What was the first ANIME you got hooked on?

[zakkrusz]

Very True. Toonami, and Adult Swim were large factors in accelerating my interest too. I was also lucky to get The Encore Action Chanel and the former Tech TV (RIP) which also showed some good stuff. Those introduced me to the sophisticated philosophical/psychological type titles which showed a facet of the medium I'd not seen before.

 

[Pilot Ace]

Whatever, I didn't really notice. If it bothers you, I can keep it in mind. I don't mind constructive criticism. *shrug*

I would actually really appreciate that.

 

[Roshi]

UFO Robo Grendizer and Captain Harlock in 1978/1979.

 

[Angel4576]

Some combination of;

Robotech, Mysterious Cities of Gold, Ulysses 31 and Battle of the Planets (Gatchaman).

 

[Rii]

Tekkaman Blade as a kid, Noir as an adult.

 

[The Laughing Vulcan]

I've had three phases of anime love....

1) I was a kid, and all we had was a TV set with three channels. I didn't even know what anime was, but I fell in love with Battle of the Planets, Ulysses 31, Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds, and especially Mysterious Cities of Gold. It was a bolt from the blue compared to the old Filmation and Hanna Barbera cartoon, shows that actually developed stories and characters over a set number of episodes, rather than recycling the same story week in week out. Last year I picked up MCOG on DVD and it was just as good as it was when I was 11 years old.

2) VHS. Around 19 years old, I started getting some disposable income, and we had belatedly entered the VHS age in our house, although. It wasn't until the BBC showed Akira one night, that I finally found out that Anime was not just cartoons, but a whole different storytelling medium. After that, Channel 4 put on the late licence strand, and showed stuff like Cyber City Oedo 808, AD Police, Devilman and Legend of the Four Kings. When the BBC later showed Wings of Honneamise, I was sold. I needed videos then and there. But videos were short on episodes, and high of price, and the Internet didn't exist, so I didn't know what was good and what was bad. I just went by BBFC rating, and what I had seen on TV. I opted for the 18 rated shows, and those which were complete in boxsets or on one tape, rather than buying 50 half hour tapes of the Guyver. I bought all the stuff I saw on TV, and some good stuff like the Ghost In The Shell Movie. But I also bought a lot of crap as well. Junk Boy, Urotsukidoji, Angel Cop, Genocyber. That put me off my second phase of anime, as well as the collapse of the industry in the UK in the later nineties. I have found my love for this era again lately, although finding some of those old titles is hard. I imported Cyber City Oedo 808 from Australia and I'm fonder of my Region 4 Wings of Honneamise DVD than is psychologically advisable. I've also tried some titles that I sniffed at for being family friendly back in the day, like New Dominion Tank Police and Orguss 02, and I reckon if I tried them back then, there wouldn't have been a gap between phases 2 and 3.

3) DVD. I started reviewing DVDs about eight years ago, but the UK anime DVD market really didn't pick up until about 2003. It was a dodgy reintroduction to the medium for me. I had upgraded my Akira video as soon as the disc was released, but I had no intention of wasting any more money. But, when the site I write for offered some anime check discs, I didn't sniff at 'free' anime. First up was Transformers Armada, which was so crap it beggared belief. Then came Sailor Moon, dub only discs and edited, although what I did see didn't entertain me in the slightest. The companies only tested the waters with Dragonball Z, releasing just a couple of discs, but again, from what I could see, I had no danger of being sucked back in. Then came Vampire Princess Miyu. Which wasn't half bad. A pretty attractive horror anthology series, with interesting characters and engaging stories. And I hate horror. Then came Love Hina...

Anyway, close to a 1000 anime DVDs later, a good proportion of which I went out and bought as well as those check discs that keep rolling in, I think I may be getting hooked again.

 

[Jim Steele]

Sadly I was quite late to the Anime party, so my firsts were Stand Alone Complex and Gunslinger Girl (got into them at the exact same time).

