| Interview With Chris Psaros - 10 years later | |
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After DBZU closed in June of 2001 and as the series kept progressing throughout the years, DBZ fans everywhere have always wondered "What does Chris Psaros think about this?". When I decided to host DBZU, I realized that it was literally 10 years after it closed. Since I was also one of DBZU's biggest fans, I contacted Chris out of the blue to see if he would like to do a "10 years later interview". Luckily, Chris agreed and now I present:
 Interview conducted by Ryan "Castor Troy" Molina | |
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It's been a decade since you've closed up shop on DBZU. What have you been up to in the past 10 years? |
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Well, I guess that would HAVE to be the first question. I hate having to get into a big answer right off the bat, before we've even gotten shitty rap songs and Goku's missing penis out of the way, but I guess there's no way around it.
The last thing I said to most of the people who will read this is that I was leaving my site so that I could move on to "bigger and better things," and, since that was my excuse for ducking out before I was finished, they probably want to know how that turned out. To say what I need to say about the last 10 years, I really have to go back 14 years, to 1997, to the months when I was creating the site. Imagine somebody who is, on his best day, mildly narcissistic, and on his worst day, a full-blown self-absorbed egomaniac with a messiah complex, someone with a totally unrealistic sense of how he measures up to the rest of the world. He has a good idea, and the idea evolves into a wordy, passionate website. It meets with immediate and massive success, largely as a result of a lucky, high-profile link from an authority website (the Anime Web Turnpike). Inertia takes care of the rest. As they say nowadays, it "went viral." For the next 3 years, this person, who you'll remember came into this as a hyperemotional narcissist/egomaniac ALREADY, wakes up every single day of his life to dozens of emails telling him that he's brilliant, and funny, and sublimely creative, and a tremendous writer. It gets to the point where people are literally making fansites about him. And the egomaniac is just completely taking all of this for granted, like it was inevitable and he will be able to reproduce the effect at will any time he wants, in any arena he chooses, for the rest of his life. Again, the readers can't really be blamed (since most of them are about 13 years old), but they're unwittingly creating a supervillain. So then it's 2001. Our webmaster, who at this point has become more monster than human, is 24. He has absorbed unmitigated worship for 3 years and has reached 100% of his ultimate, horrible battle power. He's about to finish college, and he decides, now that he's all grown up, that it's a good time to close down his website about a cartoon and move on to Phase Two. He doesn't know exactly what Phase Two is yet, but figures that will take care of itself. Then the real world cracks its knuckles and says "oh, is this the kid who thinks he's hot shit?" And so, ten years after walking away from my very popular website, where I'd amassed my own personal fan-army, and in the wake of which I honestly thought I was about to become some kind of superstar, I'm back to tell you that I didn't. The warning has frequently been given out that finding early success at something can be dangerous to the ego. Over the last 10 years, I became the poster-child (or the poster 34-year old man) for that warning. Without going into detail, let's just say that nothing has gone quite as well for me as being "the king of Dragon Ball Z" - whether that's other websites, business ventures, creative projects, or competitive endeavors. I've given a lot of things a shot. Most of it has ended up in flames. I could go into more detail, but suffice it to say, the end result is that I work for a (struggling) publishing company and do tech support on the side. That's about it! So, I have underachieved. I did NOT move onto bigger and better things. But then, I suppose that's only in terms of material success. What I HAVE succeeded at is increasing my skills at everything, getting wiser, and being (mostly) happy. Often frustrated, but happy. I live in the most beautiful area in the world, and my girlfriend is the best. So it doesn't matter that for an entire decade just about everything I've tried to MAKE happen has sucked a massive dick and exploded. I've been given a lot by grace, and (so long as I'm in a moment when I orient myself correctly), I'm happy. |
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Around the time you closed DBZU in 2001, the FUNimation dub had already finished the Android-Cell Saga and had started on the Buu saga to finish the series. Did you still keep up with the DBZ dub on Cartoon Network until the final episode aired in 2003? |
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Before we go further, I have to say one thing: I am (for the most part) almost completely out of the anime/manga world now. I don't follow it, or video games, or much of anything on TV, or really any kind of "fandom" at all.
