DB30YEARS Page 10

  Some have maligned Jaco for its apparent lack of action and its dry humor, but to my eye, it’s all by design. Toriyama has bigger sharks to punch here. By showing just how improbable everything in the Dragon Ball is from the outset, we gain a new respect for its unsung, unnoticed heroes, and see that it’s more than just strong guys firing energy beams at each other. Everyone has their role to play in the story of life, whether it be heroic, comedic...or tragic.

  JULIAN (“SaiyaJedi”) lives in Japan and provides translations for Kanzenshuu. He has extensively documented Jaco’s serialization, other releases, and impact.

  Dragon Ball Z Fandom in Ye Olden Days

  The true confessions of a flea market junkie

  Before Crunchyroll, before BitTorrent, before YouTube, before Hotline servers, before (well, at the same time as) IRC, if you wanted to watch anime subtitled, it had better have been licensed by someone cool. If not? VHS fansubs were your joint.

  By Meri LaBrie

  Imagine waking up at 6:00 a.m., before the morning sun has even crept into your bedroom, just to watch cartoons. In a groggy state, you stumble downstairs toward the tiny television kept in your family’s living room. It’s time for a before-school ritual, armed with a bowl of cereal of dubious nutritional value in one hand, and a remote control in another. This setting can only mean one thing: it’s anime time! Suddenly, I’m wide awake!

  The year is 1996, and my 15-year-old self had recently discovered Sailor Moon that fall. One fateful morning, a TV ad for an equally exotic “japanimation” appeared during a Sailor Moon commercial break. There was some little kid who looked like a monkey, but there was fighting, a blue-haired chick with a gun, some giant robots, gorillas, and lord-knows what else.

  “Dragon Ball? MUST FIND OUT WHAT IT IS!” Thanks to the ad, I found Dragon Ball’s local listing time and finally watched an episode (at an even earlier time than Sailor Moon, no less).

  Unlike Sailor Moon, which aired every morning in syndication, Dragon Ball aired only one weekday and one weekend morning per week. That said, I admit it wasn’t love-at-first-sight when I had a chance to watch an episode of Dragon Ball. However, the more I watched Dragon Ball week after week, the more I started to “get it.” However, it didn’t reach the level of sheer obsession Sailor Moon caused within me. That soon began to change once I discovered a certain “underground” (I use the term loosely for dramatic effect) scene in my high school.

  As anime started to become ever-so-slightly more popular in school, the kids drawn to it began coming out of the woodwork. I was in Spanish class reading a copy of Animerica magazine (THE go-to anime mag of the day) when a friend happened to notice I was reading a Dragon Ball article. I exclaimed over a drawing of “Goku.” That was when my friend said those fateful words to me: “That’s not Goku. That’s his SON.”

  Wait. WHAT?! Goku, that wacky kid with the tail, has a SON!

  Well, color me intrigued.

  My pal then explained to me (thanks to the wonders of his growing up in Korea) that Dragon Ball continued into Dragon Ball Z, with a cast of older characters and even more of their offspring! And aliens, no less!

  Needless to say, I HAD to learn more. DBZ soon aired on North American television not too long after. By growing my pool of anime friends at school, my knowledge of the Dragon Ball universe expanded. And with it, as did my knowledge on where to get my fix.

  Like the mythical land of Valhalla or El Dorado, some pals at school clued me into a flea market off a local highway. A flea market? Really? That dirty, dingy place next to the Sam’s Club that I’ve always known was there, but never stepped foot in? Why is this a magical place?

  Simple: piles upon piles upon PILES of fansubs. It was a glorious sight to behold! I essentially had nearly the entire library of DBZ at my fingertips. So much time, not enough money.

  A few friends had loaned me fansubs from other series in prior months, but never before had I ventured out to obtain tapes of my own. I had a bit of money saved up, and I found that by age 16-17, I spent any and all disposable income on anime products (legal or otherwise). Fansubs soon joined the list of “must-have” anime items.

  Every weekend was like a treasure hunt. I had only just gotten “online,” so my knowledge of the DBZ timeline was spotty at best. There were “sagas” or “arcs,” and the nice (if not somewhat shifty) folks at the fansub shop in the flea market did a good enough job of labeling their tapes.

