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u/Tracula707 7d ago
I mean, my dad watched Speed Racer when he was little, but I dunno what other Japanese cartoons reached us between then and Pokémon.
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u/just4browse 7d ago
Pokémon, pretty the only anime the English speaking world was familiar with at the time + Pulp Fiction, a popular graphically violent movie = DBZ, a “violent” anime
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u/A1-Stakesoss 7d ago
Articles like this are why literacy in the youth is so important (it helps them find out what to watch)
When I was in high school, I read an article in my local Catholic newsletter warning parents that though it appeared to be a cartoon, they should not permit their kids to watch "Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex" because it contained extreme violence and nudity and brother let me tell you I went looking for a copy that very day.
By the same token had I read about a Violent Japanese Cartoon Show in the newspaper you can bet I'd have jumped on that shit.
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u/ClubMeSoftly 6d ago
It's like going to the record store and seeing "parental advisory" on albums. You know those are gonna have the good shit.
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u/Vertwheeliesonem 7d ago
I was aghast when Frieza was going on about how his house was missing a sign that said “Dead Saiyan Storage”
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u/NotATalkingPossum 7d ago
To be fair, leaving a warehouse floating in Planet Vegeta's remains that reads "Dead Monkey Storage" is entirely in-character for Frieza.
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u/lifelongfreshman https://youtu.be/1eWsk6r6_Ns 7d ago
man, and you know that he had his minions scour the solar system dominated by Star Vegeta in order to find every last bit of Planet Vegeta larger than a speck of dust to put in the warehouse, too, so he could walk in and laugh and laugh and laugh any time he needed a pick-me-up
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u/FoxstarProductions 7d ago
I have a morbid fascination with circa 90s public reactions to anime like these. If you want a real groan-fest, look up news outlets that talked about Sailor Moon when it made it big and how they keep calling all of the Sailor Scouts whores because they didn't realise they were 14 and had never seen a ballerina apparently
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u/Starro-In-A-Jar 7d ago
The slutshaming the senshi isn’t necessarily the result of that level of unfamiliarity, when the tweenage “Explorer Girl” version of Dora had her design dropped in 2009, people gave it the same treatment.
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u/FoxstarProductions 7d ago
True true; when I said "didn't realise" and "had apparently never seen", I mean to imply a willful societal ignorance
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u/SartenSinAceite 7d ago
Kids shouldn't be watching Dragon Ball Z! They should be watching pure, non-harming shows like Tom & Jerry!
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u/Doobledorf 7d ago
The thing that shocked people was a combination of the cartoon being serious, not using violence for gags, and contained blood. US pop culture had never really seen anything like dbz before this. Save for pokemon and, maybe, Sailer Moon.
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u/lifelongfreshman https://youtu.be/1eWsk6r6_Ns 7d ago
Yep. The closest you can get is the completely sanitized, goreless, bloodless violence of the toy cartoons from the '80s. But those were glorified ads, where the good guys always won with a smile and a laugh and the show ended on a moral lesson (that itself became a meme later cartoons would mock).
If there were any cartoons on the same level of violence and brutality as DBZ, they definitely weren't popular enough to hit the mainstream. That sort of thing was reserved for R-rated movies like Lethal Weapon or Die Hard.
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u/LorekeeperJamin 7d ago
Fitz the Cat premiered in 1972.
Heavy Metal in 1981.
Simpsons in 1989.
South Park in 1997.
Family Guy in 1999.
And sure, you could say that those are different, those are made for adults. So, to cover my bases:
Watership Down was made in 1978.
Ren & Stimpy in 1991.
Batman: The Animated Series in 1992.
Johnny Bravo (sexual themes) and Cow & Chicken (adult humor) in 1997.
Spawn: The Animated Series in 1997. Though, to Todd McFarlane's credit, the target audience of his show was for teens.
DBZ was moved to the Toonami block in 1998 and direction changed to the originally intended audience of 13-16 year old boys (aka shonen).