 

[Gojirob]

To me, Speed Racer was just another cartoon, albeit one I really loved, as a kid. Voltron (s) really blew me away, but it was only using stun rays, so I recovered off-screen. DBZ was the first thing I knew from the beginning was from somewhere else, and it wasn't until its complete CN run that I really got into it, and learned that the genre's POV and mine weren't always lined up. Tenchi intro'd me to the 'unwanted harem', Gundam to the responsive mechs, for want of a better term. Outlaw Star first showed me the reluctant slacker hero who steps up. Variable Geo was my first taste of High Octane Fanservice. Elfen Lied throws everything but mechs into the mix, and the manga actually briefly goes even there, sorta, and in a horrible way, big surprise. It also was my first taste of the staple 'people who are good or want to be can still be responsible for huge wrongs'.

 

[Heeroyuy]

Bubblegum Crisis-the original OAV. On VHS! For those curious about what it is, it's basically about four women who wear robot suits and fight rogue robots. It's basically Gatchaman meets Terminator meets Blade Runner.

It was later remade into a late 90s TV series and given sort of a modern makeover, but it lacked the nifty tunes and fun of the original.


Although it was the game Final Fantasy VII which got me interested in the medium....

 

[JediKnightButler]

Robotech was my "gateway show" thanks to a good friend of mine who showed me the first 36 episodes of the show (Macross Saga). From there I got introduced to other shows such as Project A-Ko, Bubblegum Crisis, Urusei Yatsura, Kimagure Orange Road, Dirty Pair, and a whole host of other shows thanks to a local anime club, comic book conventions, etc. It drove my mother nuts that I was so interested in anime when I was a teenager-she just couldn't understand why I liked it so much. I got kind of burned out on anime since then and haven't really kept up with a lot of the newer anime.

 

[Theonethatis]

For me - 1978 - KTLA Family Film Festival - Movie: Space Cruiser Yamato compilation film (one year later, the series was released in the U.S. as Starblazers).

This was the first Anime I saw on the same network at the same time. I used to watch the family film festival with Tom hatten every sunday. My dad and I discovered the Yamato that day. I have been a lifelong anime fan ever since. Wow thank you for that memory.

After that came Battle of the Planets, Then Voltron, The came The big one, Robotech. After that not only was I hooked but my mother was hooked. We still pull out the original Macross series and watch it every once in awhile.

 

[C.E. Evans]

I always liked Speed Racer, Battle of the Planets, and Voltron, but it was definitely Robotech that truly made me into an anime fan. Back in 1985, a cartoon that featured main characters that can evolve, fall in love, experience genuine tragedy, and even die during the course of the series was unheard of on U.S. television at the time and I was never the same since.

I've had a lot of favorite anime shows over the years, but I really could honestly say that Robotech was the one the first got me hooked...

 

[Angel4576]

1) I was a kid, and all we had was a TV set with three channels. I didn't even know what anime was, but I fell in love with Battle of the Planets, Ulysses 31, Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds, and especially Mysterious Cities of Gold. It was a bolt from the blue compared to the old Filmation and Hanna Barbera cartoon, shows that actually developed stories and characters over a set number of episodes, rather than recycling the same story week in week out. Last year I picked up MCOG on DVD and it was just as good as it was when I was 11 years old.

Just a guess, but sounds like you're a UK resident as well as that pretty much mirrors my experience with the genre in the mid to late 80s, including the same shows!

I think in terms of the videos, the biggest disappointment that I had was that the first half of the Macross saga of Robotech was released but suddenly stopped and we never got the remaining episodes. Having missed the series on TV (Sci-Fi eventually showed it), it wasn't really until the DVDs that I actually watched the rest of the series. The other thing that confused me was Macross: Do You Remember Love (or 'Clash of the Bionoids). COuldn't figure out what the hell was going on, it's Robotech/Macross but not?!?!?

