One regret that I’m stuck with is that I don’t remember exactly when or under what circumstances I was first introduced to DB, and what hooked me on it initially. My best educated guess is that it occurred some time in the year 2000. I vaguely recall watching DBZ briefly on some channel during the Saiyan Saga before I had access to Cartoon Network. I’m fairly certain that past that, however, it was all Toonami. Though I don’t know where exactly I came in the first time I watched it, I do know that apart from how long Toonami spent airing reruns leading up to the Buu Saga, I basically watched the show all in order, a lot of it as it was first airing in English. I had not even seen, let alone read any manga at this point.

It is unknown what was in (presumably) 11 or 12-year-old me’s head when I first clapped eyes on such a show, when before the only proper anime I’d ever seen was Pokémon. I had no experience with Japanese media of any other sort, short of Nintendo (and a few other) games and a couple of animated shows that aired on Nick Jr. in the early 90s, when I was too young to really remember. Certainly nothing like this. Who were all these funny fellas with funny names saying funny things while flying around hitting each other with fists and energy beams?

What made me poke my head into this world in the first place? I’ve never been a “check out a new thing on my own” kind of person. Did someone recommend the show to me? Did I just have the TV on and tuned to the right channel at the right time? Was it enough to see something with the word “dragon” in the title and be curious? These answers are all lost to time, as far as I know, as is the true origin of how I became attached to Vegeta for the first time, something that remains deeply ingrained to this day.

The best clues I have to my original thoughts and feelings on the show are things I remember writing around this time period, though none survive to the present. I recall writing and printing out a document entitled Dragon Ball Z is Funny which was just a bullet list of funny things about several of the characters - very basic observational things that a 12-year-old would find humorous. I also had an inside joke with my friend that was literally just saying "Oooh, Piccolo color" in a funny voice, presumably began when referring to something green. Somehow, I still have a recording of us doing the line.

The aforementioned joke line with my friend, from September 2001 - making it the oldest DBZ reference I still have

I remember that in (I believe) 6th grade, a creative writing assignment I did was a crossover DBZ/Frogger story simply called Dragon Ball Z Frogs wherein Goku was Frogger and had to rescue all the other characters (who were the other colored frogs) from each of the levels. I played a lot of Frogger in my tween years. Even now, each frog has a permanent association in my brain with their assigned character. As far as I know, this was the only act of fanfiction I ever committed to text until 2020. Frogger 2 multiplayer frogs also have associated characters, though not tied to any writing.

Funny to think that Frogger was the series that got crosswired with DBZ in my head and not Sonic, though I was definitely playing just as much of the two Sonic games I had on PC - Sonic 3 & Knuckles and Sonic 3D Blast. The latter, however, did have a music track that ended up on my little playlist I listened to endlessly while daydreaming about my favorite space monkey. The rest of the playlist consisted of a few NSYNC songs and a random other pop song. I still listen to these to this day.

By 2002, I was fully formed into what I’d consider the final stage of blossoming fandom, the form which went on to recur multiple times and probably will for the rest of my life. I was watching the show, playing the games, stuffing DB into other games and my own family’s computer, and scrawling references everywhere I could - both to things I found funny and to my undying love for Vegeta. Almost all surviving artifacts from this time period are from 2002, at least to my knowledge. There’s a lot that is lost, or the origins thereof are lost.

A dayplanner I used in early 2002. It features several written references, as well as a no-reference drawing of Shenron, and a folded page in which I used to keep a picture of Vegeta (the same one I copied myself on the page behind it)

Apart from scribblings and typings and frogs, there were other things that may have come from this time period. Our original home computer from 1994 still had a hard drive from I believe 1997 in it when I had it sent to me, complete with Windows 95 and whatever else was on it when it stopped being used. The Windows startup screen was still a custom DBZ one I had grabbed from who knows where. The fact that I’d bothered to mod this particular computer means this more than likely occurred before we got our XP machine (though the original computer didn’t fully retire until a surprising number of years later), placing it in this time period. Currently the drive is inaccessible so no further investigation can be done. In addition to this, once we had XP I was slapping "web objects" all over the desktop, some of which may have been DB related. Same goes for Winamp skins.

The Windows 95 startup screen, recovered through a virtual machine

This was also when I was already shoehorning DBZ into other games besides Frogger. I know I made at least one DBZ theme park in the Rollercoaster Tycoon series of games (1 or 2, or even both, who knows). I made Saiyans as a species in SimLife. I absolutely named Pokémon after characters. I’m fairly certain I named my original red Gyarados in my original playthrough of Pokémon Gold after Vegeta. I love red Gyarados (and Gyarados in general) and so it was only natural to name my favorite angry fish dragon after my favorite angry space monkey. This is one of my only clues that I was already entrenched by late 2000.

In spite of not recalling being allowed to participate in online communities this far back, there is also record of a Neopets account that is even older than the one I do still have from 2005 - this one most likely was from 2002 at the latest based on where I saw a DBZ-referencing username scrawled (that dayplanner seen above). However, the attempt to recover the account failed, so I can only speculate that my true first Neopets were most likely named with DB themes. Other unknowable things from the online world of the dawn of the 21st century are the words and thoughts of other people. In particular, I remember reading someone’s article(?) about Saiyan tail physiology and thought it was really cool and grounded sounding at the time. Whether it was or just that I thought so because I was a kid, or even who wrote it is, like so much else, lost to time.

Of course, I wasn’t just sticking DB references into games and other things that had nothing to do with DB themselves - 2002 was also the release year for the earliest actual DBZ games I played - the original Budokai for the PS2 and Legacy of Goku for the GBA. I remember getting stuck on the fight with Vegeta in LoG for a hot minute because I really, really didn’t want to hit him and felt bad about having to do so in spite of that being, y’know, how the story goes. Hell, to this day, if I play a game where I have to beat him in a fight (or lose one as him or teamed up with him), I can’t help but apologize afterward - I'm just a sap like that.

The box art of Budokai may have been, for a short time, the only physical representation of Vegeta I had, considering how powerful the nostalgia blast was when I saw it again many, many years later. I played the heck out of that game as a kid, and made something of an inside joke with myself (and maybe my brothers) out of Mr. Popo’s shop dialog. Oddly enough, me writing it all over things is the only well-preserved part of this first wave of fandom.

Scans of the oldest piece of paper I have, featuring references to that Mr. Popo line, the inside joke about sanitized dub language, as well as "cute space monkeys" and "I love my prince." "Our Earth" is even a reference to a bracelet I had on the neck of a T. rex plushie which I used to cuddle as my stand in for Vegeta, as this pre-dates owning any merch.