Forum - View topicHow did you get into this anime thing, anyway?
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FloruOtaku
 Posts: 19 Location: Florida |
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As an anime fan I generally enjoy speaking with and getting opinions from the community, so here I'm wondering just how most people not only discovered anime, but how they really became to enjoy it. For me, I really started enjoying anime as its own thing when I sunk up late at night to watch adult swim to see things like FMA and Wolfs Rain (yeah, in retrospect, I was way to young to watch that stuff). A few years go by and I become more and more cemented as an otaku from reading manga and watching anime suggested by my friends.
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Chiibi
 Posts: 4829 |
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When I was eleven years old, I started to take an art class at a community college in the summer. A girl there had Sailormoon trading cards and I thought they looked interesting so I asked her about it. She told me when to watch the show, which I did. Every single week day. Since DiC was SO BAD at editing, I could tell the show had to be foreign, somewhat...but I didn't know what country it was from. Until one day my dad brought home a laptop with THE INTERNET, and behold, the glorious doors to the shining anime world were opened to me.
After that, I went to Hollywood Video and rented every single VHS that had bright-haired, big-eyed cute characters on the cover which led me to meeting Ranma, Tenchi, Evangelion, Record of Lodoss War, Gunsmith Cats, Slayers, Birdy The Mighty, and all those unfinished two-episode OVAs from the 90s. I immediately changed my foreign language class request from German to Japanese. My heart was captured by the gorgeous style of shoujo manga when I picked up the first volume of Magic Knights Rayearth at a Waldens bookstore. And when I attended my first anime convention at age 16, I knew there was no going back.......I had become an otaku. |
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murph76
 Posts: 3291 Location: Akron, OH |
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I didn't become an anime fan until I was 30.
In 2006 I changed jobs at my place of employment, working late into the evening instead of days. There's not a lot on TV in the middle of the night, so after work I'd flip on Adult Swim to unwind after my shift. Their anime lineup (specifically Cowboy Bebop, Ghost in the Shell, Fullmetal Alchemist and FLCL) really hooked me. Around the same time, Turner Classic Movies put on the "Month of Miyazaki," introducing me to Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro and the classic Ghibli films, further cementing my love of this medium. I started collecting anime because of Adult Swim, too. After months of catching random episodes of Fooly Cooly, I finally was able to watch the series in order from the beginning. Well, through episode 5 that is. After broadcasting that episode, AS announced a lineup change that didn't include the program. I was invested in the show and had to know how it ended, so I visited Suncoast (back when it was still open in the area) and paid full retail price for all three volumes (about $100 total). Later, I learned buying online was cheaper, and only after that did I discover fansubs. In college (mid-90s), I rented Project A-Ko and Perfect Blue from my neighborhood video store. However, that was the extent of their anime section so it never really clicked with me. Also in college, I learned that Star Blazers (which I watched as a child) and Robotech (which I knew of but was never into as a kid) were anime. I really loved Star Blazers, it was so different from the other shows. It's a huge nostalgia title for me. So, here I am. 37 years old, same job, mortgage, car payment and an anime collection that occasionally frightens me because of its size and the fact that it keeps growing. But it's a pastime I really love. |
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FloruOtaku
Posts: 19 Location: Florida |
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Lul
that kinda reminds me on how I was glued to the Adult Swim TV as a elementary schooler when I had the chance. Everything was just so... different and fascinating in this mystical world of... whatever the hell I thought I was watching at the time. Of course, my taste at that time still pertained to Digimon and Card Captors, but something in me was naturally drawn to the adult stuff.
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DuskyPredator
 Posts: 15578 Location: Brisbane, Australia |
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Probably from being recomended to watch pokemon when I was early years of Primary school, we went to a small market with a family friend with the kid around my age. I recieved some small toys of the charmander evolutionary line, looking up google image I was able to find this, and then I watched my first episode on morning cartoons that I was not even aware of. I continued with various shows like Digimon, Card Captors, Mew Mew Powers (edited version of Tokyo Mew Mew), etc (I didn't like Sailor moon though). I really did not even know they were anime until like ages later, I knew they were foreign, but it clicked more when I saw some of my seniors reading manga that it was a japanese cartoons, they were actually reading an ecchi scene.