So, I'm not in the loop, and would be totally out of my depth talking about anything from the last 10 years that is not exactly Dragon Ball. But, to answer your question, I DID continue to follow the FUNimation dub to the end. I didn't necessarily watch every episode live as it aired, but I couldn't NOT see it through. I watched the dub of the original Dragon Ball too. |
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Any thoughts on FUNi's Buu saga dub and the entire dub as a whole now that it's been finished for years? Did you feel the Buu saga was better or worse than the rest of the series dubbed? Did you ever think that FUNi would finally reach the end of the series? |
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Well, the dub is almost entirely shit, as we all know, and the fantastic work that FUNimation has done on other shows since then (Kai in particular, and even the original Dragon Ball) only makes the badness of DBZ stand out more glaringly and frustratingly.
The Buu saga was not the worst, I guess, but it was certainly no prize. As for the newcomers voice-wise, Videl was fine, Goten and Trunks, meh, Bibidi was alright, and Dabura was good (but only because it's almost impossible to fuck up a character like Dabura). The voice for Buu himself (fat Buu) was bullshit. As for my feelings about whether or not FUNimation would finish, in the beginning (the first two seasons), I was unsure of DBZ's prospects. I knew that all it needed was to hit a critical mass and it would be unstoppable, but reaching critical mass was the trick. Once the third season hit Cartoon Network though, and immediately started crushing in the ratings, it was a done deal. From there I had no doubt that they would get through the rest, and then do GT, and DB, and then systematically and relentlessly re-release all eighteen thousand episodes over and over on each new video format that comes along until the end of time. The DBZ dub is a weird thing in that FUNimation treated their crown jewel - the reason the company was even formed in the first place - like their abused stepchild. A lot of that was just a "status quo" thing, probably. By the time they finished DBZ, I'm sure they knew that their dub was garbage in relation to what they were then capable of, but the standard for the show had already been set, and it was too late (or too much effort) to suddenly completely change course. Or, I don't know, maybe they could have. But certainly not with things like restoring the original music, or anything else that mattered. Can you imagine how confused the average viewer would have been if they turned DBZ on one day and Kaiou-sama suddenly had a voice that DIDN'T sound like a piss-gargling retard? I don't know if the American people were ready for that yet. |
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In 2001, the Ocean cast came back to dub DBZ for the remainder of the series in other countries like Europe. Have you seen any clips or episodes? If so, what was your opinion? |
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The latter Ocean cast episodes are a powerful testament to the importance of directors, producers, and writers - the people behind the scenes.
Here you had this cast (Ocean) that was on fire when they first took hold of the characters, replaced suddenly by an abysmal, totally green cast (FUNimation's) that was pathetically imitating the original voices and hoping nobody would notice. But the new cast steadily improved, until they were just as good (maybe even better) than the Ocean cast. And then the ball got passed BACK to the original cast, only with a different crew in control, and the result ended up being almost as bad as the first, immediately post-FUNimation-takeover episodes! It was just a really funny and bizarre thing to see. It was a great example of how actors and voices are not enough. You need talented people running the show. |
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Did you watch FUNi's DBGT? Any opinions on "Step into the Grand Tour"? |
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I have a confession to make: I have never seen Dragon Ball GT. Not in Japanese, not in English.
I don't mean that as in I've literally never seen it, I've seen many episodes and most of the first arc or two, and I cheated and watched the last episode because I needed to have the experience of being a titanic dork by actually, physically crying when Goku went away forever (which I did), but I have yet to actually sit down and watch the whole series, from beginning to end, and process it. And yes, I know all about "Step Into The Grand Tour." I hate it a lot, and I think my poor heart would have exploded if they'd done something like that to DBZ on day one. Yet, at the same time, even to this day I sometimes find myself silently whispering "a brand new adventure begeeeins, another challenge for Goku and his freeeeeinds" to myself, so it wouldn't be fair for me to call it a complete failure. I guess it's not that big of a deal. Making rap songs for US anime adaptations seems to have become par for the course, or at least was for a while. I also witnessed that fucking war crime of an opening theme that 4Kids used for One Piece. Also, I appreciated the faithful remake of the Japanese theme when they put GT out on the Season Set DVDs. Sung by superstar Vic Mignogna no less! Gotta love the Minones. (Hey, and the remake of the One Piece theme too! Mignogna!) |
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In 2005, FUNi finally released DBZ Episodes 1-67 under their "Ultimate Uncut" label. Did you watch any of it and if you did, what were your thoughts? |
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To be honest, I don't even remember which release that was, or what made it different from the half dozen "definitive" releases that came before or after. Was it the one with the really good-looking box art? In any case, no, I never watched it. |
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In 2007, FUNi finally released their dub of DBZ with the original Japanese score on their "Season Sets". What are your thoughts on this? Do you feel it helped the dub or was it a little too late? Also, what were your thoughts on the "widescreen" presentation on the Season Sets? |
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Regardless of any other virtue or vice, at its foundation it's a fundamentally broken product. FUNimation hammered a square peg into a round hole, breaking both the peg and the hole. A 4x3 show cannot be presented in 16x9. Period. At least not without major work (that they didn't do).
