It did not sell for $1000.

Here is that lot at auction

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Lot-of-17-Lase ... Swd2JdNU01

Their sold listings: https://www.ebay.com/sch/bendicionesthr ... 6732.m1684

Lots of cheap medium size LD lots here.

They were not happy with what it ended at so they relisted it at the insane price BIN but took an offer.

Lot of 17 Laserdiscs LD Wholesale Movies
Pre-Owned

$1,000.00
Best offer accepted

On eBay the 1000 is slashed through. We do not know what they took for it but I bet it is under $100.

Dragonball LD's seem to have gone up in the past couple years. I'm glad I got the Broly movie before they released the new one, that one is really hard to find for a decent price now.

As the 90s kids gain more income I’d expect the value of anything Dragonball will climb. They'll only want dubbed stuff and the really naff American merch though probably.

Yeah it was a gateway anime for many. I was never a huge fan. As fighting shonen go I enjoyed Yu Yu Hakusho a lot more. I'd rate Rave Master higher as well.

Rurouni Kenshin is one of the bigger gateway anime that one I liked and two I got into it when it was fresh in the US. Cowboy Bebop is amazing and in this weird spot where it is probably both simultaneously underrated and overrated at the same time but I did not watch that when it aired on CN. Trigun sucked.

Out of those you mentioned, Cowboy Bebop is the only one I was ever able to watch.

It's a lot more western in many ways. So that's probably why. There are a lot of reasons to like Watanabe series in general though. He does things that most anime don't especially if we are talking about modern stuff.

You'd probably like the original Lupin manga if you like comics. Overall it's a fun franchise but there is a ton of it and inevitably some entries are much weaker than others.

Two manga I am enjoying right now: Peerless Dad and Useless Ponko.

I don't know exactly what you are looking for in shows and I think it's likely you just aren't interested enough in the medium to watch much but I am always open to giving recommendations based on various criteria.

I was a little more interested many years ago but not now really.

I was 12 or 13 when I discovered Dragon Ball, Kinikuman, and Fist of the North Star. This was all around 85/86, I had a friend who’s family traveled between Japan and the US a lot so he always had the latest manga and occasionally even a cel or a drawing from a show. I loved Dragon Ball and still do for art, the humor, the world it takes place in. (I got out at Freezer, by the time that happened we had tape trading down to less than a week delay from broadcast. By then US fandom was pretty large, the cons drawing 5000 people probably.)

Then a decade later it finally hit the US and it was everywhere. Fist and Kinnikuman never took off here. The most popular DB stuff seems to be crap like Brawly which was honestly just Jump treading water to keep making money. The best stuff is from the beginning right up to where Goku does the kamehameha from heaven with Gohan. That was sooooooooooo cool. We didn’t have Steve Universe and all that well informed s**t like that back then so honestly I was totally blown away by it. On US TV the good guys never died or cried or pooped or anything. They just won all day. It was a paradigm shift. Anything could happen in Dragon Ball. In American cartoons (actually animated in Japan largely) the characters only wear one set of the clothes, whatever the toy wore. Even Quick Kick and Roadblock at the North Pole on a movie budget.

All three of these series typify the Jump comics spirit of teamwork, making allies of your enemies, etc, but in different ways. Dragon Ball was the only one drawn properly from day one though. These days I’m more into Kinniuman than any of them.

Btw, “Tournament” is officially a genre of anime according to Netflix, these shows are largely responsible.

Epilogue: the same time I discovered these shows I saw Transformers: The Movie in the theater and Nausicaa on video as well as Dagger of Kamui, Ralph Bakshi, and I was already way into Macross. It was a pretty intense time.

Fist and Kinnikuman are both good and I would take them both over anything Dragon Ball. It's not that I can't stand Dragon Ball but it just goes on too long and gets patently absurd. I'm really hoping that Discotek will release Kinnikuman. You know, properly, Japanese audio and subtitled.

I’ve read all of Kinnikuman and I am assure you nothing is more absurd. The early stuff where he’s a direct parody of Ultraman right down to having the same signature move and he’s fighting Spider-Man and Superman by name with no rights. The art gets way better but the plots are beyond the stupidest things ever seen.