My interest in the genre was pretty much in waves. I had the love from watching the likes of MCOG, U31, Dogtanian, BOTP that the Beeb showed, and that was it for a while, until Robotech resparked my interest. Then after that it was later reinvigorated by Evengelion when that was finally released.

There's also El-Hazard and Gunbuster that featured in there somewhere as well.

 

[Meredith]

Sailor Moon, then Ranma, then Tenchi... Then my life went into Otaku-ness.

 

[V]

I got into anime by watching Adult Swim when I went to college in 2003.

Well yeah I watched "Pokemon" before that, but because I got the video game and thought it was a good RPG, and "hey its a show for the game".....problem was there were 150 monsters and after they made 150 episodes, they ran out of ideas....

But really, I started watching Adult Swim Fall 2003 because I was up late buried in homework, and Futurama was in rerun (it wasn't on DVD yet)

and Sealab and such was on, but after that...well I watched a few episodes of Trigun, Cowboy Bebop, but never could watch from episode 1, so I didn't keep watching (I have a thing where I know I need to watch all the episodes to know what is going on)

But the first one that really grabbed me was...."Blue Gender". It was sort of like "Starship Troopers: The Series" but most apocalyptic; they *didn't* save the world, the human survivors fled to space stations and the giant bugs killed most of the people on the ground, and there's just this nihilistic post-apocalyptic vibe to it that I simply didn't see in normal TV: I mean *literally*, the two main characters are the ONLY people who live for 3 episodes at a stretch. Everyone they meet eventually dies.

However at the same time I watched some Big O episodes out of order (luckily the first season is mostly standalone), then they started over from episode 1.

So a mix of "Big O" and "Blue Gender"

Then again....I'm not a gigantic Evangelion fan, but by *randomly flicking channels* I watched the first episode during "Giant Robot Week" in February 2003. I had no idea what it was or what it was called, but when Adult Swim then chose to air the full series (without the massive edits) in October 2005, I made sure to watch obsessively.

***Also, Ghost in the Shell: The Series. I mean this was as close to a real adaptation of William Gibson I've ever seen. For a while there, they had a "Ghost in the Shell/Big O" hour from 1 AM to 2 AM on WEEKDAYS. What a time that was.

As for "movies".....I saw "Princess Mononoke" with a friend in early 2002. Later in 2003 at my high school anime club they showed "Akira" and "Ghost in the Shell"

My college didn't have an anime club officially, just some kids from the crafts house who squatted in an unused room and showed a whole wide range of stuff. Really opened me up to a lot of things. Also this is how "word of mouth" I first saw episode 1 of Elfen Lied.

 

[Admiral2]

Gatchaman, in the form of "Battle of the Planets" and Space Battleship Yamato in the guise of "Star Blazers".

 

[CorporalClegg]

You know, I don't even remember. My cousin lived in Japan in the early Nineties. (Her husband is an Officer in the Navy.) and I went and visited a few times and spent much of the time watching various shows with her kids. I could hardly understand any of it, but I loved it. They then sent me tapes of stuff. Eventually, I went around trying to buy what I could kind on VHS: The Slayers, Battle of the Planets, Robotech and some others I can't recall. I kind of got away from it for a few years, but then a friend of mine and I joined an anime club in college. By then, DVD was just starting to get big and the world really opened up.

 

[DigificWriter]

Although it wasn't my first exposure to Anime, Digimon is the first anime series that really captured my interest (it's the source of my primary online username, which is a shortened version of the phrase 'Digimon Fanfiction Writer'), and is something that I look back very fondly on.

 

[OdoWanKenobi]

Well, as I was growing up the big thing was Pokemon. So sadly, the Pokemon anime was my first real exposure. That and Dragonball Z were what got my interested. However, it stuff like Trigun and Cowboy Bebop on Adult Swim that made me a fan.

 

[Sephiroth]

I have the original Bubblegum Crisis on CD for windows 98