I actually have a good deal of "experience" with this run of discs though, because my girlfriend had never seen DBZ and we decided to Netflix our way through it. We started three years ago and still aren't done yet! We seem to be going at about the pace of the original airings. It was interesting to hear the original score with the dub actors. Especially since that may be the thing I always wanted most dearly from the dub. The discs are watchable (the awfulness of the cropping is unintentional entertainment unto itself), but I would never dream of buying or owning them. Ultimately it was the Daizenshuu EX crew that said it best: all FUNimation DBZ products can only be *almost* perfect. No matter what else they do right, some little (or big) issue always has to be wrong. In this case, it was the cropping (and it was a monster-big issue), but everything else was good. And I love the "marathon mode". |
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Any thoughts on the "Dragon Box" sets? |
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I'm shocked that they did it, and did it so faithfully. But then, over the last few years, FUNimation has really been awesome to the fans and what they want, so maybe I shouldn't be so shocked.
I haven't personally gotten my hands on them. And even though I just got through saying that FUNimation always leaves some critical thing amiss with every Dragon Ball product, I've heard that the Dragon Box sets are the one thing that they got right. Which make them even more remarkable. |
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Do you own any of the recent DBZ DVD/Blu Rays like the Season Sets, Dragon Boxes, Kai, etc? Do you still collect DBZ merchandise? |
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I guess I've implied this by now, but I actually don't have the DBZ TV series on DVD. I have the specials and a few of the movies, but that's it. That probably sounds weird - the guy who made one of the major Dragon Ball Z websites doesn't even own a copy of the series - but that's just how things turned out. During the DBZ Uncensored days I was working from VHS tapes recorded from broadcast (International Channel for the Japanese version; syndication and/or Cartoon Network for FUNimation's), and I never upgraded to DVD. If and when I do, it'll be the Dragon Boxes of course.
As for general DBZ merchandise and whether I "still" collect it, the truth is, I never DID collect DBZ merchandise. Except for those stupid Burger King toys that came out in 2000 (was it 2000?), which I had to get simply because my 1994 pre-DBZ-in-America self would have exploded and died at the very thought of a DBZ fast food tie-in. It just tickled me pink with laughter to see DBZ hit the American mainstream so hard, and I wanted a memento of it. I never had much in the way of DBZ stuff. But that's kind of just me in general. I don't really "collect" anything. I don't like stuff. I don't like owning things. Stuff is a pain in the ass! The last piece of DBZ merchandise I had was this fucking awesome Super Saiyan Energy Drink that I drank a couple weeks ago. I admit that I can't bear to throw the can away. |
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What are your thoughts on the entire franchise as a whole and how it's evolved in the past decade? |
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Well, if you mean "evolved" in the "gotten better" sense, I don't think it has.
If you mean "evolved" in the scientific sense of "change through time," I guess all I can say is that it's aging fairly gracefully, and it's nice to see that some pack of stupid assholes (or a Toriyama gone bad) hasn't come along and created some ridiculous, terrible thing in its name to ruin it. We've gotten something akin to the "Star Wars Special Edition" with Dragon Ball Kai, but thankfully no "Star Wars Prequel Trilogy"-type thing, except for that OVA that came out a couple years ago, which I haven't watched, but heard is mediocre at worst. My understanding, though, is that the DB franchise is sinking beneath the waves. It just isn't pulling in the dough anymore. That's fine by me, it's probably about time. I say let it go, and revive it again somewhere down the line. I don't like franchise overkill. It doesn't change the thing itself, or make it less meaningful to me, that it's no longer as commercially viable as it used to be. |
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Do you still browse around what's left of the DBZ web community? Rest assured people still talk about and think very highly of you even today. :) |
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Funny you should say that. The "think very highly" thing. That's something I really need to talk to everyone about.
