When I was around 8 or 9, I thought that Goku and had other life beings trapped in their bodies (kind of like Yu-Gi-Oh). Why? Because the damned Ocean dub had an intro with a bunch of stuff that we hadn't seen yet and had scenes of Vegeta and Goku turning Super Saiyan.
I was also informed by some older kids who "saw the Japanese version," that there were a lot of sex scenes that we'll never get to see such as Bulma and Vegeta, and Goku and Chi Chi.
Then, I was told that the U.S. version had worse animation than the Japanese version. This is not entirely untrue, but what he was specifically referring to was the special effects on the attacks. So, the story I got was that in the Japanese version, they're all glowy and have crazy special effects and the U.S. version just drew over it to give us regularly-drawn animation.
This was a world where Dragon Ball Z was insanely popular, but access to anything beyond the Ginyu fight was very rare (at least to us kids; I'm not talking about those who were able to buy the fansub VHS tapes).