DBZeta Giveaway: Why/How did you get into Dragon Ball?

SSJ2

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Quite simple guys, please post why/how you got into the franchise and whether or not you'd still consider yourself a fan at this point. You can post as many times as you'd like in this thread but you will only be entered once.

*This thread will be pinned for the duration of the giveaway.
 

Papasmurf

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I got into it in my elementary school years (in b4 30 year old man joke), though my first exposure to it was through a DB Final Bout disc that my dad had on his person when I was about 5 or 6. I'd already seen episodes like Dabura vs. Gohan and Kid Boo vs. Goku/Vegeta through VHS tapes they rented out at the local Korean Blockbuster, but I truly got into it through renting volumes of the manga and reading it from volume 1 to 35-36 or so (the end of the Cell arc and start of the Boo saga) as they were releasing uncensored versions in Korea, one volume per week. I didn't read up to the end until 2003, but I've been a fan ever since, and seeing as I still discuss it and write a fanfiction about the franchise, I'd consider myself a fan still. I've met some on and off friends like Evil Vegeta, CatOuttaHell, :autism (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.
 

Warrior_of_Mite

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Was flipping through the channels when I was a teenager after school one day. Saw it and thought it looked cool. They were in the middle of the Namek Arc I believe. Noticed it came on after I got home on Toonami. Started watching it and got hooked.
 

Yoshi

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I browsed the Neoseeker Forum during 2009 and met Mishimi who got me into the basics. I became a fan of the Anime and the Manga ever since, but I fell out of the fandom over the franchise after around 2013 due to disappointments like Battle Of Gods and literal frustrations like Revival Of F, which were both supposed to be canon at the time. Even keeping that in mind, I was a fan of Dragon Ball for a consistent amount of time overall compared to all other Manga outside of One Piece, so that alone speaks volumes about my enjoyment for the series, overall.
 

GreatSaiyaman123

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I genuinely don’t know lol. They were always reprising episodes from Z and GT on TV throughout the 2000s, but I think I must have found it on the internet instead. Watching clips of fights on Youtube and stuff.

I was also lurking on forums by 2011 or so, so I guess you could say I’m from the OG generation even though I didn’t start posting until 2017.
 

Southern Gothic

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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.
 

Hector

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When I was 14, a classmate who bullied me heard me say that Pokemon was the best anime, and he disagreed. When he saw I wasn't convinced, he invited me to his house ans showed me videos from Dragon Ball.
 

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