Remember the infamous DBZ Uncensored forum? Maybe this is going to sound presumptuous, but to me that place was the precursor to 4chan's /b/. It moved almost as fast and was just as chaotic and horrible. Anyway, believe it or not, the DBZ U forum actually still exists. An offshoot of it anyway. After ezboard shut the forum down in the Great DBZ U vs. Tenkai War of 2000, people from DBZ U, and from the forum of Mike Payne's old "Mr. Popo's Palace" site, came together at a spinoff forum. It quickly stopped being about DBZ (or anything else in particular). When I first came to the forums, I noticed that the posters were treating me with this "arm's length" distance and respect that made me feel kind of lonely and excluded. So I said to myself "I have an idea! I'm just going to start being really annoying and shrill and childish and confrontational and awful in my posts, and then maybe people will get more comfortable teasing me, the way they're all teasing each other, and I can be one of the guys." I wanted to take the formality down a notch. I wanted us to reach a level of comfort where we could "fart around each other", so to speak. Well, I tried it. They didn't like it. Then something snapped. I turned my back to them, pulled down my pants, stuck my butt in the air, and that was it. A year, then two years, then three years, then eight years later, I was still going. They forgot what my face looked like, because I had shown them nothing but my ass for so long. I was literally the worst message board poster of all time, and completely despised. I tried on many occasions to stop, to go back to the more respectable DBZ Uncensored-like Chris, but it was too late. You don't recover from that. And the habits had become too ingrained, too automatic, too unconscious. My "alter ego", or my ass, or whatever you want to call it, had completely taken over. I just could not shake the new "voice" that I had adopted. My posts were the most blustery, irritating garbage you can imagine. So, my involvement with the DBZ web community since I shut the site down pretty much boils down to tormenting, and being tormented by, a group of former DBZU/MPP fans (none of whom have actually been into DBZ for years), whom I've subjected to basically nothing but my absolute worst, shittiest, most impulsive aspects for over a decade straight and who all (understandably) hate my guts now. I've only recently gotten myself under control there. The point of this story is that the initial seed of my bad behavior was discomfort around the reverence with which I was treated among the DBZ web community. I think a lot of the esteem directed at me during the DBZ U years simply came out of the fact that at the time I was in my early 20s, and the readers were young and impressionable, and my site was really passionate and earnest and thoughtful. So, sure, a bunch of teenagers are bound to look up to THAT guy (and to remember him with rose-colored glasses). But the truth is, I can really be a massive buffoon. In fact, that's probably a much more accurate day-to-day characterization of who I am. DBZ Uncensored was me at my most eloquent and meditative (and nerdy), in contrast to the me that runs around doing retarded, attention-whoring (also nerdy) stunts, like writing almost 6,000 words in reponses to an interview about my decade-old Dragon Ball Z website (tee hee). In any case, outside of my self-destructive antics at the ex-DBZ U forum, I never did much personal interacting with anybody from the community. People treated me like I was Martin Luther King or something and it was always just kinda awkward for me. I mean, if everybody's built you up into this larger-than-life figure, and then your skeletons start poking out of the closet (which they inevitably will), where is there to go but down? As for "lurking", I never stopped going to Mike(VegettoEX)'s site every now and then. Once Kai started I checked in there fairly regularly. He and I were never quite the same after the aforementioned Forum War, but I bow in amazement and admiration at his dedication TO STILL BE DOING THIS. His output is unbelievable. What's the podcast up to now? Like 300 episodes? So, I go there, and sometimes Kanzentai (which is an awesome site), but nowhere else. I'm not even aware of any other DBZ fansites worth visiting. Most of the "big names" (Planet Namek, Suushinchuu, etc.) have been gone about as long as I have. For me, the DBZ web community is a memory, and a nostalgic reminder of what the Web in general used to be like. The DBZ websites of the late 90s/early 2000s could never happen again. Not on the content level, not on the creative level. We (and anyone else doing anything on the Web at the time) didn't have the same tools that people do now. We often started with nothing but a blank page in some text editor, and hammered it out in raw HTML by hand. Since then, all the CMS's and prefabricated templates and whatnot have come along and changed everything. The new paradigm removed a huge technical barrier-to-entry (which is good), but it also made it so people didn't have to face the same demands of creativity and inventiveness (which is bad). Most sites nowadays start from an underlying conceptual skeleton (usually a blogging platorm) that you just plug everything into, even though the platform may not be the best one suited for the content. This is a long way of saying, damn I miss those old DBZ sites! They were often so shitty in so many ways, but that was the charm. There was so much more diversity in terms of look and feel and experimentation, because so many of those sites were built from scratch, and there was no CMS to do a lot of the thinking and designing for you. And, you didn't ask this, but no, I have never considered rejoining the community! Aside from this interview, I'm done writing about DBZ forever. (Though I always thought it would be a funny joke to suddenly show up in like 2007, reopen my site, and just jump right into the Garlic Junior episode comparisons as if my last update was yesterday.) |
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Here's the biggest question of them all: What's your opinion of DB(Z) Kai? Do you keep up with it? Do you feel it's better paced than the original DBZ anime? |
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Dragon Ball Kai started out exciting and mysterious (when nobody knew what it was or what it would be like), received a mixed but mostly positive response (when it arrived on TV), but ultimately crashed, exploded, and burned into a pile of tragic rubble (when it was cancelled two-thirds of the way through, the score was torn away in disgrace, and - to put the cherry on top - the final episode was bumped into oblivion by news coverage of the earthquake and tsunami).
