Lol, yep. I loosely nicknamed myself because of Dragonball Z.

There was a TV special in Japan around March 1993 called "The History of Trunks".

Back then, one could ONLY pretty much get new anime by going to scifi or (UGH) Star Trek conventions... laboring past sweaty, smelly nerds and downright PATHETIC tables of fanfics printed up on copy machines. Scary stuff with poorly drawn depictions of like Capt. Picard mouthing Dr. crusher. Stuff that made your eyes bleed.

They were scary and terrible events, worse than 100 anime cosplayers...

Aaaaaaanyway, the whole point, the WHOLE REASON to drive miles, take buses, take trains, run hundreds blocks through congested cities and whatnot to get to these nightmares was just those one or two guys who had selling tables which had NOTHING to do with poopy American superhero JUNK or $500 lightsaber replicas...

...The "ANIME" guys.

They were things of beauty, for their time. They'd try and cram EVERY type of product onto their meager little tables.

You'd have a stack of manga books with anime music CDs on top.

You'd have UFO catcher gashapon plushies hanging from peg hooks.

There'd be stacks of robot models underneath the tables (oh, and they weren't these nice, new models that you can put together without glue, no.)

The REAL thing my eyes cried out for was the standing shelves people like this always had... the TOYS. You'd see characters from anime you saw in the 70's... but new toys still being made? You'd see super-deformed versions of characters both america AND japan... and all the sweet, sweet, giant diecast metal robots from like Bandai's Godaikin, Popy, Takatoku...

I can only imagine how odd it had looked, me just sitting there going through EVERYTHING a seller had for sale, dumbfounded that such things this awesome even existed. Or worse yet, asking him to take EVERYTHING down off the shelf so I could molest it.

All the while, you'd have fruitcakes dressed up as Klingons or fat chicks attempting to be Slave Leia walk by with angry looks and being like, "Uh, this has NOTHING to do with scifi".

LOL.

But the real killer of wallets... the anime. These guys would have a few comic book boxes FULL of videotapes.

They were rarely legitimate, either. They literally would have friends in Japan tape stuff, and they'd just duplicate them dozens of times using two VCRs.

Oh, and the quality did suffer. On some tapes, you'd hit "play", and then you'd see the "play" text onscreen from maybe 5 OTHER people's VCRs stepping on each other before the show actually started lol! Sometimes you'd get BURNED, getting home to find the seller didn't look over his dub job, selling DOZENS of people tapes with audio but video that was flipping and impossible to track into view.

And the price? Holy crow. At first, it was not odd at all to spend $20 on a bad quality videotape that ONLY had 2 episodes of any anime on it.

Every year, it got a bit better... the tapes would actually be utilized up until the end of their 2, 4 or 6 hour runtimes.

Aaaaaanyway, there was a guy who did subtitles. And it seemed after awhile that every bootleg I was buying had his (poorly made) credits at the start. He turned the art of illegal anime videotapes into a business apparently.

One of those tapes I got was Dragonball Z. I already heard of Dragonball... back in the 80's, one of the UHF TV stations had aired a special called "Dragonball", which was two movies of young Goku. (Done by the Robotech guys, Harmony Gold. It wasn't terrible, but they changed names here and there. Goku was called "Zero". Ick.)

It was kind of confusing... WHY was Goku all grown up and why were the fights so much more monumental?

I was hooked. Apparently a lot of others were too, as the tables selling bootlegs of it were CRAMMED with people... bigtime.

Around the same time, I had anime penpals through some wretched fan publication called "Mangazine".

But I wanted a cool pen name. My name's kind of boring, so...

(And remember, this was before the internet boom. The only time people had alter-ego type names was when they were talking on the CB radio to strangers.) Needless to say, my CB name blew too. ("Thousand People", it was).

So I'm watching this Dragonball Z special and a scene pops up where Goku's getting killed (literally) by the androids.

He then yells, "#### (dang) JIZONINGEN!"

I thought it was funny for some reason, and I was pretty sure ningen meant "human". So, I went to the library and found I was right.

Couldn't find a translation of "jizo" though.

So I started sending letters out to penpals with "JIZONINGEN 73" (73 = birth year) on it, only to be quickly corrected it was actually "jinzo", which meant artificial, robotic, fake, etc... or, "fake human".

And yeah. There we is.

Things are godlike now to someone who lived through the dark times before the internet.

An entire anime series contained on something the size of a keychain? In HIGH quality? And a few hours after new episodes air?

WHAT?!?

Nearly any japanese toy you could ever want, much cheaper than they used to be, all contained in practically one place?

WHAT?!?

[Removed. -Shine]

It's a good time to be alive... B)