I've been in the middle of completing a bucket list goal of mine I've had since I was a young adolescent. I got super into Dragon Ball Z back in the late 90s thanks to Toonami. And when I say I was really into it back then, I actually mean I was OBSESSED with DBZ from the time I was about 12 until I was 15 or so. Unfortunately during this time, the US hadn't even got the whole Frieza Saga yet, which for those that don't know is not even halfway through the series. By the time I started getting into DBZ, Japan and various other countries had already got all of Z and GT at that point. I both was tortured and hyped beyond belief to see pictures, short video clips, and screen captured images of these yet to be officially released DBZ and DBGT episodes and it just fed my obsession even more. Unfortunately DBZ in the late 90s and early 2000s was released at a snails pace. By the time my DBZ fandom had started to falter, the Buu Saga episodes hadn't even been released officially in North America yet, and the Cell Saga was barely up to the Cell Games. It was beyond frustrating, but eventually I sort of got out of DBZ and anime for the most part by 2003 or so.
Fastforward to the early 2010s and I started buying the DVD box sets for all the DBZ and DBGT episodes and was finally going to watch all the episodes I longed to see when I was a 13 year old kid. It literally took me a decade to finish all 291 episodes of DBZ, and about a year and a half ago I started watching DBGT, a show I never got to enjoy when it was first coming out. I'm only a little over halfway through DBGT, but I have some thoughts.
It has really been a rollercoaster in terms of subjective enjoyment of GT. Unlike a lot of fans, I actually enjoyed most of the Dark Star Dragon Ball Saga where Goku, Pan, and Trunks travel across the universe to collect the scattered balls. It gave me massive Dragon Ball vibes, but on a much grander scale. Unfortunately these early episodes were a big reason why DBGT was almost cancelled and the whole Baby Saga was created in order to save the series and also make the show more like DBZ instead of Dragon Ball. This transition has some of the worst writing and editing I've ever seen in an anime. It's like reading a book that's missing random pages and chapters and you literally have to piece together those missing parts to create a cohesive story. Also around this part in the series, the action and some of the ideas start to get really, really good. The crappy part is as soon as I feel like the show is starting to get really good, it takes me out of it again by getting really terrible once more. There are so may great ideas in GT, but the execution on most of them is flawed at the best of times, and absolutely awful at the worst. DBGT also does the opposite of Z where things happen way to quickly, leaving no time to develop anything naturally and everything just feels super rushed. Compare that to DBZ taking three episodes of almost nothing happening before a little bit of something occurs. A healthy median would be nice. But overall, I'd rank DBGT a 4/10 series so far. I still have to get through the Super Android 17 Saga and the Shenron Saga, which I've unfortunately heard mostly negative things about, but then again the whole series is generally despised. What's funny, and a little sad is I've actually enjoyed GT more than everything in the Buu Saga after Majin Vegita dies while fighting Buu. Let's see if I still feel that way once I finish DBGT. At the very least, I'm very happy to finally be watching a show I probably would have killed someone if it meant I could own and watch DBGT back in the late 90s lol.