When I found out about Akira Toriyama's passing a few days ago, I knew I'd be blogging about it. In some ways, I owe a lot of my childhood and teenage years to the Dragon Ball / Dragon Ball Z series.
It was one Saturday morning in 1995 (I think it was a Saturday morning). It was maybe 7 or 7:30 AM. My child self was still sleepy but I noticed that nobody was using the TV. I excitedly took the remote and turned it on. Most times I'd be stuck watching whatever my grandparents were watching, but not this time!
After flipping a few channels, I stumbled upon a cartoon showing a spikey-haired boy with a monkey tail talking to a girl in blue hair. I didn't know what was going on but I liked it. The animation style was cute, and I wanted to watch more. I tried to catch it every Saturday after that. Eventually I understood the plot. The idea of gathering dragon balls to make a wish was really interesting to me. Another thing I found interesting was how the episodes were serial, not episodic. I didn't want to miss any episodes or I could miss something in the story. It was my first time watching a cartoon like that (for anybody raging that I called Dragon Ball a "cartoon", please keep in mind I was very young and anime wasn't mainstream or known to me at that time).
When it looked like it reached the ending (all the dragon balls were gathered and a wish was made), I was surprised and sad when it wasn't on the next Saturday morning. I was hoping it would re-run from the beginning, like how other cartoons would re-run their episodes from time to time. I checked the following Saturday morning. And the next. And the next. I also checked at different times in case it changed timeslots. It was nowhere to be found. Where did the show go?
From that point, I had this desire in me, wanting to express how much I liked Dragon Ball. Not many kids at school talked about it, though, so I kept quiet most of the time. Through the years I would see various shops in Chinatown selling trading cards and stickers of many spikey-haired guys with monkey tails. I'd look at them longingly, having no money to afford them. Sometimes I'd ask my parents to buy them for me and they would -- sometimes. All the while my desire to know more about Dragon Ball grew and grew. I didn't know much about the internet back then so all I could do was sit idly with the desire.
It wasn't until high school that I joined an anime club and met somebody who also had a love for Dragon Ball. I tried to be calm, but inside I was thinking, Yayyy, another person I could talk to about Dragon Ball, kyaaa~~! XD We bonded pretty much instantly. From there, I would go on to experience a lot of firsts with Dragon Ball:
-buying my first manga (Dragon Ball, volume 1)
-buying my first bootleg VHS tape because I wanted to watch Dragon Ball in Japanese with English subtitles. It was some episode in the Majin Buu saga for Dragon Ball Z. The quality was verrry crappy and I didn't buy any more after the first one
-coming across a fan comic called Little Saiyalings, which was a delight to read
-realizing that websites could disappear when my favourite fansite, PlanetNamek, went down without any warning
-voice-recording one of my favourite English dubbed episodes on a cassette tape so I could re-listen to its audio every now and then. That episode was when Trunks showed up for the first time to give Goku a warning
-coming across websites that offered to record certain sagas of Dragon Ball / Dragon Ball Z / Dragon Ball GT if you mailed blank VHS tapes to them (imagine wanting to get the Freeza saga all on VHS)
-claiming a character as my "boyfriend" (hahaha XD)
In short, I explored becoming an anime fan -- something that's still a part of my identity today. And it was thanks to Dragon Ball.
Below are some Dragon Ball-related things I still have, after all these years:
Stickers!
Some more stickers!
Some trading cards. There was one card I really loved (the first card I ever got -- it randomly came out of a machine selling Sailor Moon cards), but I gave it away to a friend many years ago.
A cover I made for a container I and another friend used to lend each other manga. I think all the Dragon Ball characters were copied from different panels of the manga.
While I focused on Dragon Ball in this blog, I did experience some of his other works while growing up. That smiley blue slime in the Dragon Quest games will always be cute yet menacing to me. I enjoyed the character designs for Chrono Trigger (I was one dungeon away from beating the game). I thought Cowa! was cute and funny. Thank you, Akira Toriyama, for all you have given to the world. May you rest in peace. *bows*
Many years back I blogged about writing a poem to Gohan as Videl back in my high school days. Below is the link to it if you'd like to read it!
If you have any questions or comments, feel free.
Thank you, take care and until next time! *hug*
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