DB30YEARS Page 12

  A Fairly OddParents movie contains a few cameos, while Andrew equates himself to Vegeta (with the whole “reformed” thing) in the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

  MIKE (“VegettoEX”) is one of the co-founders of Kanzenshuu. He enjoys documenting Dragon Ball’s influence on authors and creators across the world. He also still likes poop jokes.

  The Rise and Fall of an Era…and the Rise Again: Dragon Ball Fansites

  Wuken. JKwok44. SREDBZ. Carddass. Daimao. Ramza. UltimateDBZInfo. Meri. VegettoEX. MrE. CastorTroy. SkitzZero. Do these names a ring a bell? You experienced what many consider the “Golden Age” of DBZ websites. How about today?

  By Ryan Molina

  It was the year 1998. Dragon Ball Z had just started its run on Cartoon Network after failing to become a hit in regular syndication. Its fame and popularity on Cartoon Network led to a rise in the fandom with folks who wanted to express their love for the series by making websites. Popular sites like Suushinchuu, DBZ Uncensored, and VegettoEX’s Home Page were the so-called standards of what a “good” DBZ site was back in the day.

  DBZ fansites usually had news, character bios, a series synopsis, episode guides, etc...but the heart of each and every website was its owner. Each webmaster had their own take on what their love for the series was like, so much in fact that the draw of the websites was starting to become the webmaster instead of the regular content on the site. Names like Wuken, Chris Psaros, and VegettoEX seemed as well known as the series itself as these webmasters injected their own personalities into their sites with both jokes and serious discussion.

  However, the fandom was divided between the people who had only seen DBZ on Cartoon Network (known as “dubbies”) and people who had seen the original Japanese version from its original broadcast or fansubs. Terms and spellings constantly clashed from “Special Beam Cannon” vs. “Makankosappo,” “Tien” vs. “Tenshinhan,” etc. You could easily tell the webmaster’s alliance based on their spellings alone. Back in the day, using “dubbie” terms was a big no-no and younger webmasters took quite a bit of flak for it. Debates and “wars” erupted between the dubbies and Japanese fans saying “You’re not a true fan if you haven’t seen the original Japanese DBZ!” or “Goku’s voice sounds like a girl in Japanese!”

  In the fall of 1998, which was my senior year in high school, I had wanted to get into the DBZ website gig in order to express my own love for the series. Looking up to sites like DBZ Uncensored and VegettoEX’s Home Page, I wanted to create something unique rather than trying to copy every other site posting the same episode guides based on the dub airings. Before we had fancy WordPress templates and YouTube, we had to either write out our pages with HTML or use a drag-and-drop editor like Dreamweaver. After two previous failures, I had a random spurt of inspiration and created Vegeta Insane, a humor site based around Vegeta; DBZ humor-dedicated sites didn’t exactly exist back in 1998. After completing Vegeta Insane in five days, I sent the link out to various webmasters to see if they would link it on their own sites. I was lucky in that the majority of the sites I sent to linked me back on their sites, thus starting my road to DBZ Internet fame which would change my life forever.

  About six months into the DBZ website fandom in 1999, I began to notice that there were “tiers” of DBZ websites where people classified the most popular sites as the “elites.” DBZ Uncensored, VegettoEX’s Home Page, Temple O’ Trunks, and the newcomer Planet Namek were the clear leaders. The “2nd” level of DBZ sites were generally well-designed (nice looking Photoshopped images and table-based layouts), but incredibly bland with the same information, movie clips, episode summaries, character bios, etc. Most people didn’t seem to even know about these sites; I would get quite a lot of them as link submissions, but I couldn’t find anything unique in them to consider linking them from my own site. The bottom tier websites were all the Geocities, Tripod, Homestead, Angelfire, and other assorted free-hosted sites which weren’t exactly done well, but occasionally had a bit more heart than the “2nd” level sites. You could easily tell the webmasters of the bottom tier sites were dedicated to getting their names out there, but didn’t have the technical skill of the upper level folks. At the time, I felt incredibly proud to be considered among the “elite” and was happy my material had found a massive audience. It was kind of like waking up as a quasi-celebrity every morning.

