I watched some Dragon Ball on TV as a kid, wasn't a fan at first, until I randomly saw the first or second episode. The beginning is very charming and has such a sense of adventure! I didn't know about Manga at the time, and you couldn't just "binge" TV shows back then. So now I tried to catch every single episode. I think this was the first TV show I saw where time actually passes - unless you were following some soap opera for decades, that wasn't really a thing! At some point there's a gap in time where the characters all go their own ways and then meet again for a big tournament, and the main character actually got a major growth spurt. As far as I remember, that was basically unthinkable in an animated show in the 90s, and to be honest that's still very rare today.

And that's when it felt like I was growing along with the characters in the show. After the next fast-forward, the main character is grown up, has a wife and a kid who looks a bit like he did when we first saw him. From then on, the manga/anime sheds pretty much anything outside its core formula (they fight some monster, lose, train really hard, then crush it) and it's mostly superheroes and monsters flexing and yelling. But teenage me ate it up. "Dragon Ball Z" was quite delayed in my country, and it's difficult to explain why a kid like me got very excited about some anime characters changing their hair colors, and would then download RealPlayer clips of that over ISDN. If you were a teenager at that time, you definitely had a whole bunch of cryptically named DBZ characters in your MSN or ICQ friends list.

On a completely different note, Akira Toriyama just completely redefined action in manga. I know he was pushed to do more martial arts because of the success of things like "Fist of the North Star", but I doubt you got this sense of motion and intensity on a piece of paper before Dragon Ball. Some of that got through in the anime as well, and it was the other main reason I was fascinated by it as a kid.