movies if you were lucky.
The fact of the matter is, I simply did not care. It was enough to get my fix. It was enough to absorb this entire universe in such short order. It was enough to get tapes, trade with friends, and talk about different parts of the series. Part of the fun and beauty of the fansub scene for me was being able to watch DBZ asynchronously. It was like a puzzle, a mystery. Frankly, it was magical.
I love that time in my life when I, not by choice, got to watch a long series out of order (for example, tackling parts of the Buu arc before I’d even seen Goku transform into a Super Saiyan). I loved that the first fansub I ever saw was DBZ Movie 13 which, at the time, was the last DBZ movie. I don’t think I’ll ever have a chance to watch a show in such a way ever again, and for that I truly treasure being able to access DBZ fansubs at a time when it was so exciting and new to be a DBZ fan.
MERI ran the “Temple O’ Trunks” website and gets to put up with VegettoEX on a daily basis.
Covering Battle of Gods
A behind-the-scenes look at what it’s like for a modern fansite to cover a new movie
Readers/listeners/fans of Kanzenshuu were used to visiting the site on a daily basis to learn all about Battle of Gods. What was that constant news cycle like behind-the-scenes, though? How did Kanzenshuu coordinate so much news & content?
By Julian Grybowski
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the peak of excitement, it was the nadir of sleep-deprived, server-side voodoo. In short, it was awesome, in all senses of the word.
July 2012. Kanzenshuu had barely gotten off the ground. We were three months out of the gate, slowly adding back content that needed to be ported (and brought up to our current standards) from the former Daizenshuu EX and Kanzentai, when “it” appeared: a teaser website, with a silhouetted figure, the letter “D,” and a countdown to July 14th. We all speculated what it might mean, but none of us really held much hope that it could be aimed at our fandom. After all, we had already received an animated feature less than a year earlier: Episode of Bardock. We considered the possibility of a continuation to Dragon Ball Kai, but it couldn’t be that; the series’ run in Japan had fizzled out anticlimactically with poor merchandise sales and a music plagiarism scandal. Toei wouldn’t be taking another chance on that, would they...?
And so, we decided it must be a special promotion for the already-announced, upcoming One Piece movie. Kei17 of World Dragon Ball famously declared on our forums that he would “eat [his] pants, wander around [his] city wearing Goku’s dogi, and draw a dojinshi featuring DB girls” if it turned out to actually be Dragon Ball. The silhouette did look a bit like Shenlong, but that was probably just coincidence.
But suddenly, there was incontrovertible proof: an early leak from the upcoming issue of Weekly Shonen Jump. A new Dragon Ball Z movie announced, slated for the end of March 2013, and—get this!—heavy involvement from Akira Toriyama himself. We scrambled to translate it and get it out there before it was overtaken by rumors. Traffic skyrocketed. The site crashed at least once. Little did we know that this was just a taste of what was to come.
By the weekend, the cat was already out of the bag, and so the official reveal passed without much fanfare. Still, the surge of interest from overseas was enough for Toei Animation themselves to put out an official English version of their website a few weeks later, just to appease the masses. But just a few days after the initial movie announcement, comments by the film’s scriptwriter and publicity director added fuel to the fire, confirming that the movie would take place in the “blank decade” spanned by chapter 517, and that it was a part of the franchise’s “official history.” The atmosphere was electric. We all scrutinized their words, picking apart the official press release and the scriptwriter’s Twitter posts, trying to find some hidden insight.
A teaser trailer, revealed at Saikyo V-Jump Festa and soon added to the official site, gave us one more thing to analyze frame-by-frame, even as we were pretty sure it wouldn’t have anything to do with the finished product. But wait! Do those rocks mean something? What about dodgy CG Goku? What is he looking at over there?! The potential meaning in its minutiae was as tantalizing as it was irrelevant.
The fandom worldwide was awash in speculation and rumor. We stood in the middle, trying to keep things on an even keel with accurate information, even as we tried to contain our own enthusiasm. But for the time being, we would have to wait: we were at the beginning of a long information drought. There was a trickle of tidbits here and there: the film would be receiving funding from the Japanese government for its promotion abroad; the art director, in charge of the backgrounds and other animated scenery, was announced. But that was it for three agonizing months. Naturally, the fandom rushed to fill in the gap. “Could Broli be appearing again?! Please say it’ll be Broli! His power is MAXIMUM!!” cried one half of the fandom, even as the other half desperately pleaded, “ANYTHING but Broli! Besides, he wasn’t created by Toriyama!” On it went.