  This particular shop sold three VHS tapes for $15, and I considered this a deal. Sometimes the tapes had either no packaging or inaccurate graphical treatments if one was lucky enough to get a tape with a clamshell case. As for the content, the number of episodes per tapes ranged anywhere from three to four (FOUR?! What a bargain!), and the visual quality varied wildly. Some tapes were so horribly garbly that I had to return them to the shop. I eventually wised-up and tested the tapes while still in the shop before handing over my hard-earned money.

  In this age of high-definition media, it’s frankly hard to imagine media’s visual quality as anything less than perfect. Fansubs back then (or at least, the ones I obtained) were several generations removed from the original master tapes, which themselves were derived from TV broadcasts...or LaserDiscs for the movies if you were lucky.

  The fact of the matter is, I simply did not care. It was enough to get my fix. It was enough to absorb this entire universe in such short order. It was enough to get tapes, trade with friends, and talk about different parts of the series. Part of the fun and beauty of the fansub scene for me was being able to watch DBZ asynchronously. It was like a puzzle, a mystery. Frankly, it was magical.

  I love that time in my life when I, not by choice, got to watch a long series out of order (for example, tackling parts of the Buu arc before I’d even seen Goku transform into a Super Saiyan). I loved that the first fansub I ever saw was DBZ Movie 13 which, at the time, was the last DBZ movie. I don’t think I’ll ever have a chance to watch a show in such a way ever again, and for that I truly treasure being able to access DBZ fansubs at a time when it was so exciting and new to be a DBZ fan.

  MERI ran the “Temple O’ Trunks” website and gets to put up with VegettoEX on a daily basis.

  Covering Battle of Gods

  A behind-the-scenes look at what it’s like for a modern fansite to cover a new movie

  Readers/listeners/fans of Kanzenshuu were used to visiting the site on a daily basis to learn all about Battle of Gods. What was that constant news cycle like behind-the-scenes, though? How did Kanzenshuu coordinate so much news & content?

  By Julian Grybowski

  It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the peak of excitement, it was the nadir of sleep-deprived, server-side voodoo. In short, it was awesome, in all senses of the word.

  July 2012. Kanzenshuu had barely gotten off the ground. We were three months out of the gate, slowly adding back content that needed to be ported (and brought up to our current standards) from the former Daizenshuu EX and Kanzentai, when “it” appeared: a teaser website, with a silhouetted figure, the letter “D,” and a countdown to July 14th. We all speculated what it might mean, but none of us really held much hope that it could be aimed at our fandom. After all, we had already received an animated feature less than a year earlier: Episode of Bardock. We considered the possibility of a continuation to Dragon Ball Kai, but it couldn’t be that; the series’ run in Japan had fizzled out anticlimactically with poor merchandise sales and a music plagiarism scandal. Toei wouldn’t be taking another chance on that, would they...?

  And so, we decided it must be a special promotion for the already-announced, upcoming One Piece movie. Kei17 of World Dragon Ball famously declared on our forums that he would “eat [his] pants, wander around [his] city wearing Goku’s dogi, and draw a dojinshi featuring DB girls” if it turned out to actually be Dragon Ball. The silhouette did look a bit like Shenlong, but that was probably just coincidence.

  But suddenly, there was incontrovertible p
roof: an early leak from the upcoming issue of Weekly Shonen Jump. A new Dragon Ball Z movie announced, slated for the end of March 2013, and—get this!—heavy involvement from Akira Toriyama himself. We scrambled to translate it and get it out there before it was overtaken by rumors. Traffic skyrocketed. The site crashed at least once. Little did we know that this was just a taste of what was to come.

  By the weekend, the cat was already out of the bag, and so the official reveal passed without much fanfare. Still, the surge of interest from overseas was enough for Toei Animation themselves to put out an official English version of their website a few weeks later, just to appease the masses. But just a few days after the initial movie announcement, comments by the film’s scriptwriter and publicity director added fuel to the fire, confirming that the movie would take place in the “blank decade” spanned by chapter 517, and that it was a part of the franchise’s “official history.” The atmosphere was electric. We all scrutinized their words, picking apart the official press release and the scriptwriter’s Twitter posts, trying to find some hidden insight.