  Because of the massive curiosity and awareness that was spearheaded by these websites, more fans wanted to check out the Japanese version. Fansub distributors like Ctenosaur, DBGoten, Solidflux, and others began to make their own websites for the purposes of selling and distributing DBZ fansub tapes of the series and movies. Many of us were frequent customers of these fansub distributors. I even received several free tapes from distributors who were fans of my site!

  The rise of the “full episode” sites like Super5—which contained poorly encoded and choppy RealMedia files of full episodes—also began to emerge around this time. These sites would be the first target of FUNimation’s on-going legal battle against illegal distribution of the series.

  At this point in time, there were not large, “official” DBZ sites from Toei themselves and the FUNimation site only had basic synopses of the first 53 dubbed episodes and the first three movies. There were very few sites that actually covered every part of the series in detail, and so information slowly made its way online courtesy of fans with their subtitles tapes and guide books.

  Out of all new sites, Planet Namek was quickly rising up to the top spot because it was the fastest site to gather DBZ news, had a massive clip archive from fansubs, and even ran its own fansub distribution for a little while. Several sites like my own eventually moved over to Planet Namek due to its dedicated hosting and it taking the top spot of being the most popular DBZ site on the web.

  2000-2001 was the peak of DBZ’s popularity with the success of Seasons 3 and 4 on Cartoon Network. DBZ was #1 on the search engines, beating out Britney Spears and Pokemon. Planet Namek was doing 30,000 hits per day, while even I was pulling a modest 6,000 per day, peaking at 10,000. More people were becoming fans every day and were also starting new websites every day with the same information, character bios, episode lists, etc. I was still running strong by continuing to dedicate my site to comedy, although I had changed my site’s name from Vegeta Insane to Ginga GIRI GIRI.

  FUNimation themselves had also began reaching out to DBZ webmasters to promote their work. I was contacted by several FUNimation voice actors and employees to help spread the word about events, signings, conventions, etc. and received admirable praise (along with a few goodies) from the actual company itself.

  The releases of the bilingual DVDs were beginning to shorten the gap between the “dubbies” and the Japanese fans since now everybody had access to the original Japanese version. It seemed like DBZ on the web was ushering in a new Golden Age.

  At this point, I felt like I was at the top of my game. My mindset was that if you were to measure my power level with a scouter, it would probably explode. I didn’t realize it was all going to come crashing down very soon.

  With the increasing popularity of DBZ also came increasing problems online. The dot com bubble burst in March 2000, leaving advertisers to completely shut down their services and many DBZ websites unable to pay for their expensive hosting fees, along with many hosts fleeing the scene altogether.

  Hosting fees got so expensive to the point where Planet Namek had to get rid of my site, forcing me to find hosting elsewhere. My situation got so bad to the point where a friend of mine knew a host and asked him if he could host my site…though that host was never heard from again. This was a common occurrence.

  I jumped from host to host, only to be kicked off for excessive bandwidth consumption each and every time. Some people started a joke petition to prevent me from killing servers!

  My site partner, Dr. Bond, and I eventually found a dedicated server that we were paying for out of our own pocket and we were hoping that al
l of our hosting problems would be put to rest. DBZ was already at Season 5 at this point with no plans of slowing down. In 2002, the fateful day happened again when I came home from class: I saw a “Bandwidth Limit” exceeded on my site which I was all too familiar with. We did everything to keep bandwidth down, but the massive popularity of DBZ was too much for even our $300 a month “dedicated” server. After getting incredibly sick of bandwidth problems and losing motivation to update the site because of them, it was finally time for me to call it quits and close Vegeta Insane/Ginga GIRI GIRI.

  After my departure in 2002, while I stopped paying attention to the DBZ web, I never stopped being a fan of the series and still continued to collect the DVDs as they were coming out. I was surprised one morning in 2003 that Daizenshuu EX had come back and with the end of DBZ approaching on Cartoon Network, the U.S. fandom quietly died down. Many fansub and full episode sites had closed their doors long ago because of the DVD releases, many fans were already growing up and were moving on to other things, and the DBZ web had become a shadow of its former self.

  However, 2003 marked a new revival of the DBZ franchise starting with the Dragon Boxes, which was the first time the series had a legitimate release in its home country of Japan. Just when things were quieting down in the US, things in Japan started rising again. The manga had seen a re-release as the kanzenban and several new guide books were made, giving us information that was completely unavailable before. Daizenshuu EX was the #1 source that constantly kept up with it on a daily basis, even with a much smaller DBZ web community. With barely any competition, it wasn’t too long until Daizenshuu EX had finally taken the rightful spot as the #1 DBZ fansite.

