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Introduction
The first time I ever saw Dragonball Z was seven years ago in France while on vacation. It was part of a anime line-up that included City Hunter and several other shows. I was clueless about the DBZ storyline, but the fighting was pretty darn cool. (Isn't that the main thing that attracts people to the show?) About two and a half years later, in early 1996, I got internet access. I remember how it was such a big thing to be able to talk with people from all the country. Now we're all used to it. Heh. Anyhow, the internet was great for looking up random stuff. One day, I decided to do a search for "Dragonball Z" on Yahoo. There were only eleven sites listed. That's right, only eleven. Most of them were first generation web pages with a couple pics and a very brief summary. The three big pages of the time were Wuken's Page, Ed Gorgen's Saiyajin's Pride, and Curtis Hoffman's Three Steps over the Edge There were no DBZ pages with its own domain name. The busiest page was Wuken's, who got around 500 visitors daily.

DBZ in North America
Despite all the bitching about censorship and poor voice acting, FUNimation's importation of the series to North America is the single biggest reason for DBZ's tremendous online and real-life popularity. Could the current dubbing job be better? Hell yeah. Same goes for the music, dialogue, and editing. But FUNimation is a business company, and they know there's more money to be made with the Pokemon set than with the older fans who are acquainted with the original Japanese series. It's better than nothing. When the series first came out in NA, there was widespread doubt about how long it would last. Most of us were sure that it would be canceled before Trunks' appearance, if not sooner. And we would never have even considered the possibility that DBZ could reach #2 on the Lycos Top 50. If Saban had continued to distribute DBZ through syndication, it's likely that the series would have been ended already. Cartoon Network deserves recognition for acquiring the broadcasting rights to the series, thus ensuring its continuation. I can confidently say that I'm happy with how things have turned out.

Mucho Multimedia
Multimedia is what most people want. Pics, sounds, moviesŠ it's all good. Some fans seem to think the way to show their enthusiasm is to fill up their hard drive with files. Pictures are popular because you can print them out and make your own posters; they're also easy to steal if you're a newbie who wants to make a crappy page. People love their mp3s. Napster's popularity is a clear sign. DBZ mp3s are no exception, especially since they're not readily available at Best Buy or Sam Goody's. Like pictures, they're easy to steal, mostly because it's hard to tell who originally scanned the pic or made the mp3. Movies round out the multimedia triumvirate. What beats actually seeing the series in motion? The major problem with it is the file size. For a multi-MB download, you get a dozen seconds of small, fuzzy screen. MPEGs and MOVs were a pain in the ass. Back in the day, though, it was the only option. When Realplayer technology became more advanced, shrewd webmasters encoded full episodes at the size of a minute-long MPEG. Good deal, eh? More on that later.

*The* best multimedia site a couple years ago was Son Gohan's Page. It wasn't updated often, and it was sloooooowŠŠ. but that was because of the huge amount of bandwidth that its users were using. SGP had everything ­ 25+ galleries of scans, dozens of songs, a few music videos, and a ton of MPEGs. The site was well over a gig and a half. The number of the visitors at the time was equally impressive. Several thousand people would visit the page daily, a huge number when the other top sites were only getting several hundred. The amount of bandwidth generated was astounding. At its peak, it resulted in a tetrabyte of throughput. (a thousand gigs or a million MBs)

An alternative was Planet Vegita, whose movie offerings were on par with SGP. Both resided at Simplenet for a good reason. The cost of hosting was only $10 a month. In return, you got unlimited space and bandwidth. Eventually, Simplenet wised up to the fact that high traffic sites like those two were costing them too much money. They came up with a scary email informing webmasters with high bandwidth usage that if they wanted to stay, they had to pay $2000 monthly. Needless to say, we all vacated. (I had just gotten a Simplenet account to house the manga chapters. I got to use it for all of a month) That's the biggest problem with large files. Not only is it a bitch to upload and download, but the huge bandwidth generated makes it hard as hell to find a reliable host.

Text Stuff
Back at the beginning, the two big news pages were Wuken's and Saiyajin's Pride. Of the two, Wuken's news was more thorough though less frequent. Living in California, Wuken had access to Japanese bookstores and kept abreast of the happenings in Japan. Saiyajin's Pride focused more on American news and did a great job of covering the North America release of DBZ. In addition to current news, fans wanted info on the series. Curtis Hoffman filled that void admirably. He alone summarized almost every single DB manga volume. Additionally, he wrote a brief overview, several character lists, a family tree, an attack list, and several other files. Thanks to him, there was a solid information base available online.

One thing he didn't do was a power level chart. The first one to do so was Danny Athar of the defunct Prince Vegeta's DBZ Page. Its popularity was evidence by the number of mediocre sites that copied it, owing to fanboy fascination in arguing over characters' strengths. The small file size also made it easy to steal the list.

Editorials have been popular. Opinions are like assesŠ erh, noses. Everyone's got one. That's why people are eager to contribute them. VegettoEX's Page and DBZ Uncensored are good examples of sites with quality editorial sections. Besides the fan submissions (which are screened so that the ones put up are coherent), the webmasters themselves write regularly.