When I was a kid the violence really struck me. It’s extremely bloody and death filled. They for sure don’t make stuff like that anymore. I think Ramen Man probably lost 1000 gallons of blood over the course of the series.

Kinnikuman jumps in a fight to save someone else and his arm comes off. They take one of Buffalo Man’s horns and forge it into a new humerus so he can get back to fighting.

(It’s a wrestling series where if you win it you become king of a planet of wrestling supermen. Not metaphorically! You win, you will wear a crown a cape and wrestling undies.)

Kinnikuman and Dragon Ball for sure have the sense of humor with Fist being total stick up the butt serious all the time.

The absolute worst thing about DBZ is all the yellow headed guys screaming and powering up for days. There’s SO MUCH screaming and...can you imagine watching that dubbed? Oh man. That’s going to keep a lot of people away. For the first half of it or more though there’s almost none of that.

I guess I meant absurd in a different way. I enjoy general absurdity and wackiness in anime in the sense you are talking about, I even enjoyed bobobo. In this case I mostly meant the fact that there are basically multiple episodes spent powering up. Dumb and boring. I see you covered that later in your post, yeah that's what I was referring to.

I think that's epic, training for multiple episodes before a fight. So cool.

I was waiting for 5 hours out in nowhere for my next rental inspection the other day so I went to the library and read Dragon Ball vol 1. I've always known DB and liked the designs but never read or seen it. It was a cool take on the monkey king story and I was pretty surprised how racy it was even for a Jump comic. Actually when I think about it Katsuura's stuff was published in Jump and that's all pretty much teenage soft p0rn.

I've grown a strong distaste for tourney s**t because to me it's all the same; a bland and boring protagonist, beating up characters more interesting than himself. I understand they're supposed to be templates for self-insertion but that makes for a lousy character.

That's probably why I could tolerate the ones in the original Dragonball, Goku only won like one of them, didn't he?

Dragon Ball sort of invented it so you wouldn’t haven been tired if it yet.

Well, Kinnikuman did it earlier and pretty much the same way but that show only made it outside of Japan in the form of video games and tiny eraser dudes.

Maybe, but that's obviously not the order I originally saw them. I think G Gundam was the one that made me realize that I really, really don't like tournament-driven plots. I liked everything about that series EXCEPT the tourney angle. And I just dropped Dragonball Super after the whole Zamasu arc (oh boy, another villain who's in love with his own voice) because I knew what was coming next and I have no patience to put up with another 60 episodes of that crap.

To get this off topic even more, I don't think I've ever actually watched an entire episode of DBZ, I did have a Jamma board once but it was faulty.

Is Kinnikuman on DVD in the USA? I would love to see that series, had them as a kid as Muscles and had a chance years ago to get the 205 toy book
box set they released.

No.

I see where you’re coming from with G Gundam. It’s massively inspired, hot blooded as hell, but it was also a very very toy driven TV anime so it was padded and tournamenty. They were very much just trying to see if they could keep Gundam viable back then and the usual stuff wasn’t paying the bills so they tried some stuff...like, that was the first Gundam show where they have an army of mains and they all have a MS called Gundam so they can sell five model kits right off the bat instead of just one Gundam and a mid-series refresh. It’s also very obviously not in the original universe.

Giant Robo makes a nice alternative. Much shorter, no toys, absolutely incredible series. Also see Giant Robo if you think Big O is too long.

Big O is Batman right? Never did watch it all.

Giant Robo is great and a U.S. BD release is coming from Discotek.

Giant Robo felt too much like the kind of series that you can't really appreciate enough unless you're intimately familiar with the works of Mitsuteru Yokoyama, even if Imagawa plays fast and loose with the material. It's kinda like how I chose to watch Shin Mazinger! Z Impact as the first Mazinger anime so I could judge it solely on it's own merits, but re-watching it after watching pretty much all the other Go Nagai stuff and reading about the rest actually made it a better viewing experience since all those seemingly random cameos and appearances made sense with the new context.