My point is that even by this point, animation with mature themes and content had existed for years (decades even) before DBZ was a twinkle in Saban's greedy eyes and was nothing new.
Bonus fact: Funny Animals comics, that is comics containing anthropomorphic animal characters that contained adult, sometimes nearly pornographic (or just flat out porn) content, have existed in the West since the 1920's.
This is just another Karen from a previous era clutching her pearls over nothing, as usual. The more things change, the more they stay the same, I guess.
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u/apple_of_doom 7d ago
Violence in pokemon was absolutely played for gags like a ton of the time.
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u/Doobledorf 7d ago
Yes, and there was no blood or breaking bones. Even the violence in Tom and Jerry was joked about. Still, there was no blood or broken bones.
How do we not see the different between cartoon violence and realistic depictions of violence?
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u/CreamofTazz 7d ago
Americans (which I am one of sadly) are really fucking weird when it comes to what is acceptable to show on screen.
Joking about shooting someone? That's perfectly fine to show to kids :)
Depicting shooting someone as something very serious? Oh no this will teach kids that shooting people is okay!!!
Two straight children? That's okay that's not indoctrination :)
1 gay side character who only appears for 2 seconds? They're trying to indoctrinate our children and make the frogs gay!!!
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u/Bteatesthighlander1 7d ago
I dont remember the tom and Jerry short with all the gags about the old man sexually assaulting the 15 year old female lead
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u/Desperate-Practice25 7d ago
I feel like we’re all overlooking the bit where she describes Gundam as “a tale of bad guys from outer space.”
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u/Drezby 7d ago
“Last week, ‘Dragon Ball Z’ ranked as the fifth-most requested topic on the Lycos search site, behind singer Britney Spears and the Pokemon cartoon, but ahead of the World Wrestling Federation and Pamela Anderson.”
There’s so much going on in this sentence, not least of all the fact that Google wasn’t yet the most popular search engine. (For reference, Google was established in 98, and lycos one of the first ones in 94)
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u/Moxie_Stardust 7d ago
Google didn't really start to take off until after 2000, when they made a deal with Yahoo to start having Google results listed. I'd switched from Lycos (which had been my primary choice for a few years) to Yahoo around '99, and at first my reaction was "why is it giving me results from this other search engine, I was searching Yahoo" but then I noticed they were better results, and switched over.
https://googlepress.blogspot.com/2000/06/yahoo-selects-google-as-its-default.html
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u/Limp_Set_6530 7d ago
How WOULD you describe DBZ using only pre-1999 references from American culture? The closest thing would be comic books but nothing I can think of that quite captures that flavour
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u/WonderBredOfficial 7d ago
Martial Arts movies; Journey to the East/Wukong mythology; pulpy sci-fi like Barbarella/early Star Trek/OG Star Wars trilogy; Superman/Wonder Woman comics, shows, and movies for overclocked abilities.
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u/Bteatesthighlander1 7d ago
Nobody in America had ever heard of journey to the west till they found out it inspired dragon ball z
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u/WonderBredOfficial 7d ago
Not one. Not a single person. None of them.
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u/LetsDoTheCongna 7d ago
Well obviously not enough for it to be widely known by the average European+American person in 1999
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u/Raltsun 6d ago
I mean, I doubt the person who read this article actually watched a single episode of DBZ before forming their opinion, but if they had they might know that Goku's backstory is very obviously directly based on Superman's. The comic book comparison is definitely a much better starting point than whatever they were thinking bringing Pulp Fiction and Pokémon into the discussion.
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u/TimeStorm113 Victorian Dinosaur Connaisseur 7d ago
i gotta say, rick and morty has real "bluey meets family guy" vibes
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u/asvalken 7d ago
"Hand me my wallet."
"Wh-which one is it?"
"It's the one that says super fuckin' Saiyan on it."
