There’s a tiny part of me that fears that inquiries like this will become more and more frequent throughout the rest of my life, which is going to make me come to the realization that it’s not so much the world behaving erratically, but that I’m clearly becoming old.
But seriously, chalk this up like my once inquisition of the rising popularity of Deadpool, but I have to ask, why is it that Dragon Ball has evidently become so popular again?
It really does kind of baffle me. At least Deadpool’s rise in popularity can be somewhat chalked up to a talented writer really giving him a chance to shine, and fans responding extremely positively in regards to said re-development of his character.
Dragon Ball, to my knowledge hasn’t really been given such a renewal, save for from what I understand was a slightly condensed version of the show to cut down the magnanimous fight sequences that lasted six, 22-minute episodes to detail the importance of a punch. But overall, it’s still very much the same exact Dragon Ball that aired through the late-80s into the mid-90s. There is where I am perplexed to why it’s apparently so popular.
Another part of it is has to do with the fact I was never a fan of it back in the 90s either, when I was at my prime anime-watching days, and worked at Anime FX then, where I had pretty much a vast collection of anime I could’ve watched at any time. Frankly, I never saw the appeal, and that in itself was somewhat surprising, considering the fact that I was a fan of Akira Toriyama’s artwork (from Chrono Trigger fandom), and that I generally enjoyed the fighting genre, whether it’s martial arts films to action sequences in movies. But for whatever reason, Dragon Ball had absolutely zero appeal to me.
It’s probably because I was such a hipster with my anime tastes back then, and when something is popular, I tended to go in a different direction. And for whatever reason, Dragon Ball was so stupidly popular amongst young boys, Hispanics and African-Americans, and its videos, action figures, posters and any other merchandising was the strongest selling stuff in the world. It’s like there was always so much buzz about Dragon Ball, that I simply grew to resent it.
Either way, it perplexes me to how popular it’s become again, and I frankly don’t understand it. It’s not really that different than what it used to be. Perhaps the fights are no longer 26 episodes but instead are 13, but still, it’s not like there’s any new content. Video games that act like the television show, where fights encapsulate battlegrounds that are larger than the Utah Salt Flats, and everyone can shrug off massive punishment and 9,000-hit combos like they were getting pelted by a Nerf gun. And then there are movies that have been made and are having sequels planned, and people are going ga-ga over it on social media, and making me have these thoughts of wondering how something that was once was hot, has gotten hot again, after such a dormant period in between.
Unfortunately for me now, I don’t have the friends I did back in the late 90s who were on board with me with our mockery of Dragon Ball. If I’m too vocal about how stupid Dragon Ball is today, I’d be all by myself and face accusations of being contrarian and elitist. So I’ll just stick with the opinion that I simply just don’t understand why Dragon Ball is apparently a popular thing again, and leave it at that.
