My origin story is pretty standard stuff - grew up in the '70's on a diet of Americanized anime-cartoons and fell in love. For me, the big formative title was Battle of the Planets. I adored "Princess" and "Mark" - and am still actually quite fond of 7-Zark-7 and Keyop's silly vocal tick. Voltron was also big around that same time. During my childhood and early teen years, I don't think I had much active awareness of *why* I enjoyed the anime-based shows so much more than other cartoons – but when I came across something in “that style”, I always felt compelled to watch. (I came across a version of Little Women on Nickelodeon once that I'd *still* love to hunt up. It's always bugged me because I don't think it was the World Masterpiece Theater version.)
I’m sure I saw Robotech during it's first run, but I don’t think I was able to watch every day, because I never quite understood what was going on. The plot always seemed to be jumping around - and the Macross/Southern Cross/Mospeada time-shifts were particularly confusing.
Still, I saw enough that when I came across the Jack McKinney books in my late teens, they caught my eye. I revisited the story through the books, and that led to a period of hard-core Robotech obsession during my sophomore year of college. I was just getting started on the Prodigy dial-up network at the time, and went looking for Robotech conversations in their "Animation" section. There wasn't much there, but I eventually figured out that I'd have more luck in the weirdly-named "Anime" section instead. From there, my curiosity got piqued by all these weird acronyms - OVA, BGC, KOR, VGA. And that was that. Once I found out that the art style I'd always liked had a special name and that there was MORE of it, there was no question of whether I'd be interested or not... just an immediate "Yes, please!"
I started hunting at the local comic store where I'd recently blown several hundred dollars on Robotech tapes, but after handing over another $40 on the only other anime VHS they had on hand (Vol. 1 of AnimEigo's KOR OVA release), I swallowed my distaste and went the Blockbuster route. (At the time, Blockbuster was the Walmart of the video rental business - swooping in and killing off all the local mom-and-pop stores - so I'd been boycotting the new one that had recently opened in my town.)
Once I got more familiarity with all those acronyms, I spent quite a lot of time talking (and a bit of trading) on the Prodigy boards, and later had a lot of fun with the small community of anime people on The Sierra Network. Girl-type anime fans were a bit of a novelty back then, especially in such a small community as TSN, so I found several of the guys quite eager to help me expand my knowledge with tapes and other free stuff. A friend in California also hooked me up with phone numbers for Nikaku Animart and Kimono My House - two stores that had lots of cool anime merchandise that I'd never have known about in those pre-internet-shopping days. (I still get kinda nostalgic for those days of ordering off of the Nikaku "catalog": three black-and-white pages, printed with three columns of text on front and back, stapled together with nothing but the names of items and their cost. Choices were made solely on whether the title "sounded cool".
)I had a bit of a lull in my fandom for several years in the late '90's. My small ponds on Prodigy and Sierra Network had dried up when everyone moved to AOL (and later, the internet overall, of course) and I found it a lot harder to make connection in the big oceans of AOL and r.a.a. It was harder to find reliable people to trade with, but the rapidly growing commerical VHS market was too expensive for my budget, so my viewing new anime slowed to a trickle.
Things picked up again when DVD's got popular and nowadays, a good 90% of the stuff I watch is via online rental from either Netflix or GreenCine. I'm still very interested in all sorts of anime, and my rental queues are usually a mix of old and new. I wholeheartedly agree with what others have said that the rise of shows about moe-girls-doing-moe-things really, really sucks... but I also find enough good-to-excellent shows in any given year to keep me hoping that the balance will eventually shift back.
Currently, my anime fandom is probably at as high a level as its ever been. A friend and I started an anime meetup group several years ago that has introduced us to several good friends that we wouldn't have met otherwise, so I see a lot of titles I might not have thought to try through our monthly get-together, and I spend way too much money on various sub-collections of anime-related stuff. (DVD's, of course, but I also have a sizable stash of anime artbooks and Totoro/Studio Ghibli merchandise that I'm moderately proud of.
)Ummmmm... I guess I'll close with a few favorite pre-2000 titles. This isn't a scientific "Top 10" - just the ones that jumped out at me when I look over my list on Anime Planet and seemed worth mentioning. (Also, I disqualified movies, or I'd have had to mention everything Studio Ghibli. I do have a bit of an obsession with Totoro.
)- KOR/Maison Ikkoku - I lump these together because they both represent to me a time when you could have an iconic fanboy-bait female character who is still a unique individual with flaws and foibles of her own instead of a cookie-cutter clone of every other girl of that "type". Plus, both shows are just great fun.
- Gunbuster - The first show I saw after discovering anime that really wow'd me and showed me how gut-wrenching this stuff could be. The moment where Noriko boards her father's ship and opens the doors to the bridge, expecting her father to be there, would probably still be in my top 10 list of 'most powerful moments in anime'.
- Patlabor - I love, love, LOVE this cast to bits. It's not always the strongest show in terms of plot, but I'd so love to go out and have a beer with these characters that the occasional clunker episode doesn't really matter.
- Lodoss - Even in old-school anime, you don't often get this level of serious, straightforward epic fantasy in anime. I love the scope of it, and the dragons always amaze me - one of the best portrayals of the sheer majesty of dragons in any medium, imo.
- Koko wa Greenwood - If I could wave a magic wand and revive any series, it would be this one, without a doubt. The humor is so sharp, and when it turns to a more dramatic (but still comedy) plot with the final mini-arc, it nails that, too. It actively *grieves* me that the manga was so short, too.
- Video Girl Ai - Another gut-punch emotional sort of story.
- Romeo's Blue Skies - I love all of the World Masterpiece Theater titles I've seen, but this one was my favorite. I'm a sucker for this sort of sentimental underdog story.
- Utena - Getting more into what I consider to be the "second gen" of anime, I guess, but it's pre-2000 and a masterpiece
- Infinite Ryvius - Aaaand I'm very close to the 2000 deadline with this one, but I love anime that is science fiction in the thinky, old-school sense of exploring ideas and elements of the human condition, and this series does that in very cool ways.