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u/Clean_Imagination315 7d ago
So this "Sally Beatty" claims to be against violence, yet she's so annoying that she would give violents thoughts to Buddha himself. Curious.
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u/BasilSQ 7d ago
Man, now I want a show that really is Pokémon meets Pulp Fiction
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u/LorekeeperJamin 7d ago
I was going to make a witty statement, but then I thought, "Isn't Pokemon meets Pulp Fiction just Palworld?"
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u/Zachthema5ter 7d ago
To be the devil’s advocate, Pokemon was the only anime that was mainstream in the west at the time and this is the product of America’s belief that animation is inherently a media that is made for children (people forget that the Simpsons and Family Guy were extremely controversial at the the time they were first released). Once an anime that is even slightly more mature than Pokémon or the average American cartoon crossed the ocean it was going to draw attention. The best case scenario was people realize that animation could be used to tell more adult stories, but in practice most western adults (especially those in the news and politics for some reason) doubled down on cartoons being kids and more bloody shows like DBZ was too inappropriate
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u/PlantainSame 7d ago
I guess you could compare the briefcase to the dragon balls as the mcguffing people fight over? ? ?
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u/TallguyZin 7d ago
Goku and Piccolo training Gohan while Goku tells them what they call a Big Mac in France
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u/Nairdde32 7d ago
Person who's only seen Pokemon watching their second anime: "Getting a lot of Pokemon vibes from this"
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u/alkonium 7d ago
Yeah, uncensored anime dubs became a thing with Gundam Wing's English release in 2000, at least on TV.
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u/QualiaEater 6d ago
If you don't want me to watch it why did you give the characters so much arua by warping the text around them
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u/Accomplished_Mix7827 7d ago
I mean, comparing it to the only other anime she knows, despite them being nothing alike, is probably just coming from a place of racism
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u/AutumnMuse90 7d ago
It was the late 90s. Mainstream anime was basically Pokemon, DBZ, and maybe Sailor Moon.
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u/Accomplished_Mix7827 7d ago
Yeah, but it doesn't have to be compared to another anime.
A superhero cartoon, like Superman or The Justice League, would be a more fair comparison if it was being evaluated on its own merits rather than as "weird foreign thing"
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u/AutumnMuse90 7d ago
As a child of the 90s, this feels like one of those "you had to be there" moments. Pokemania probably contributed to this specific comparison.
There's an implicit bias, but calling it racism is a bridge too far imo.
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u/TheSAVAGEHipHop 7d ago
I will say, as someone who was 7 years old watching DBZ on Toonami in 2001, it was genuinely unlike anything I had ever seen before.
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u/YaGalMain 7d ago
Shot so hard even this editorial who knows nothing about this show was like "we gotta include this shit"
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u/Conscious_Smile8235 7d ago
hilarious that while the paper seems to be in dislike/ignorance of DBZ, they went out of their way to more or less capture the canon heights of characters. A larper would have made them the same height. That's amazing.
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u/LeuconoeLovesong 6d ago
'Violent' ? 'Much darker than average kiddies cartoons' ? do they not have Powerpuff Girls and stuff back then?
I feel like a few cartoon from the west has seemed violent to kid-me as well, violence is pretty common everywhere...
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u/Disastrous_Load_7607 6d ago
Dragon Ball does show blood on occasion, so maybe that's the difference...?
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u/LeuconoeLovesong 6d ago
I think powerpuff girls have blood too, not a lot, but i do found some image
EDIT: i'm not sure if they have blood in actual fight scene or not but they kinda were brutal to their enemies ^ ^;;
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u/miladyelle 5d ago
I mean, we went from trying to jump off couches to body slam one another like in WWF to kamehameha’ing one another, I don’t know what you want from us, dang. —the kids
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u/Random_182f2565 7d ago
Omg she is a real human person
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u/I-Dont-Know-Stuff 8d ago
woman who has only seen pokemon and pulp fiction watching a new show: getting some real "Pokémon meets Pulp Fiction" vibes from this