those cases it boils down to the same or similar enough reasons: they didn't very much like what the overall anime/manga landscape was turned into in the aftermath of the Cartoon Network boom and in some cases don't have the patience or the inclination (or very much compelling reason in general) to interact with fans from during and beyond that period.

Simply put, the vast majority of the industry has no longer catered to them and what they got into anime & manga for originally in the first place (a microscopic sliver of a few exceptions notwithstanding), and the core-most outlook of post-CN fans on anime & manga (and the core appeal of both mediums) clashes BADLY with what attracted them to the medium(s) in the first place. As I noted with myself and this particular forum a long while back I think, its simply a case of completely incompatible personality types that have little to nothing in the way of common ground not being able to mix or get along, borne basically from an unfortunate generation gap.

A certain segment of fans from back then however ARE of course still much more visibly around, and in most cases it seems to usually be because they tend to generally be people of a disposition much different from those described above and much more closely aligned with that of post-CN millennial fans: these would be old timers who were much better able to adapt to (hell, even welcome) the vastly altered environment that came with the dawn of the 21st century.

I... am not among that latter type its safe to say. I'm very, VERY much of the former variety, who stubbornly hung around a bit for probably far, far longer than I ought to have (against the advice of a few similarly opinionated old timers I corresponded with in e-mail for a time awhile back).

So far as Dragon Ball itself goes, the fans who didn't like Toriyama straying from his gag manga shtick and venturing into more straight ahead wuxia (or rather what passed for "straight ahead" wuxia through the intensely warped, cracked mirror of the overall late 80s/early 90s wuxia landscape as well as the mind that spawned something as innately weird as Dr. Slump) I wouldn't necessarily say were the large majority among Western fans of the time. They tended to often be a very specific contingent of fans who:

A) Came into Dragon Ball off of Dr. Slump and expected/wanted it to be more of the same but with a martial arts flavor (which to be fair is more or less how DB indeed started out as early on), and...

B) were overall anime/manga fans from a generation older than/prior to my own even: fans who when it came to this sort of anime/manga were more Urusei Yatsura and less Akira.

Going into any more depth on the subject beyond that, particularly within a place like this, is something I'd have to put in what could be seen as debatably even MORE effort than the Wuxia thread. With wuxia I was mostly just unpacking the history and evolution of a very specific (albeit insanely dense and anciently old) genre. With this subject however, not only would I have to open up about as least SOME degree of personal details on my end of it, I'd have to try and find a way to mediate and bridge two substantially clashing and disparate mindsets on geek media whose common traits in some ways only just barely intersect with one another.

That's... ugh. I'll probably end up doing this. Somehow. Eventually. I just need to wrack my brain on how I best approach the issue and what “tone” to strike.

As uncharacteristic as it would be for me, I feel like the best way to try and communicate the finer details of this would be for me to try as best I can to set aside my usual “point blank direct, shoot-from-the-hip-bluntness” style of writing, at least to a degree, and try the best I can to be a bit more “delicate” about this.

And its not even because I really give a fuck about “offending” anyone here, as much as it is that I suppose I'd want some of the concepts here to actually land with people: to be more “digestible” so that they'll actually mull over what's being said, rather than immediately resist engaging and react instead with raw, visceral gut emotion.

Also I have, you know, an actual life to deal with.

This'll get written about by me at some point. Sooner or later. I'm a sucker for closure after all, and this would certainly be the last major “unload” that I really have left to say about any of this stuff to this community here at this point.

Also this...

Aren't the people from back then now 40 year olds?

Being in your 40s doesn't mean you're suddenly unable to retain memories or post on the Internet. :/

(Not that I'm there yet, but still.)

...gave me a laugh.

The way younger people in the U.S. look at anyone even remotely older than them has been getting steadily and steadily worse for a very long time now. In the 90s when I was a kid, you generally weren't considered officially "old" until you hit maybe around 50 or so? Perhaps even 40/45 at worst. Celebrities who were in their mid to late 30s back then were still considered extremely youthful and vibrant. Come the late 2000s, as soon as I hit 24/25-ish I'm suddenly (and unironically) being tagged as "old" and "grandpa" by kids only maybe 5 or 6 years younger than me.

At the rate we're going, by maybe the 2020's American youth culture will officially consider you an ancient, past your prime walking sarcophagus the microsecond you finish puberty.

[Cure Dragon 255]

I apologize for my wrong assumptions and thank you for correcting me. I'm always glad to grow.

[Hellspawn28]

finding its way out into the wilds of common households across America (with '96 through '98 being especially landmark years of MASSIVE growth in number of users across the nation): but otherwise this sentiment's about right.

I think by pre-Internet years, I think he meant before the Internet was at high speed at everyone's houses. I remember in 1998, I was consider to be a cool kid if I had Internet at home since most kids in my classes in the 2nd grade didn't have it. I think around 2003 was when faster speed internet started to take over. A lot of people still had dial up in the 90's and the early parts of the 2000's. I remember I would get mad if my mom use the phone back in 1999 if I wanted to use Google on my mom's PC.

