My first encounter with Toriyama's work wasn't DBZ or Chrono Trigger--I mean, it might've been promo art for Chrono Trigger or DQ or something, but I hadn't played those games yet. My first real encounter with it was totally context-free parts of Dragon Ball episodes experienced while barely awake on Saturday mornings. Given the timeframe this would've had to be the "BLT dub," Funimation's first ill-fated attempt at the IP. According to this site, it failed to catch on at that point partly because the distributor was "unable to secure anything but very poor timeslots," and while this isn't coming from a vetted scholarly source, that was my experience--waking up around 7am on Saturday to catch the back half of an episode of a cartoon that looked like nothing I'd ever seen.
I guess this wasn't my first exposure to Japanese cartooning more broadly, which would've come from games. But I was very young at that point, and it probably was the first thing I saw that made the case that you can do a sustained and coherent fantasy story about anything. The setting doesn't have to be a facsimile of Europe during a narrow window of human history. You don't have to emulate historiography at all--you can build a whole structural foundation out of the logic of humor or the logic of anything really. Maybe the Monkey King rides around in funky little cars. Why the hell not?
Also, much has been said about his fondness for vehicles, but it must also be acknowledged that the man knew how to draw a dino.