In early November, the drought finally broke, and we got our first tease of new info: images of tie-in figures for the new movie, including the Pilaf gang! “Wait, PILAF?!” cried the Broli fans in confusion, though it threw pretty much everyone for a loop. A poster was then leaked to the Internet, sporting a title in both Japanese and English. What did this “Battle of Gods” mean? Who were the “gods” in question? Was that lady with the staff the fabled “Makaioshin” from the Super Exciting Guide books? Was that purple cat-rabbit-thing her lackey? The possibilities were endless.
Within a few days, we had confirmation of both the poster and the title, and before the month was out, our first piece of official merchandise (a limited-edition “Collaboration Ticket” with One Piece Film: Z, dutifully purchased at the crack of dawn on a rainy Labor Thanksgiving holiday), and also our first proper glimpse of the new characters, God of Destruction “Birusu” (not the “lackey,” apparently) and “Uisu” (voiced by Masakazu Morita, so not a woman). Who were these mysterious new individuals? And more importantly, how the heck did you spell their names in English? Our attempt to confirm alcohol-based puns (as “Pilsner” and “Whiskey”) with the scriptwriter on Twitter was met with the coy reply that “That’s not the source~” while almost the entirety of the Anglophone fandom leapt on the spellings “Bills” and “Wiss” because…well, we really have no idea.
Once December hit, the trickle of news became a steady stream. The movie’s storyline was discovered by Heath on a randomly-guessed, unlinked URL on the official site, then reported across the internet as “officially revealed” (which it wouldn’t be for over a week afterward). FLOW were announced to be doing the movie’s theme, a cover of Hironobu Kageyama’s “CHA-LA HEAD-CHA-LA.” A trailer was premiered, ominous and action-y, and setting the fandom alight once more with the fires of speculation...and also heated arguments over the meaning of Gohan’s hair color. We thought we had things pretty well under control, but we had barely dipped our feet into the abyss.
After that, the stream of news turned into a deluge. It really is a blur after that point. Is that Vegeta with a stupid grin on his face? Are the Pilaf gang children?! Is that Buu setting the God of Destruction off over pudding? What’s this whole “Super Saiyan God” business, anyway…? We were working a 24-hour news cycle, picking up where each other had left off, using whatever spare moments we could muster in between jobs, new babies, sleep, and other elements of this “life” business. It was enough for us to stay afloat, but only barely.
The barrage continued. New products were announced, as were new tie-ins. I bought things at Lawson for the sake of Dragon Bowls, and ate more KFC than is reasonably healthy for the sake of glow-in-the dark Dragon Bottles. Books came out by what seemed like the score. Hey, is that the manga in full color? Oh, and it’s available digitally, too? Wait, did they just say they’re going to re-release the Daizenshuu?! Good thing I could at least lighten the load in my wallet as everything else piled on.
There were magazines
, too. The official site had a page keeping track of “media exposure,” and every new article was subtly different, introducing new tidbits about the film that had not been revealed elsewhere. Turns out that Battle of Gods was a much different film from where it began, and the scriptwriter was mostly in name only after Toriyama came on board. More importantly, the name puns of Beerus and Whis (as we had come to call them) actually were alcohol-based…with a catch. The more we learned, the more there seemed to be to find out, and the translation backlog grew and grew. Even Akira Toriyama, not normally known as the most outgoing of creators, had his own media blitz, with interviews in what seemed like every publication around. Some information from the author’s mouth is nice, once in a while, but really…once it reached a certain point, we were starting to hope he’d clam back up for a while.
Somewhere in there, I even found the time to go to Tokyo and audition for a special Dragon Ball edition of the show HokoTate alongside fellow forum-members Kei17 and Peking Duck. Kei and I didn’t make it in, but we were able to cheer on Peking Duck and the other contestants as they went head-to-head with actual Shueisha and Toei