> Dragon ball was definitely the show that popularized Japanese animation in the west.

Highly debateable. Saint Seiya was huge in other parts of the world, for example. Also, Sailor Moon and Pokemon - both were arguably larger than DB. For me, it was Robotech/Macross.

But yeah, DB (DBZ in particular) was hugely popular in the 90s, with Cartoon Network showing it basically over and over. And remains one of the best of its genre.

No, you are wrong. DBZ in the late 80's and 90's was huge in Europe, megahuge, more than Pokémon. It just happens the US got DB very late. By the age they were whatching DBZ we already finished GT, and DBZ ended for us more than half a decade ago.

That's not exactly true, The Cell and Buu sagas were aired on US TV after only a small delay from the Japanese release and local television was airing the Frieza saga on from the mid 90s.

We got the Frieza saga in early 90's. Very early.

I think it's not such a useful debate. All of the early anime that was popular early on outside of Japan was undoubtedly influential and important part of the popularity of anime outside of the US, but Dragonball Z really had a special spot in that it had pretty large mainstream appeal and aired during normal afternoon blocks on American TV -- while Sailor Moon was known when I was growing up, I remember it being on early morning (06:00) cartoon blocks, so it was kind of out of the way. That isn't to diminish the influence of Sailor Moon, Saint Seiya, etc, but at least in the United States DBZ was a cartoon you talked about at school because "everyone" watched it and was waiting for the rest to be translated and dubbed.

I think that's mostly what the GP meant, and I would agree it was quite significant in this regard.

Funny, it was the other way for me. Dragonball was on in the early mornings and Sailor Moon was in the afternoon.

I don't recall Sailor Moon ever approaching the popularity of DBZ (in the United States at least). It seemed like every kid in America was glued to the TV in the 90s watching DBZ on Toonami. Pokemon was probably more popular than DBZ, but much of that was due to the influence of the Pokemon Game Boy games, and obviously the trading card game.

I think DBZ was the first massively popular anime in the western world that leaned heavily into the shonen tropes. Pokemon appealed more to a younger audience, and Sailor Moon was more of a shojo anime.

In Poland Dragon Ball with a reader voice over French dubbing was broadcasted by a German TV (RTL). We had to have two TV antennas, one for RTL and one for normal Polish TV. In my wall there's still a wall socket with places for 2 coaxial cables. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCJaryccMCc

It was also on cable tv

Was "live overdubbing" a common thing in Poland? I spent some time in the Middle East as a child, and we'd periodically pick up satellite broadcasts of American TV (e.g. Mighty Morphin Power Rangers) that was then being translated in real-time into Polish.

I remember thinking it was incredibly bizarre at the time, because the delay between the original audio finishing and the reader voice-over made it really hard to hear either audio stream.

> the delay between the original audio finishing and the reader voice-over made it really hard to hear either audio stream

growing up in a household that spoke both, it wasn't too hard to pick out both 'streams', and this definitely helped me learn the languages 2x as fast, but it felt like there was more 'processing' going on in my head, and I don't think I enjoyed watching things that way (when later given the choice for one language or the other)

I dont think it was frequent, but it wasn't unusual.

Before getting access to the internet the game was to find importers and sub culture groups that got access to these series. If it wasn't for the anime it was for the books, for the games, for the figures etc.

It looks different at first, but I see the same effort to get out of one's sphere and reach for another culture, and start to learn things that aren't in school books, see the world in a different way.

We quickly learned the difference between SECAM and NTSC, how audio was coded on the tapes, why colors were different, the import taxes depending on the price and category, the IP licensing deals, the yen fluctuation etc...while in middle school.

I'd never want to go back, but it sure was a formative journey.

RIP Toriyama

Japanese animation was already popular decades before.

But I think it's fair to say that Dragon Ball was the most ubiquitous piece of anime on the globe across the 90s/2010s and the one with the longest lasting impact

Depends on where you were. I was an American fan of anime before it was really socially acceptable and I've been of the mind that its popularity was probably inevitable once enough old guard culturally sneering at it died. Same as happened with video games.

But DBZ (and Sailor Moon) definitely solidified it as a respectable commercial force for the mainstream USA, and gave a unified culture experience that's now pop culture, thanks to millenials getting old.

