Americans were constantly behind the curve, as new episodes debuted in their native Japanese long before they were translated and localized on Cartoon Network’s Toonami. The Dragon Ball information trade was slow at the turn of the millennium.

Everyone was trying to put the pieces together of who these people were, and how the Dragon Ball story unfolded.” “All of it was fascinating and novel, and fans shared clips and characters with a lot of excitement. ”We’d spend hours each day on our 56K modems downloading images of different characters whose names and likenesses were foreign to us, and random, low-resolution video clips from across the different series, including from GT, which had yet to air,” says Derek Padula, a Dragon Ball historian, and the author of a forthcoming book called USA DBZ: The True Power of Dragon Ball Z in America. No one questioned it because no one wanted to break the spell. When the image appeared on prehistoric fan forums of the late ’90s, it was easy to buy in.

Aesthetically, Super Saiyan 5 merged the hairy, primeval weirdness of Super Saiyan 4 and the angelic excess of Super Saiyan 3. His mane was crystal white it spiked down his back to meet a regal simian tail and a billowy pair of ivory fight pants. There he was: an immaculately chiseled Goku, pecs and delts where they couldn’t possibly exist, standing aloft and unfazed above another alien battleground. In 1999, the Dragon Ball faithful witnessed the image of the fabled Super Saiyan 5.

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