30 Day Anime Challenge #1 – My Very First Anime

Ever since stumbling into anime blogging many years ago, I’ve always been fascinated by writers who can keep up a regular posting schedule and not leave their blogs to languish for months on end. I tend to write when the mood strikes me, and sometimes I simply have trouble coming up with something useful to say. One tool that writers use to get their brain juices flowing are writing prompts; simple thoughts and challenges to get into a creative state of mind. Well, bloggers have plenty of prompt-lists too, and I’ve decided to try one! I’m not sure if I can keep to a one-a-day schedule (I’m already late a day, since I wanted to do this for the month of June…) but hopefully this will help keep my mind nimble and ready to write about all those other ideas that bounce in and out of my mind randomly.

As you can probably tell from the title of this post, prompt #1 is “What is the very first anime you watched?” For me this is a surprisingly difficult question to answer, because I grew up in a time when a lot of what we would call “anime” nowadays was repackaged for Western audiences and thoroughly scrubbed of anything that could identify it as Japanese. One of my favorite recent discoveries is that Inspector Gadget, which was one of my favorite TV shows as a kid, was animated by TMS in Japan and existed partly due to a proposed Lupin sequel series that had failed to materialize. Besides that, my past is sprinkled with half-memories of one-off TV broadcasts of movies like Galaxy Express 999 and some of the fairy tale collections that used to air on Nickelodeon, which I realized long after the fact were produced in Japan.

It wasn’t until I was in about third or fourth grade that I started to get a sense of what Japanese animation was and what it looked like due to, of all things, comments on my drawing style from some savvy friends who were somehow more in-the-know than I was (clearly my weeb instincts were developed even if I didn’t quite realize it yet). I was too young at the time to really participate in the anime fandom that I now realize did exist, at sci-fi conventions I couldn’t have attended as a solo kid. Also, the internet didn’t exist in anything close to the form it does now, so online fandom networking was completely out of the question. Strike three was that I didn’t live anywhere near the coasts where being exposed to foreign entertainment would have been much more likely as a matter of course. It wasn’t until I was in middle school in the mid-1990s that I can definitively say my knowledge of anime’s existence and my still-limited access to it allowed me to anticipate the US release of a series that is probably the “first anime” of many people my age – Sailor Moon. I have to give partial credit where it’s due – I’m pretty sure that TV Guide had a mention of the show in one of their articles, and I read that magazine every week since, as a geeky kid, TV was my life. Obviously once I actually watched the show, goofy English dub and edited episodes and all, it was love at first sight.

Sailor Moon appealed to me because it offered me something different and unique; it was a cartoon series made for girls that allowed its characters to have different personalities and interests in addition to their heroic exploits. This sometimes lead to personality conflicts (both comical and serious) but almost always demonstrated how individuals with differing sensibilities can still function as a team. Usagi, the protagonist (known as Serena in the original US release, yikes) was a complete disaster in many (most) life situations, but ultimately saved the world with her earnestness and pure heart. As someone who was kind of a disaster in adolescence, too, it was comforting to know, with examples, that even without performing very well in school or being the “perfect” friend I still had worth as a person. I also loved that the show’s various story arcs always contained romantic sub-plots in addition to the exciting monster-of-the-week action; in an age when the term “chick flick” was thrown around as a derogatory term and “strong female character” meant an emotionless male action hero painted over with a female body, it was empowering to see that experiencing and prioritizing love and relationships didn’t detract from the heroism of the characters. In fact, it often served as their motivation and source of strength. I feel very lucky to have been in the right place at the right time in my life for the show to affect me in the deep ways that it did. Judging by how many women my age seem to have similar feelings towards the show, I know it wasn’t an isolated phenomenon.

After being thunderstruck by Sailor Moon I became a devotee of The Sci-Fi Channel’s Saturday morning anime programming block, where they showed some really varied (and at times shockingly violent and risque) stuff like Robot Carnival, Akira, Project A-ko (both the surprisingly entertaining first movie and the later, weirder ones), and Dominion Tank Police. Eventually I became friends with other people my age who were into anime, the internet caught up with fandom (and then began facilitating and supplementing it), and now I can’t even keep up with the amount of anime I would like to watch that’s easily-available. I now consider myself a life-long anime fan, or at least for as long as anime is still being produced. But it was my lucky chance meeting with Sailor Moon in the wee hours of each weekday morning that gave me an inkling of the wonderful things I could seek out from animation from Japan, and it’s the memory of that early fandom passion that’s kept me devoted for so long.

How about you? What was your first anime? Let me know in the comments if you have any special memories you’re willing to share!