Ill have to give it another shot. I only got through an episode maybe two. Did not grab me.
Comment on Anime Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion Thread [2025, Week 36]
Rottcodd@ani.social 5 days ago
I delved way back into the past last week and watched Magic Knight Rayearth and thoroughly enjoyed it. Sure it’s a bit dated and silly in places, but it’s engaging and good looking and the story turns out to be quite a bit more than it initially seems.
HubertManne@piefed.social 4 days ago
Unboxious@ani.social 5 days ago
Have you had a chance to look at the Magic Knight Rayearth manga? The art is incredible.
Rottcodd@ani.social 5 days ago
Thanks for the heads up - I’ll check that out.
I watch older anime almost exclusively, but with manga, I’m following so many new series and adding new ones all the time that I generally don’t have the time and energy to read older ones. But I keep adding them to my TBR anyway…
nyan@lemmy.cafe 5 days ago
I would say the third OP (“Hikari to Kage wo Dakishimeta Mama”) was superior to the first one. (The second OP, on the other hand, was so terrible that it was excluded from the dubs for the first English release.)
The plot twist at the end of the first season is classic CLAMP, though, from before they got so obsessed with linking every manga they ever wrote together.
Rottcodd@ani.social 5 days ago
I haven’t gotten to the third OP yet. I just started watching the second season the other day, and haven’t been able to give it my full attention yet, so have only seen four episodes. And yes - the OP is awful.
wjs018@ani.social 5 days ago
Big fan of Magic Knight Rayearth. It was one of the first shows that my (now) wife and I watched together when we started dating. It was a lot harder to watch anime back then, but she actually owned a copy so that we could watch it together.
Rottcodd@ani.social 5 days ago
Why I’ll always have a soft spot for Gundam Wing and Tenchi Muyo and Vampire Hunter D snd Ninja Scroll and Trigun and Cowboy Bebop and…
wjs018@ani.social 5 days ago
Before I went to college and had reliable access to (relatively) high speed internet, watching anime was…difficult. I remember passing around both VHS tapes and DVDs with friends at school (this was around the time most of us had a dual VHS/DVD player at home). Often I would just get to watch a couple episodes of a show, maybe or maybe not in the right order since they were basically all unofficial. I remember watching random episodes of lots of shows during this period in my life and not fully understanding the story, but just thinking it was cool or having a friend that knew what was going on and could catch me up (Ranma, Trigun, Fushigi Yuugi, Urusei Yatsura, Rose of Versailles, and many others I don’t even remember).
Some of those Toonami shows (in the US) were really the first ones that I could reliably count on watching in the right order and through a whole series. So those kinds of shows were really formative for a whole generation of us. I have fond memories of talking about shows like DBZ and Yu Yu Hakusho (in addition to Bebop and Gundam Wing which you mentioned) with friends at the time.
These days, even if you run across another anime fan irl, with 50+ shows coming out every season and broadly available, it is not too likely you are even watching any of the same shows. That’s not a bad thing per se, but it is a very different vibe than how it used to be when anime was much more niche.
Unboxious@ani.social 4 days ago
PC Gaming has the same issue. Just 15 years ago if you were a PC gamer you were probably aware of 90%+ of the games on PC that were worth playing, and you’d probably played a significant percentage of them. If you had a friend who was also a PC gamer the odds were extremely high that you played some of the same games. These days it feels like you really have to go out of your way to make the same thing happen.
Rottcodd@ani.social 4 days ago
That was a lot of the thing. There was such a limited number of anime released on VHS that all of us that were fans then tended to have seen the same things, so conversations naturally went to Akira and Vampire Hunter D and Bubblegum Crisis and Ninja Scroll and Hellsing and so on.
And as you note, another part of that was just seeing parts of series. Like I had a tape with the first four episodes of Trigun, so for years, that was all I knew of it. (Imagine the impact when I finally saw the rest - it’s mood whiplash enough when you watch it straight through).
Toonami opened things up and exposed a lot more people and provided a dependable way to watch a series all the way through, but it was still a relatively limited set of shows - Gundam Wing and Cowboy Bebop and Tenchi Muyo and so on.
And yeah - it’s a whole different world now. Now there are so many choices available any time that the biggest issue I face is option paralysis.
And on the topic of the VHS era of anime - a video I’ve always liked - a barrage of anime from that era, set to music: SR-71 - Let It Whip