After six months we're still stunned by the popularity and the obscurity of Dragonball.
Here's a show rarely mentioned on TV or in newspapers, yet for six months it's been one of the Web's hottest topics. This week it stands at #4 on the Lycos 50.
What exactly is Dragonball? It's an anime (cartoon) series from Japan, one which actually first ran there in 1984. The original series, Dragonball, was followed by sequels Dragonball Z and Dragonball GT. ("Z" seems to be the A-1 favorite with most fans.) Overall, a staggering 500+ episodes of the series were produced.
The dragonballs of the title are 7 orbs which, if collected together, spawn a dragon which will grant one wish. Everything else is too complicated to explain in under 5000 words. The animation is of the bulging-bicep school with a bushel of pointy hair tufts thrown in.
Why is Dragonball Z so hot online? Certainly the target audience is right: youngsters may or may not be the heart of the Internet, but they do tend to drive the very hottest search terms. Dragonball has plenty of bone-rattling fights and cosmic energy bursts, and the story is deeply arcane in a web-friendly way: there are complicated legends, a huge cast of characters (also complicated -- dig this bio of Dej Vegeta), and a backstory going back 100 million years to be dissected, discussed, and catalogued.
Like its Japanimation cousins Sailor Moon and Pokemon, Dragonball is a cartoon, a comic, a video game, an action figure... it's hard to tell where one medium stops and another begins. These kinds of cross-platform hits do exceedingly well online.
The Cartoon Network has been showing Dragonball Z in the USA, which has helped the current craze along. The US episodes have been sanitized, with violence, spicy language and occasional nakedness removed from the freewheeling Japanese originals. This rubs fans the wrong way (and has even been a boards on our Lycos 50 message boards.)
So why don't we hear more about Dragonball offline? Perhaps it's too complicated; it's sure harder to follow than Coyote vs. Roadrunner. Or not cute enough? Or is it the violence? (Though that never stopped the Roadrunner.) In any case, if Dragonball's online popularity continues you've got to think it will cross over to become an offline mainstream hit sometime soon.
(Confidential aside to WWF fans: on Monday night the topic of Lycos chat will be: pro wrestling. Feel free to join in at 5:00 pm EST.)
