The best way to determine if this anime is for you is by answering one simple question: do you like cheese? No, seriously, because this might be one of the cheesiest anime I have ever watched. This is in no way, shape, or form a condemnation. Sometimes you have to tell it like it is, and if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and has feathers like a duck, then it's probably a duck. Lucky for you, I like ducks, and I think the first 24 episodes of Slam Dunk are pretty all right too. The first batch of episodes does a solid enough job of communicating exactly what type of show you're getting yourself in for. The problem is, I didn't KNOW what I was getting into at the jump, but there's still hope for you guys reading this review.

Slam Dunk is a classic that many older anime fans have grown up with, and its impact is still felt today. In an era where we get crazy and inventive sports series every other anime season, there was a time when Slam Dunk was seen as the height of the genre alongside other classics like Hajime no Ippo. I enjoy sports anime more than watching actual sports because of how exaggerated and heightened the games can be. I want to say that I was spoiled by modern-day sports anime, but they colored my expectations on what to expect from them. When I started watching Slam Dunk and realized that we weren't seriously talking about basketball until maybe episode five or six, my initial impression wasn't amazing.

I'm not kidding when I say it takes an ungodly amount of time for the show to reach its first official basketball game between the main characters and another school. The game only makes up about a third of the first twenty-four episodes. Slam Dunk spends just as much time having funny side plots about rivaling clubs and delinquent gangs as it does establishing the basics of basketball. It's initially off-putting and borderline disappointing because this dichotomy applies to our main character, Hanamichi.

Slam Dunk is a cheesy high school comedy as much as a basketball anime with some cliché love triangle shenanigans thrown in there for good measure. The main driving force that gets our protagonist Hanamichi on the court in the first place isn't some desire to be the best, but rather it's just to impress a girl who happens to be a huge basketball fan. I'm not kidding when I say the show focuses just as much on Hanamichi's lousy luck and misunderstandings with women as it does on his actual capabilities on the court. This makes him funny and even endearing in some ways, but it also makes his motivation seem shallow. If you're following a character that doesn't have nearly as much investment in what's going on as he should, then why should I care? At the very least, I will ask why we're following him, not those around him with a stronger passion for the sport.

But then, slowly (and I mean SLOWLY) but surely, we begin to see what Slam Dunk is trying to do. Slam Dunk is a product of its time when high schoolers with chiseled jaws and pompadours were seen as cool and eccentric. Basketball is the show's focus but not necessarily the driving force. Hanamichi, as a character, is the accelerant as he is the one that everybody desires or is put off by. The show is about his influence on other people and their influence on him. Hanamichi's growing skills as a basketball player do begin to yield a more fleshed-out of character, and if you're a beginner with basketball, then learning the basics with him can be a lot of fun. It's nothing profound, but Hanamichi is earnest and a hard worker when he puts his mind to things, and you look forward to those moments when he does. The problem is he doesn't always do this and lets his temper get the better of him, but basketball might prove to be the thing that causes him to get everything together.

I say "might" because this show has over one hundred episodes, and we're only reviewing the first twenty-four. This is supposed to be the beginning of a much longer journey, and while what's here is okay, it's far more drawn out than it needs to be. When you have a show literally called Slam Dunk, and the majority of the show takes place off of the basketball court, it's borderline false advertisement, and I think this is something that a lot of other sports anime that have followed in Slam Dunk's footsteps have done a better job within the decades since. Even when we get to the actual basketball games, the payoff doesn't match the execution, given the show's somewhat dated animation.

It doesn't look terrible, and there isn't nearly as much recycled animation as I thought there would be. However, the show does that classic pattern of repeating still frames and using flat-panning shots to establish movement instead of just animating it. Some moves, like the titular "slam dunk, can look cheap with motion tweening and dramatic stills. Then, when the show tries to do something fancy with its animation framing, it can borderline get confusing. When a character tries to dribble around somebody, we might get these quick, dramatic cuts of where the ball is going and what characters focus on. It's certainly ambitious, and after the sequence is over, I can connect the dots, but that connection is far from a straight line. Overall, the show just looks OK at best and messy or uninteresting at worst.

So as a strictly sports anime, Slam Dunk falls short, but as I mentioned before, it isn't just a sports anime. Once you accept that, it becomes much easier to accept the show for what it is and even have a good time. This show is dripping with '90s cheese and has the comedic timing of a high school sitcom with slapstick elements. Each episode even ends with a dramatic still shot or a scene overlooking a sunset. I watched the episodes on YouTube thanks to Toei deciding to dump all of them on there (although they could've done a much better job with the subtitling), but honestly, it felt like I was watching something retro off of a CRT TV. There's a little cute commercial break in the middle that is told in English, the characters are incredibly loud but passionate about what they believe in, and while I didn't bust a gut laughing at all of the gags, I did finish most episodes with a smile on my face.

I love all of this. Slam Dunk isn't trying to take itself too seriously, and just when you think it might during some of the tenser moments between two thugs or two basketball players or both, it'll do something slapsticky to lighten up the mood. The show's soundtrack heightens this cheesiness to pure enjoyment levels, which is one of the best things about Slam Dunk. Did you ever watch one of those old workout videos with really catchy and repetitive electric keyboard melodies? That was the thesis for the compositions that make up this show. It's very goofy yet uplifting and creates an atmosphere that's easy to slip into, like a warm snuggie while you bob your head to the beat.

There's something to be said sometimes about how well a show has aged and whether or not it has anything to say in the modern day. I wonder if I'm grasping the same appeal that so many other people fell in love with in the past, but that doesn't mean that I didn't grasp any appeal at all. While Slam Dunk might not be as kinetic as I would like it to be, and certainly some elements show their age, like the animation, I can't deny that Slam Dunk has a lot of heart. It may be only rough at the start, and follow-up episodes will display a better balance of the high school antics with more involved sports action. Only time will tell, but if you ever thought about checking out this classic, give it a shot but know what you're getting yourself into first.