“You’ve been waiting for this moment”: New Dragon Ball: Sparkling Zero trailer is straight-up ’90s Toonami nostalgia

Dragon Ball: Sparkling Zero’s new trailer is throwing it all the way back to the late 1990s, and after school Toonami watchers are loving the nostalgia. 

Publisher Bandai Namco Entertainment released an all-new trailer for its upcoming, superpowered fighting game yesterday, and it’s edited to fit right in with ads you’d expect to see running on Cartoon Network’s Toonami block in the late ’90s and early 2000s. 

There’s the classic lo-fi dramatic music, quick-cuts to a bunch of DBZ’s iconic faces delivering badass lines, what seems like voiceover from veteran DBZ actor Christopher Sabat, and it’s 45-seconds long – about the length of time a Toonami advert would run for. Even the thumbnail looks like it belongs to a VHS stop screen. Check it out below and prepare yourself for a dramatic, Ratatouille-esque flashback moment.

I was nothing but a bundle of cells when Toonami was at the height of its powers, delivering beloved Japanese anime to kids worldwide, but I’m happy to see so many millennials getting a kick out of the new Sparkling Zero trailer.

“Whoever was the marketing person in charge of the advertising trailers for this game needs a massive raise,” one YouTube comment reads. “Every trailer just makes me more and more hyped for this.”

“Millennial DBZ fans said ‘fine I’ll do it myself’, went to game design school, got hired at Bandai Namco and are working on this game/editing these trailers,” another says, “Respect.”

“The lo-fi in the background, the Chris Sabat voiceover mixed in with the character soundbites, and the power-up sequences; somebody said it earlier but this has an early 2000s Toonami/Adult Swim vibe and I love every bit of it,” a third fan wrote. “They’re aware that most of their player base is coming from that era of time.”

Dragon Ball: Sparkling Zero is smart to capitalize on that era, considering it’s another Budokai Tenkaichi game, and that series debuted right after Toonami’s initial run. We’ll see what other call backs are there – not including the 20 Gokus and 15 Vegetas  – when it launches on October 11.

Check out our Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero hands-on preview to see why we think it has the potential to reinvigorate anime arena fighters.