sleet01

Great, two things I have absolutely no need of are combining.

Folks who were young smokers when the first bans started are now running studios/writing scripts?

This is a tough one… the first anime I saw was Space Battleship Yamato, imported into the US as Star Blazers, but outside of thinking that it was completely different from other cartoons I didn’t know anything else about it.

Eventually I caught some episodes of Harlock and saw that there was more than one show with this style, but didn’t realize they both came from an entirely different industry.

Through the next 5~6 years I came to recognize the “anime look” in various other media - many American cartoons farmed their intros out to TMS or Toei and it was obvious that there was something different going on - and Japan was constantly in the news as their economy (actually The Bubble) took off and big American businesses reacted to that “threat”.

Around this time I saw the Galaxy Express 999 movie on VHS, partly because it looked cool but mostly because I knew by then that Lieji Matsumoto was the artist behind Yamato and Harlock and wanted more of that.

So that might be the first anime I watched because I knew what it was. But “anime” wasn’t really in the vernacular then; it was still “Japanese cartoons”, or maybe “Japanimation”.

The first anime that I watched because I knew it was “anime” was probably Bubblegum Crisis: a friend’s brother got fansub tapes at the big local university and brought them back to share around over summer break.

He also brought Urotsukidoji, but that’s a story for another time…

Gonna watch this at lunch!

Casting Hishikawa Hana and then having her do her best Mao Mao impression has to be intentional, right?

• blows dust off classic Fellowes floppy disk caddy *

“Gimme some sugar, baby!”