Other writings have also been informative and interesting. The web site critics of Team Ginew highlighted a best and worst site every month. They also ran a number of features detailing methods of site improvement. Unfortunately, their site was rather short-lived. Later, Dr. Gero's Laboratory took the task of reviewing sites in addition to other pages. A second and fairly recent alternate offering has been interviews. The most notable site was The Dragon Ball Vault which was an all-interview page with top webmasters. The site was great because of its uniqueness and quality interviews. The site is gone now, but the idea has caught on and become common. A final use of text has been fanfics. Most fans appear to be uninterested in them, though. The length of stories is a factor. Another is finding a well-written one. My guess is that people prefer downloading fighting clips rather than reading a story. Not that there's anything wrong with downloading action scenes. =P One thing about these alternate forms of text is that they're hard to maintain. Note the lack of any long-term text sites. A popular site must incorporate multimedia to maintain a continuing interest on the part of both the webmaster and visitors.

Most of the obvious things to make a DBZ site about had been addressed immediately, such as multimedia and info. This led to the development of niche sites which included:

Fanscanning
One day, I came across a site called The Dragon Ball Project. It didn't look too impressive, but I checked it out anyway. I clicked on the picture links. "Eh? What's this?" I wondered. It was a comic book format of Dragon Ball (DBP was offering the first five hilarious chapters of volume 3 ­ they've been taken down because Viz has released that part of the series commercially) I loved the comics. I began to look around for more. At the time, there were only a couple of sites that offered fanscans. The largest two were Pete's Translation Page (which did volume 25 and half of volume 26) and CDC's Page (who did volume 29 & 30 and scanned a heck of a lot of manga for me to edit). I downloaded and read all the manga available at the time. But it wasn't enough. I wanted more. I wanted the whole darn series. At the rate the translation sites were going, though, it wasn't going to happen. That gave me an idea ­ I would open up a fanscan site! To indulge my zealous desire, I went to Best Buy and bought a Mustek 600 III EP for $90, the cheapest scanner available at the time. I borrowed volume 35 from my brother's Korean friend, got a translation for the volume from Anime Crisis (who did text translations for thirteen volumes, an invaluable asset) and I was set. The Weekly Dragon Ball Chapters was born in Sept 97. My first scan and editing jobs were terrible. I cringe when I look at them. A month later, I decided to go daily and changed the site name accordingly to The Daily Dragon Ball Chapters. That went on for awhile, and I got through a huge chunk of the series. Several other people supported the drive. Spamdini, Danny Athar, CDC, Marlin, Kaine, and various other translators made it possible to get the entire series done. (see the Manga FAQ to see who did what)

Humorous/Creative Sites
These sites took awhile to take off. Since the beginning, the big names have been the ones offering multimedia and news. Another factor is that most of the receptive audience towards creative stuff are female, who make a small part of the testosterone crowd of DBZ fanboys. Creative sites became more prevalent in the past year with the popularity of Temple O' Trunks and Vegeta Insane. Both are character shrines that expand beyond the usual character pics, fanfics, and bios by putting emphasis on humor and special features. Music videos are a popular draw and a great idea. Another individual that deserves special recognition is CDC. Besides being a fanscanner and contributor, he also released two fine fanmangas ­ DBCDC and Lil' Saiyalings. The latter can be found in the Features section of Planet Namek. If you haven't seen it yet, I strongly recommend that you do so. The humor is clever and the strips are very well-drawn, especially the later ones. Also, he manages to give the characters a distinctive CDC look while retaining their basic essence. Props to him and to all webmasters that try to come up with something different. It's not an easy job, but they do it for us and we love'em for it. (except the people who want more, more, more. Luckily, those people are a minority)

Full Online Episodes
Mpeg & quicktime clips had been available since the early days, as discussed previously. The problem with them was that they were both too big and too short. Realplayer offered a solution ­ longer files at a smaller size. The first site to really take advantage of this was Super5 in fall 98. They offered FULL episodes! Online! For free! Yes, the picture wasn't the best. And it's true that connecting could be a struggle. But this didn't seem to deter the legions of rabid episode-hungry DBZ fans who descended upon the site. Super5 was booming. It was getting something like 8000 visitors daily. But what happened to Super5? They were contacted by a FUNimation rep who informed them that they were violating copyright laws and must desist. (I was worried about that happening to me by Viz. I think they didn't care as long as the volumes they were doing weren't offered) Incidentally, the full episodes were perfect for pirating. Many unscrupulous individuals with cd burners made cds with a hundred episodes and sold them for high prices.

Here ends my brief overview of online developments in DBZ sites. I realize that the number of commendable sites exceed the amount of time dedicated, and so to those not mentioned because of oversight or lack of space, I apologize. Hopefully you enjoyed the article enough to forgive this and any other errors or inaccuracies.

- Eric Phan
(If you have feedback you want to share, email me at eric2phan@hotmail.com. Note that I may not be able to reply to everyone due to mail volume. Also, I will be GONE all July, so I can't answer mail then)