I loved what Dragon Ball Kai might have been, and solidly enjoyed what it ended up being (that is, before it completely derailed). I mean, a manga-only edit of the DBZ anime! Such a great idea! I used to contemplate that very thing. In fact, I don't think I ever mentioned this on my site, but I always thought that would have been a smart direction in which the international versions could have gone (though none of them did). All that extra filler gunk was in there during the Japanese broadcast purely to stall for time, and if you don't need to stall, why not get rid of it? I have mixed feelings about the DBZ filler - some of it's great, some of it's terrible - but regardless, the storytelling is just so much stronger without it. DBZ's filler turned one of Toriyama's greatest storytelling strengths - lean, brisk, urgent pacing - on its head into its exact opposite. The sluggishness of the DBZ anime is a joke to non-fans. Kai cuts through all of that, the story shines through, and confronts those non-fans with a show that's a lot harder to complain about. And I loved Kai's score. A lot of people didn't, but I thought it was fantastic. I was disappointed when it started to get overly repetitive (oh, this track again?), but I always felt that the Shunsuke Kikuchi score fit Dragon Ball better than it did DBZ, and that DBZ would sound really cool with something more epic, sweeping, and Hollywood movie-ish, like Kai's was. (Of course, as things turned out, I guess it sounded a little *too* Hollywood movie-ish!) Now for the criticisms: I don't like the 16x9-ing of the footage. Since the whole show was actually re-framed and re-drawn (where necessary), the project was a whole different ball of wax than FUNimation simply dumping a 4x3 image into a 16x9 frame for the DVDs, but the results were far from good. A lot of the redrawn footage looks simply ghastly. Certain instances were welcome, and were pulled off beautifully (such as Vegeta's fixed color scheme in the early episodes) but much of the rest looks like spliced-in footage from a different show - a show drawn by eight year olds with broken thumbs. Oh, and the censoring. That's obviously right in my wheelhouse, so I know you're expecting me to talk about it. This was disappointing and surprising, but I can't blame the producers for it, since apparently Japanese broadcast standards have changed since DBZ originally aired. Still, I was floored when I saw that DBZ was now being "cleaned up" even in its home country. My goodness, you can't show baby Goku's wee-wee on Japanese TV anymore? What has this world come to?? Seriously though, some of the paint-overs were bringing back memories of the Saban syndication era. I mean, come on guys, you can still take the gore out of the Goku/Raditz suicide blast without reducing the wound to a bruise! The real problem with Kai though - and this also isn't the fault of the producers - is that the whole effort has now been rendered useless. First of all, it was left unfinished. If there's no Buu era, there's no completion, and if there's no completion, what good is ANY of it? I don't desire to own or watch an incomplete series any more than I desire to own or play with an incomplete deck of playing cards. To be honest, Kai was all set to replace DBZ for me, for "rewatch" purposes. It's flawed, but I'll probably want to watch Dragon Ball again someday, and life is too short for me to ever sit through the Garlic Jr. saga or "Bulma vs. the Namekian crab" again. Since Kai was abandoned two thirds of the way through, that's no longer going to be an option. Second (and even in the unlikely event that they do go back and complete the series), the new score has been replaced with the old one. And I liked the new score! I like the old one too of course, but it makes me sad that the new one was cast into HFIL and I'll never be able to hear it again. So, Kai was moving along just fine, but the events of the last six months have pretty much capsized it and sealed its fate as a total fiasco. Here's the wonderful thing that came out of it all, though: the dub. Thank you, FUNimation. You did it. Finally. After more than a decade, I got to hear (more or less) what I wanted DBZ to sound like the day it premiered on American TV all those years ago. I was continually impressed - in some cases stunned - episode after episode, by the acting, the writing, and the casting (Chris Ayre's Freeza is fucking music to me). If FUNimation had come out of the gate in 1996 with a product like this, DBZ Uncensored never would have existed. I almost can't believe it's (mostly) the same people involved. They've still got Schemmel voicing Kaiou in that inexcusably awful way, because, once again, FUNimation can't seem to ever let anything DBZ-related out the door without carefully ensuring that at least one thing about it is shitty, but generally speaking, the dub of Kai is a triumph. Which makes Kai's premature death in Japan all the more tragic. |
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Any words for the long time fans? Got any cool projects, sites, etc, you want to plug? |
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I'll start with projects, etc.: First, let me apologize for "Nobody Cares" (and here's hoping that nobody rememembers what I'm talking about). Anyway, there's really no intersection at all between the kind of stuff I'm doing on the Web now and DBZ U.