  Years later, in 2006, I was invited to be a guest on the Daizenshuu EX podcast and slowly began checking out what had become of the DBZ web. The days of Planet Namek were long gone and DBZ had been over in the US for a few years. The series was still going strong with its DVD releases and the recent revival in Japan. During this time, I had discovered Kanzentai and told myself: “This is the site that I wish existed back in the day.”

  The DBZ web had shrunk down to a more village-like atmosphere with Daizenshuu EX and Kanzentai being the leaders in place of Planet Namek. I felt the smaller atmosphere made it much easier to come back to, along with the fact that I was much older which made me appreciate it more than I did when I was younger. There was no longer any desire for me to achieve fame and I could enjoy things from the sidelines. I eventually brought back Ginga GIRI GIRI in 2010 as Ginga GIRI GIRI Kai, but more as an archive of my old and new work without having to worry about bandwidth problems, since I was paying for it out of my own pocket now.

  Today, Daizenshuu EX and Kanzentai have merged into Kanzenshuu and it is still the #1 DBZ fansite going strong with over 300 podcast episodes, constantly updated news, accurate translations from the guide books, never-before-seen material, and much more. Planet Namek at its peak didn’t even contain 1/5th of the information Kanzenshuu has available.

  As a longtime observer and participant in the fandom for over a decade, I’m happy to see that DBZ is still going strong with the fans who are still expressing their love for the series via sites, YouTube videos, etc.

  With Kai, games (especially Dragon Ball Heroes), and the upcoming movie, it looks like DBZ on the web is going strong, even with a much smaller community. That passion and heart from the older sites can still be felt. Those fans who grew up with the series have families of their own; when I re-opened Ginga GIRI GIRI Kai, I spoke with Dr. Bond for the first time in years only to find that he had already gotten married and started showing his kids the series!

  While a lot has changed, it’s great to know that the fandom is as strong as ever and DBZ on the web is here to stay.

  RYAN ran “Vegeta Insane / Ginga GIRI GIRI” and now produces videos as a part of Battle Geek Plus.

  Thank You

  Thank you for celebrating Dragon Ball’s 30th anniversary with us!

  We hope you have enjoyed reading these memories, articles, reviews, and critiques as much as we enjoyed putting them together for you.

  Dragon Ball is such a magical series and it is our deepest hope that a bit of that magic has shown through in this magazine.

  Thanks you to all of the authors and contributors for making this magazine happen, thank you for reading it, thank you to everyone who has ever worked on the Dragon Ball series in any capacity...

  And thank you to Akira Toriyama! Here’s to another thirty years with your masterpiece!

  - Mike, Julian, Heath, Jake (www.kanzenshuu.com)

  Table of Contents

  DB 30 Years

  The Biggest Fight

  Super Dragon Ball Z

  Look to the (Jump) Stars

  10 Years: Budokai 3

  A Game Not Forgotten

  The Tale of Publication Dates

  The Big Review

  Cover Project

  Tale of the One-Shots

  Dr. Dragon Slump

  Dragon Ball in Jump

  Discovering DBZ

  Memories of…DBZ

  Get That Dream Job!

  The Dragon Ball Series: Dividing it Up

  Continuous Evolution: Viz Manga

  Dragon Ball Heroes: Victory Mission

  Who is Bardock?

  Episode of Bardock: All the Copies

  History of Dragon Ball Merchandise

  Dragon Ball Fandom: A Personal Introspective

  Animazement

  Con Prizes + EXP

  Neo-Shonen

  Toriyama World

  The Essence of Son Goku

  Crossover Madness: Cross Epoch

  You Don’t Forget Your First Love

  In the Mood for a Melody

  The Inevitability of Filler

  Homages…in Filler?! Journey West!

  Dragon Ball Theology

  The Unexpected Dragon Ball Prequel

  Jaco: One Last Look

  Dragon Ball Z Fandom in Ye Olden Days

  Covering Battle of Gods

  U.S. Theatrics

  Battle Review

  Super Saiyan God

  The Excitement!

  Homages in U.S. Television

  The Rise and Fall of an Era…and the Rise Again: Dragon Ball Fansites

  Thank You