Didn't even manage to go out of my way to watch it until I finished Highschool and got the internet and looked up Death Note that I saw a comercial of on a tv chanel I would never watch. That trailer really caught my eye. Joined ANN a year latter. And now I am a mess of over 280 or so series. |
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Observe
 Posts: 28 Location: Oakland CA |
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When the sci fi channel first began, they used to show vampire hunter d, lens man, project A Ko, dominion tank police and robot carnival. This was back in the early 90s. Then around like 95 I got really into it, mostly from ninja scroll. So then after that I was renting all the ranmas, tenchis, neon genesis, moldiver, biohunter, el hazard, etc. I never got into dragon ball z because I always thought the animation wasn't that good.
Last edited by Observe on Sat Mar 02, 2013 4:16 am; edited 1 time in total |
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FloruOtaku
Posts: 19 Location: Florida |
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I remember Animondays
 I would watch MONSTER on it all the time back in '09. I still haven't seen the entirety of that show... *sadface*
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WhiteHairGirls
 Posts: 4713 Location: New York City |
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I watched Pokemon, Digimon, Zoids, Sailor Moon, etc as a kid, but I didn't know they were actually dubbed anime. In high school my friend recommended me to watch Bleach and I think I also started watching Naruto at the same time. Also watched Death Note and Slam Dunk while in high school. Fast forward to my sophomore year in college, I was still only was watching Naruto and Bleach. One week I felt super bored and was browsing youtube and fell upon a top 10 anime video. So I basically watched most of the anime in the video and my addiction had started. Oh and I stopped watching Bleach and Naruto. It has been about 3 years since I found that youtube video and I have watched over 200+ anime.
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Beltane70
 Posts: 3978 |
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Wow, you guys are making me feel old!
My exposure to anime began back in the late 70s with the Battle of the Planets version of Gatchaman, followed by Space Battleship Yamato as Star Blazers. A few years later,1980 or so, my family got cable and Showtime showed a group of 70s robot shows under the Force Five name. Around the same time, Mattel toys released some of the robots under the Shogun Warriors line. A few years later, Showtime would go on to show TechnoVoyager under the name Thunderbirds 2086. Over the next few years, I watched Tranzor Z (Mazinger Z), Voltron (Golion and Dairugger XV), Warriors of the Wind (Nausicaa)and Robotech (Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada). During that time, it was also not uncommon to see the cheap toys from many anime shows in Toys R Us, despite the fact that some of them never aired in the US. I remember a lot of 80s mecha anime toys and some models from shows such as Orguss, Dunbine, and Dougram. I even remember seeing a fairly large Dancouga toy in one of the KayBee Toys around me. While I was somewhat aware that some of the shows were Japanese, I still didn't know the term anime, nor knew that there were so many other shows as well. It wasn't until just after Robotech finished airing that I discovered anime in its original form. That brings me to my first anime discovery at a science-fiction convention in New York City when I saw one of the dealers showing a bootleg copy of an anime film. I remember recognizing the mecha in the movie, but not the scene that was being shown. That's when I asked what the film was and learned that it was Macross: Do You Remember Love?. I wound up ordering a copy from the dealer, and after seeing DYRL in its entirety that the door to the world of anime was opened. After the Macross movie tape, my next few anime titles were Macross Flashback 2012, Dangaio, Megazone 23 Part II, and the first Appleseed OVA. After that, the next 27 years of my anime watching is a complete blur. I have never looked back! |
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yoshiyukiblade
Posts: 305 |
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Like many people who are currently in their 20s and probably 30s in the US, I really got into anime when Toonami was in full swing on Cartoon Network.
As an aside, I actually watched a few anime shows before my brother and I got deeply into anime in general. He discovered DBZ on Fox one early Sunday morning and we followed the it starting somewhere in the middle of the Frieza saga all the way to where the Ocean dub ended. From that point forward, we got into various movies and stuff but never really watched anime religiously (I saw Ninja Scroll when I was waaay too young). Pokemon was thrown into the mix as well. Anyway, come my early teenage years in junior high school (now known as middle school), we found out that DBZ was airing on Toonami and got a chance to watch it in full, with the new dubs continuing from where it left off before. It was still a strange time in my life where everything we watched, my friends and other kids in school were watching too, so it always felt pretty normal. From that point forward Toonami introduced me to a plethora of new shows and it finally became a regular daily ritual to tune in and enjoy. After HS, my interest dropped off a bit, but I can't really recall a year where I was completely devoid of anime. I was always either watching a new series here and there or rewatching old favorites. It wasn't until about a year ago where a free Netflix trial really re-ignited my interest in anime. This one-year time span of watching anime easily exceeds all the anime series I ever watched by far. |
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MadMan400096
 Posts: 266 Location: Chicopee, MA |
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To be honest, I've always been more of animation in general, not just anime.