  A teaser trailer, revealed at Saikyo V-Jump Festa and soon added to the official site, gave us one more thing to analyze frame-by-frame, even as we were pretty sure it wouldn’t have anything to do with the finished product. But wait! Do those rocks mean something? What about dodgy CG Goku? What is he looking at over there?! The potential meaning in its minutiae was as tantalizing as it was irrelevant.

  The fandom worldwide was awash in speculation and rumor. We stood in the middle, trying to keep things on an even keel with accurate information, even as we tried to contain our own enthusiasm. But for the time being, we would have to wait: we were at the beginning of a long information drought. There was a trickle of tidbits here and there: the film would be receiving funding from the Japanese government for its promotion abroad; the art director, in charge of the backgrounds and other animated scenery, was announced. But that was it for three agonizing months. Naturally, the fandom rushed to fill in the gap. “Could Broli be appearing again?! Please say it’ll be Broli! His power is MAXIMUM!!” cried one half of the fandom, even as the other half desperately pleaded, “ANYTHING but Broli! Besides, he wasn’t created by Toriyama!” On it went.

  In early November, the drought finally broke, and we got our first tease of new info: images of tie-in figures for the new movie, including the Pilaf gang! “Wait, PILAF?!” cried the Broli fans in confusion, though it threw pretty much everyone for a loop. A poster was then leaked to the Internet, sporting a title in both Japanese and English. What did this “Battle of Gods” mean? Who were the “gods” in question? Was that lady with the staff the fabled “Makaioshin” from the Super Exciting Guide books? Was that purple cat-rabbit-thing her lackey? The possibilities were endless.

  Within a few days, we had confirmation of both the poster and the title, and before the month was out, our first piece of official merchandise (a limited-edition “Collaboration Ticket” with One Piece Film: Z, dutifully purchased at the crack of dawn on a rainy Labor Thanksgiving holiday), and also our first proper glimpse of the new characters, God of Destruction “Birusu” (not the “lackey,” apparently) and “Uisu” (voiced by Masakazu Morita, so not a woman). Who were these mysterious new individuals? And more importantly, how the heck did you spell their names in English? Our attempt to confirm alcohol-based puns (as “Pilsner” and “Whiskey”) with the scriptwriter on Twitter was met with the coy reply that “That’s not the source~” while almost the entirety of the Anglophone fandom leapt on the spellings “Bills” and “Wiss” because…well, we really have no idea.

  Once December hit, the trickle of news became a steady stream. The movie’s storyline was discovered by Heath on a randomly-guessed, unlinked URL on the official site, then reported across the internet as “officially revealed” (which it wouldn’t be for over a week afterward). FLOW were announced to be doing the movie’s theme, a cover of Hironobu Kageyama’s “CHA-LA HEAD-CHA-LA.” A trailer was premiered, ominous and action-y, and setting the fandom alight once more with the fires of speculation...and also heated arguments over the meaning of Gohan’s hair color. We thought we had things pretty well under control, but we had barely dipped our feet into the abyss.

  After that, the stream of news turned into a deluge. It really is a blur after that point. Is that Vegeta with a stupid grin on his face? Are the Pilaf gang children?! Is that Buu setting the God of Destruction off over pudding? What’s this whole “Super Saiyan God” business, anyway…? We were working a 24-hour news cycle, picking up where each other had left off, using whatever spare moments we could muster in between jobs, new babies, sleep, and other elements of this “life” business. It was enough for us to stay afloat, but only barely.

  The barrage continued. New products were announced, as were new tie-ins. I bought things at Lawson for the sake of Dragon Bowls, and ate more KFC than is reasonably healthy for the sake of glow-in-the dark Dragon Bottles. Books came out by what seemed like the score. Hey, is that the manga in full color? Oh, and it’s available digitally, too? Wait, did they just say they’re going to re-release the Daizenshuu?! Good thing I could at least lighten the load in my wallet as everything else piled on.

