DB30YEARS: Special Dragon Ball 30th Anniversary Magazine

by Michael LaBrie

NEXT DOOR - “OPERATION: R.E.P.O.R.T.” (Season 2, Episode 9A)

  Originally Aired: 05 December 2003

  Summary: A task to retrieve “the goods” is interrupted by the “Devious Villains From the Consortium of Crime.” Each sequence follows another KND Sector and their ultimate mission failure, each animated in a different style. It turns out “the goods” was a pizza.

  Other notes: Similar to Billy and Mandy, this was released while hype for DBZ was still massive. The parodies are obvious with “Numbuh 4” (Wallabee) being Goku, the Super Saiyan hair, gigantic Super Saiyan 3 hair, the villains taking on variations of Freeza’s forms, and claims about needing to use their “full power” to win.

  ROBOT CHICKEN - “ROBOT CHICKEN CHRISTMAS SPECIAL” (Season 2)

  Originally Aired: 22 December 2005

  Summary: Three legendary kung-fu masters are on a rampage up at the North Pole (including the little drummer boy, a DB-esque character who conjures villains by playing his drums). Santa recruits Goku to help battle the villains, but it turns out that the ultimate foe plotting behind the scenes is someone Santa knows all too well.

  Other notes: The sequence’s random turn into an Akira parody sells it, with Goku teaming up with Rudolph to fight the overgrown monster. We also got the great (nonsensical) line: “The Tenka’ichi Budokai is finally complete!”

  SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE - HOST: ALEC BALDWIN (Season 32, Episode 5)

  Originally Aired: 11 November 2006

  Summary: The animated TV Funhouse segment tells the story of Japanese competitive eater Takeru Kobayashi as he saves the day. Villains set houses on fire and create a flood, so it’s up to Kobayashi to rescue the women and children and teach them valuable lessons along the way...about eating hotdogs.

  Other notes: FUNimation’s subtitle style is matched, while some of the Faulconer Productions replacement score is occasionally intermixed with the footage. The ending theme is a musically-accurate parody of DBZ Movie 13’s original Japanese closing theme (“Ore ga Yaranakya Dare ga Yaru”) complete with some of the same lines (such as “passion” right before the final “Kobayashi!”). Someone on the production staff was clearly a huge fan.

  TONS OF OTHER REFERENCES ON TV

  These four shows are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Dragon Ball homages in American television. They are the most obvious ones, but there are plenty other one-liners and subtle nods here and there across a wealth of other shows.

  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 fastes
t 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