This week Dragon Ball Z began airing nightly on the Cartoon Network at 10:30 p.m. (ET, PT) Monday through Thursday, providing increased exposure for this powerful property. 

FUNimation Productions has sold over 20 million videos (DVDs and VHS) of the action adventure DBZ anime series in the U.S., and there have been 20 DBZ-related video games released in North America with sales of over 9 million units.  Even though the series debuted on DVD in the U.S. way back in 1999 and is now well past its peak of popularity, eight out of the Top 50 anime DVDs for 2005 were Dragon Ball Z titles.  More proof of the property's continuing popularity can be found on the current BookScan survey of graphic novels sold in U.S. bookstores, which finds Vol. #24 of Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball Z manga at #8 in sales for the week.

The beauty of DBZ is that with 291 episodes it will take nearly a year-and-a-half to run the entire series at four episodes per week.  Throw in the 153 episodes of the original Dragon Ball anime, the 64 episodes of Dragon Ball GT, the various Dragon Ball movies and specials -- and the Cartoon Network could go on running Dragon Ball shows four times a week for close to 3 years without repeating any episodes, by which time another large group of kids would be in the prime demographic for the series (8-14).