(Originally posted on Cohost on March 8th, 2024)
After hearing the news last night, a lot of old memories starting pouring in and reminding me how much Dragon Ball consumed my life as a teenager. I know that is not exactly a unique statement, but we all have our own story to tell. For me, it started before any part of the series aired in the US, or even before the internet as we know it existed. I think the first time I saw anything related to it was in an international games section of EGM magazine, covering one of the fighting games. We also had a Japanese import store in our local mall that sold DBZ merch and, most importantly, terrible quality, fan subbed bootleg VHS tapes of the DBZ movies that one of my friends showed me.
I quickly became obsessed. I was aware of "anime" at this point, but we were still in the NOT FOR KIDS era of anime marketing. In that context, Dragon Ball was so unique and fun. It didn't look or feel like anything else. At the time I was still kicking around the idea of becoming an artist and I would constantly draw Dragon Ball characters, in my school notebooks, or even for official school assignments. The picture above is an ancient drawing I made for a marker rendering exercise (yes, the date is from 1997, I am old), which I unearthed this morning as I was thinking about all this.
I never became an artist but needless to say, as I sit here in my 40's still watching anime and creating content about it, that was an extremely influential part of my life. Hearing about Toriyama's passing made me really sad and nostalgic, but ultimately happy at how much joy his work brought me and the rest of planet Earth.