The first time I remember watching anything Dragon Ball related was in the early nineties. We had something called the Harmony Gold dub (I of course didn't know this at the time), which was only available in Philly and Detroit. Goku was named Zero and all the other names were different. They only dubbed like three episodes and one of the movies. I had no idea what Dragon Ball was, just thought it was some kids show from Japan.
When I actively got into the show was in 99-00 as a freshman in high school. At 6am, channel 48 (local and obscure) played Sailor Moon and Ocean Dub DBZ back to back, so that's how I started my mornings off for a solid year. The Ocean Dub only had 60 episodes done, so they would replay those over and over. At first I thought Yamucha and Goku were the same character, as well as Raditz and Vegeta. Even with all the infamous censoring, the Ocean Dub was still violent and intense in a way I hadn't experienced before.
From there, I used the internet. Initially, I found my way to the now dead and defunct planetnamek.com, one of the early english dbz sites, where they had clips and some episodes from the series. This is also where I got my first taste of power levels, and power level lists, all of which were off by one zero for whatever reason, so SSJ Goku on Namek was listed as 15,000,000 for some reason. Same with Frieza and all the way through Boo. I carried this with me all the way until I joined F and pretended I knew otherwise the whole time.
Lastly, after having to watch the same Ocean Dub episodes over and over, I went online to find bootleg copies, back when that wasn't really hard to do because copyright laws hadn't made their way to the internet yet. On Ebay, I found the entire GT series on CD for like ten bucks. Not DVD's, just a stack of CD's I could play on Windows Media Player. Bought it, watched it and loved it, which probably influenced my current GT apologist attitude I have to this day. This was a couple years before Toonami was even a thing, so by the time new episodes of DBZ started airing with the Funimation Dub, I had seen Goku turn SSJ4 before he went SSJ, and technically had watched more episodes of GT than DBZ at that point. I didn't have cartoon network so I never saw a single episode on Toonami and was happy to skip it because I hated the Funi Dub so much.
(before the infamous ousting) and others through shared interest in DB so yeah, it's a franchise that means something to me even if I hate Toyotaro's manga and the soulless cashgrabs that Toei often produces. A lot of other shows and manga I read such as One Piece and Hunter x Hunter wouldn't exist or would be nothing like what they are without DB (even Watsuki cited some DB and YYH influences in RK), so it obviously is a meaningful and impactful franchise.