As a kid, I happily indulged in such cartoons as Tom and Jerry, SpongeBob SquarePants, and Looney Tunes. I think the first anime I regularly watched was Pokemon. I used to lean more towards homegrown animation, but now I watch animation from all countries, anime included. I guess you could say Pokemon was sort of my gateway anime. |
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Alan45
 Village Elder Posts: 10033 Location: Virginia |
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I picked up a couple of VHS tapes in a comic shop that looked interesting. I found I liked them and looked for more stuff like that. It has been all down hill from there. That was in August 1997, I was 52 at the time.
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marie-antoinette
 Posts: 4136 Location: Ottawa, Canada |
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I watched some anime when I was little, mainly Sailor Moon though I also loved Digimon and what little I saw of Escaflowne (yes, someone did watch its very brief fun on Fox Kids). But at that point, I wouldn't really call myself an anime fan, just a fan of some anime. But I knew that all of these shows were from Japan, unlike any anime I may have seen before, which I think is decently significant.
I didn't really become an anime fan until university. In my first week, I met a new friend who was a big anime fan and she introduced me to some of the more adult titles (started with Trigun). That year, I also joined the newly-formed anime club at the university and was pretty much hooked. It's been 10 years now (wow!) and I'm still very much into anime and manga.
The 70s? What's that? 
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Princess_Irene
ANN Associate Editor
 Posts: 2657 Location: The castle beyond the Goblin City |
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I started to like anime before I even knew what I was watching. My sisters and I used to get up early when we were, oh, about 6, 4, and 2 (I was the 6) every morning to watch Mysterious Cities of Gold on Nickelodeon - we loved that it had a continuous storyline. Mom must have known more about it than we did, because she brought us home Unico on VHS, which proceeded to scare the life out of all three of us. Around the same time we saw Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealer, which isn't technically anime, but shared a lot of characteristics with it I now realize. Things just sort of ballooned from there, and here I am now!
...clearly I had a fascination with East Asia from a young age, though, because my favorite non-animated show around that age was "The Nightingale" episode of Faerie Tale Theatre with Mick Jagger as the Emperor of Cathay... |
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RGaspar
 Posts: 245 |
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You could say it was all thanks to a videogame magazine I read as an early teen.
But before I tell that story, let me just say I was already watching anime when I was a kid. Dragon Ball, Saint Seiya, the first two seasons of Sailor Moon and some other series later on like Yu-Gi Oh! and Pokemon. But I didn't register them as "anime" or as anything special, I'd have switched any of these shows for a more interesting western animation asap if they bored me. As I actually did with Dragon Ball Z when the Majin Buu's arc was taking ages to get things done. Followed the whole thing for years and called it quits just some 30 or 40 episodes before the finale. 
So, you see, I wasn't really a fan. Then, in the years leading to the new millenium, I used to read a great videogame magazine that, for reasons I don't know, had a lot of anime subculture on it. They talked about hentai Ovas, big hits in japan, Final Fantasy games and stuff like that from time to time. I didn't have internet back then, so I was unable to check out the things they mentioned but one title in particular stuck with me: "Neon Genesis Evangelion". They talked wonders about NGE. It was like the second coming of Jesus for them. Jump some 6 years and I was going to college. The first thing I did when I got the money and time was to buy the Evangelion DVDs. Now, that was a completely blind buy for me, I even thought it was a show about mechas in space. Best Blind Buy Ever. The first episodes were a bit hard to swallow, being my first full-japanese voiced anime and due to the slow pacing, but after Asuka appeared I was hooked as hell and became an anime fan inmediately. Then, I'd start watching slowly the usual big titles everyone was talking about back then. These were things like Elfen Lied, Full Metal Alchemist (2003) and Death Note. I eventually re-watched and completed Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon, too. Those two series ate a lot of my anime time in the early years. It wouldn't be until my third full year into anime that I dared to watch stuff on my own, stuff that wasn't that common in my country. That was 2009 and I got to know Cowboy Bebop and Spice & Wolf, that was an enlightening year. Nowadays I have seen more than 100 series and I'm sure I'll double that amount in no time. |
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