Most of my modern-day projects are anonymous, and are more about experimenting, or keeping the rent paid, than being creative or expressive about things that I actually care about. Other than the things I do for work, I'm more into the business angle of website development now. Sad but true, and by necessity. Getting old sucks! Sometimes there's a little overlap. For example, right now I'm working on a guide to the exercise program P90X - which I'm very excited about lately because P90X kicks ass and is in the process of getting me back into shape - but I don't think that's something DBZ Uncensored fans will care about. I have a stable full of ideas, and I'm always working on them. But if I ever manage to do something else that actually catches on and becomes a phenomenon like DBZ Uncensored was, my name may not be attached to it. Over the last decade I've come to appreciate the importance of anonymity, after making some big mistakes in that regard. In any case, if I create anything that I want to claim as my own, I'll link to it from my homepage: http://chris.psaros.com. Now I understand, though, that DBZ Uncensored may very well end up being the most "popular" thing I ever do. I don't exactly take credit for it, because it was bigger than me in terms of my timing and my subject, and success with anything largely comes down to accidentally doing things right, but something about that site created a powerful and lasting resonance in people's minds. I mentioned 4chan's /b/ earlier. A few weeks ago I went on there and started reading a "You Nostalgia, You Lose" thread. I (anonymously) posted the DBZ Uncensored logo and said "does anyone remember this site?" Eight people piped up to say that they did, that they "nostalgia'd hard." This thread existed for the typical hour or so, and while 4chan isn't exactly a representative sampling of humanity, it's not the center of the anime/manga community (nor the DBZ community) either. So to get eight random /b/tards reporting in as DBZ U fans within the thread's brief life, that was just amazing to me. Since the day I walked away, DBZ U has been kept online by people other than myself, passing through multiple hands. When one lets it go, another always comes along and picks it up. I have mixed feelings about that, because the site is mostly embarrassing to me now. The writing is contemptibly bad (on many levels) by my current standards, the design/markup is dreadful (even for 1998), and the whole thing just seems like the work of some naive virgin manchild. And yet, you can't argue with results. Tens of millions of pageviews, with absolutely zero promotion on my part (I'd kill to be able to do that now). The site touched people. Actually, on at least one confirmed occasion, people touched themselves to the site, but that's another story. (Does anyone see any way that all of this could NOT have gone to my head?) The fact that there's always been a person or group that's taken it upon themselves to keep the light on at DBZU, years after the site has been rendered completely obsolete and irrelevant, is interesting. For myself, it's proof that somewhere within me is the raw material to connect with people and create a hit (though, to be fair, a hit on a much earlier, smaller, and simpler Web, when it was easier to do that). Maybe I've got another hit in me somewhere. I once did an editorial, near the end of DBZ U, about "elite DBZ webmasters" that ended with a tongue-in-cheek prediction of "the DBZ webmaster: ten years later." Well, now it IS ten years later. I read that editorial the other night with my girlfriend, and we were laughing at the things that actually ended up happening (and some were eerily close, right down to the weird mildew). But most of it - the things that matter - didn't turn out that way. The "me" of that editorial looked desperately and longingly back at the glory days, he was lonely, and he had given up. None of that came true. P.S.: Dragon Ball Evolution sucked. |
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I'd like to thank Chris for taking the time to answer this interview and now we should all know his thoughts on what's been going on with the series in the past decade. This interview was conducted over the course of several months as the news of DB Kai ending at the Cell saga was circulating, the music being replaced, and the decline of the series' sales figures. Chris was gracious enough to provide additional answers as more of the news was coming in.
 "Do I have to think up a clever joke every time they censor Dr. Briefs' cigarette? To hell with that. I'm tired of these damned shots." Past Editorials
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