When I was a child, around eleven or twelve, my father would take me to Blockbuster. It was the sort of place you could wander through for an hour if an adult wasn’t there to gently remind you it was time to go. I always knew, in that period at least, what I wanted to buy—not rent—or, more accurately, what I wanted my father to buy for me: Dragon Ball Z VHS tapes. They contained episodes I had watched already on Cartoon Network. But it was important, like possessing any talisman, to have the physical tapes, to not only rewatch but collect them, amass them in colorful rows on my bookshelf. To leap forward into the future, my father had to take me somewhere else—a local video game store, several streets down from Blockbuster, that sold bootleg Japanese VHS tapes. Since not all of Dragon Ball Z had aired yet in the United States, I could only know about the series’ full progression through these tapes. Subtitled, with Japanese commercials for candy and cleaning supplies thrown in, they offered me a thrilling, grainy window into what I could expect. I saw the villains who had not yet arrived on American shores and the terrible sacrifices my heroes would eventually have to make.
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