Japanese animation became popular in Europe in the late 70s and early 80s with the robot animes, Lupin III, Future Boy Conan, Heidi, Lady Oscar, etc. I was in primary school. Dragon Ball started much later and I watched it when I was at university or maybe later. Everybody of my age already has been an anime fan for at least 15 years by then.

I can at least confirm that in my home european country japanese animated series did not start appearing until late 80s, early 90s, and by all means they were outliers and not _popular_ at very least til some heavy hitters came around the 90s.

I also don't know how applicable is making broad statements to europe as a whole in this specific regard. I feel cultural barriers have traditionally been pretty tall and what might be applicable to a country might not be applicable in the same timeframe to a neighboring one.

It was a different phase. At least in scale. It seems you a few years older than I so maybe you can tell me, but did the late 70s felt like japanese animation or just "animation", I was too young to really sense how captain harlock and such were perceived ? To me that was a big change, dragon ball made people crazy about mangas per se (it was around the time Glenat started to produce a lot of french translations too IIRC), imports, merch, japanese language and culture .. all like one big tsunami

There were no mangas in Europe in the 70s AFAIK or they were extremely niche. Every kid was watching anime by then (and there were way more kids then than now) and we explicitly called them Japanese anime. We knew the difference between them and anime from the USA (Popeye, Bugs Bunny, etc) and the ones from our country and other European countries.

Then we grow up, manga translations and scanlations became available and we started reading too. That was about around 1990, when Dragon Ball was aired for the first times.

> That was about around 1990, when Dragon Ball was aired for the first times.

In France, Dragon ball first aired in 1988.

Kids in the 80's didn't say they were watching anime, they said they were watching japanese cartoons. They knew it was different from Disney and Tom&Jerry and other productions but it didn't mean yet what anime meant in the mid 90's with Ghost in the shell, Lodoss and other anime that weren't aired on TVs (and that weren't long running serie).

And then there was someone at FR3 who somehow slipped 3 or 4 hours a harlock captain movies on christma and new year's eve in the beginning of the 90's. That was dope.

And 93 with canal+ channel bringing Akira to television, that was pivotal into bringing japanime per se into people's minds.

Agree, I watched all robot animes but dragonball gave me the first kick to explore Japanese animation and mangas. I guess because I was older and looking for answers regarding the next transformation.

That depends strongly on the country and shows. Some countries had original anime, some had Westernized anime like Heidi and other WMT-series. Some had localized original anime, and people didn't know they came from Japan. France for example had a very original experience of Anime from the beginning, while others started decades later with the late 90s boom of Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball.

> Dragon ball was definitely the show that popularized Japanese animation in the west

In Italy, Dragon Ball was first aired in 1989.

I watched it because it was from the "Dr. Slump guy" that had been aired in 1983, and I had fallen madly in love with it.

I've bought and read both manga later on, in the 90s.

Over the years Dragon Ball has become immensely more popular than Dr. Slump, but I'm fond of the first two chapters (Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z), I didn't actually enjoy much anything past Cell.

DItto in Spain, the regional TV's got DB in Basque/Galician/Catalan as early as 1989/1990.

I was watching DBZ and Dr Slump, switching between Catalan and Japanese in the 90s on TV3! (yes, they had multilingual broadcast)

Maybe my memory fails but I seem to remember watching Dr Slump in the mid 80s on TV3.

YouTube commenters insists that Akira wanted to end Goku’s arc at Cell, but fanserviced beyond that. If true, explains a lot. I also felt that there was a lot of maturity and build up to the climax of the cell saga and everything afterwards felt like it undid that growth and just went on and on.

If I recall correctly, he originally wanted to end after Freezer, with the legendary super saiyan finale. Then again after Cell.

For your generation, perhaps. But there were many other shows before.

There were computers before von Neumann architecture too.

Yes. Abacus and slide rule.

>Dragon ball was definitely the show that popularized Japanese animation in the west.

I like Dragon Ball, but come on, let's be real. You said "the west," but at least in America Dragon Ball (I think only Z aired in America) was extremely niche whereas Pokemon was a widespread cultural phenomenon. Even Digimon was more popular/commercially successful than DBZ in the US.

At least in Spain there were already plenty of Japanese animation shows before DB.

Captain Harlock, Robotech, Mazinger Z, etc.