  There were magazines, too. The official site had a page keeping track of “media exposure,” and every new article was subtly different, introducing new tidbits about the film that had not been revealed elsewhere. Turns out that Battle of Gods was a much different film from where it began, and the scriptwriter was mostly in name only after Toriyama came on board. More importantly, the name puns of Beerus and Whis (as we had come to call them) actually were alcohol-based…with a catch. The more we learned, the more there seemed to be to find out, and the translation backlog grew and grew. Even Akira Toriyama, not normally known as the most outgoing of creators, had his own media blitz, with interviews in what seemed like every publication around. Some information from the author’s mouth is nice, once in a while, but really…once it reached a certain point, we were starting to hope he’d clam back up for a while.

  Somewhere in there, I even found the time to go to Tokyo and audition for a special Dragon Ball edition of the show HokoTate alongside fellow forum-members Kei17 and Peking Duck. Kei and I didn’t make it in, but we were able to cheer on Peking Duck and the other contestants as they went head-to-head with actual Shueisha and Toei staffers over Dragon Ball trivia, and I even got three seconds of exposure on national TV in there. Not bad, all things considered.

  Amidst all this, we had some unsavory encounters with a new beast in the age of social media: the realm of zero effort and zero scruples known as clickbait. Sites ostensibly run by other fans would repost translations verbatim, but the surrounding context would somehow be misreported in the process. I seriously considered taking my ball of translations and going home, just to spite them.

  More puzzling, but no less vexing, was the variety I’ll call the “Toxic YouTuber.” With rumors flying left and right, these enterprising folks would take to videos that “CONFIRMED!” whatever the latest speculation was, no matter how it contradicted the previous round of hearsay. Golden Super Saiyan 4? Super Saiyan 3 Vegeta? Broli returns?! Sequel greenlighted before the movie even came out? Sure, why not?!

  In the hands of such self-interested and self-serving “fans,” posts to DeviantArt became “official” overnight, and the fevered imaginations of 12-year-olds everywhere were entirely validated…all for the sake of views, of course. If you listened closely to the actual videos, they would mention (in passing) that the rumors were “not yet 100% confirmed,” not that they were ever close to being factual in the first place. One particular “channel” was so persistent that he actually posted up a “review” of the film based on such fan predictions, trying to cover up the fact that he hadn’t actually seen the thing. It was probably even believable to those who hadn’t been paying close attention to all the reveals we’d gotten in the lead-up to the film. The high comedy-to-action quotient took a lot of people
by surprise, none more so than those who’d been living in the alternate reality supplied by the Toxic YouTuber.

  Back in the real world, Kei17 (who was becoming something of a “fifth Kanzenshuu-er,” by this point) managed to finagle his way into two different preview screenings in Tokyo. Thanks to his amazing memory, we now had a full plot synopsis at our fingertips, which only needed to be posted on opening day. All we had left to do was to wait...

  Finally, it was March 30th. Once again, I was up before dawn to get to the movie theater in Tennoji for the first showing. I was not alone. Adults, young couples, and parents with children were all waiting to be among the first to see the movie. We all congregated around the entrance, until finally we were let up to the doors to the auditorium proper. Bonus “Dragon Ballpoint pens” and Dragon Ball Heroes cards were handed out. One of the parents threw a minor tantrum because his precious snowflake was overlooked for said card. And then, at long last, we were let in, the screen lit up, and...bliss. While I had been spoiled about the plot, seeing it firsthand was a complete breath of fresh air. Whatever reservations I might have had about the animation or the plot were lost in the completely natural dialogue and comedic beats. It was classic Toriyama.

  After that, things relaxed somewhat. It didn’t truly end; there were still new book releases, and then the home release, an extended version, and the eventual international premiere. And magazine articles. I’m still not done with those. And now we’re on the cusp of doing it all over again. But whatever the aggravation, the sleepless nights, the “donations” to clickbait sites making money off our work, I know that with my fellow Kanzenshuu-ers, we’ll get through it. And we’ll have fun the whole way.