[JulieYBM]

I figured this would dig Kuzait_83 back up. I'm definitely interested in seeing what the landscape was back in the era before mine. I've been reading about the origins of anime/sakuga Otaku culture (through books like Beautiful Fighting Girl and The Moe Manifesto) for the past few months and really find it interesting how Otaku and 'moe' sub-culture evolved from shoujo comics, the double-coding in Tezuka's works and the initial distaste felt by 'sci-fi fans' towards a different breed of enthusiast coming into play.

EDIT: Holy shit, this is Post #10,000 for me! O.o

[sangofe]

I got into Dragon Ball when I was 4-5 years old or so, so that was around 1987. That was when it debuted in France.

It was love at first sight. So strong that, even though my parents moved to Norway, and I didn't see the show for about 4-5 years, I had memories of this mystic, super interesting show. At the time I thought it was a french cartoon...

Now, how was the fanbase in France, early/mid 90's? Dragon Ball was every where in magazines.

Everybody had heard about Dragon Ball. Even grandma's. And of course the kid on the street corner. Dragon Ball, was insanely huge. The anime, was always in top #3, and when DBZ came, I think it had first place for every single week it was on TV. And the manga's sold like hot cakes. Plus through magazines (yes, paper), you could get in touch with other fans. You'd have articles about new episodes coming out in France. You'd even have articles talking about different video games that were getting released in Japan at the time.

I als remember getting in touch with other fans through magazines that got released where people could post adds to sell all sorts of things -- talking about selling, you'd find the Dragon Ball manga for sale in open markets in the street in france where you find all sorts of foods, used items etc. called "Le Marché".

I also remember, later on, when the DBZ movies started coming out, you could rent those anywhere. Plus, when the "Fusion" and "Attack of the Dragon" (like they were called in France) I remember reading very impressive figures like this film had sold close to a million tickets!

[successoroffate]

I apologize for my wrong assumptions and thank you for correcting me. I'm always glad to grow.

You know, you didn't do anything wrong so I don't see why you should apologize. I was thinking the same thing as you. But now that we're here, I have a question for everyone reading this, Did anyone of you became a Fan of Dragon Ball or knew of its existence in the 80's? If you're Japanese, or grew up in Japan during that time, this doesn't apply to you, but if we're talking strictly about American fan base, then there's no way to find out what was the reaction from fans during the original release time frame different from asking a Japanese fan. And back then, it was nearly impossible to compile reactions (I am looking at you FINEBROS) from the viewers and opinions. All we know are general things like the show was huge in Japan. We on the other hand, we do have the means to compile our feelings towards the show.

[Cure Dragon 255]

Thanks Succesor, you are nice. One thing I have to add to the discussion is that in Latin America the Dragon Quest anime aired alongside Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball caught on way more for its mix of humor and action. Well, that and being longer. But it might not have caught on without it.

[Ddd]

I've been a fan since 1994. I really don't remember much of that time, and I actually try to forget lol. I do remember liking the adventure/lightheartedness of early dragon ball more than the action, however, most american fans where introduced to z first(including me).

[BlazingFiddlesticks]

Kunzait does it again!

Going into any more depth on the subject beyond that, particularly within a place like this, is something I'd have to put in what could be seen as debatably even MORE effort than the Wuxia thread. With wuxia I was mostly just unpacking the history and evolution of a very specific (albeit insanely dense and anciently old) genre. With this subject however, not only would I have to open up about as least SOME degree of personal details on my end of it, I'd have to try and find a way to mediate and bridge two substantially clashing and disparate mindsets on geek media whose common traits in some ways only just barely intersect with one another.

Is there a way you can give some form to this abyss so we can contemplate why it raise war banners? It seems to be a recurring aside.

[Araki]

In Brazil, during the early to mid-1990s, only gamers or dedicated anime fans were familiar with Dragon Ball. The funny thing is, the people who knew it used to dismiss every other battle shonen. Yuyu Hakusho? Saint Seiya? Pfft, they don't have the "Dragon Ball action". That got me curious, and although i was very young at the time, with the help of older friends i started to put my hands on a few VHS tapes.

The fact the original Dragon Ball was the first series to debut here, in 1995 i think, when Saint Seiya was hugely popular already, kinda turned off some people with its comedy focus and light feel - they only aired the first 60 episodes back then. It wasn't until 1999, with DBZ, that the franchise actually reached its popularity peak that longtime fans always expected, which i think only the aforementioned Saint Seiya and Pokemon ever shared.

Anyway, unlike that part of the Japanese fanbase, i can safely say the early DB fans around here were extremely focused on the action aspect of the series and its "badassery". But there were definitely plenty of people who knew the franchise through the first anime's airing who fell in love with the comedy and to this day, prefer it over DBZ.

[UltimateHammerBro]

DB hit Europe hard in the late 80s and early 90s. The date would depend on the country, but I know that it premiered on Spanish TV in 1989, and the French dub already existed.

[Puto]

It just felt all like a perfectly natural progression to me... but I started watching with the 22nd Tournament anyway. So most of the really wacky things were already behind me.

[Cure Dragon 255]

DB hit Europe hard in the late 80s and early 90s. The date would depend on the country, but I know that it premiered on Spanish TV in 1989, and the French dub already existed.

I just remembered that! Wow, Dragon Ball sure is old yet timeless!