Those are some impressive voice actors. Now if only they can get Gen Urobochi to write the scriptâŠ
Iâd take issue with Sailor Moon being the gateway drug to anime. Compared to Robotech, it was a bit of a Jenny-come-lately.
(That said, sometime in the late '90s I did tear through all fansubbed episodes of all the series. And this was back when you downloaded pirate fansub anime as VHS-quality RealVideo files!)
Robotech and Ranma 1/2 were my introductions, but I didnât know they were anime at the time. The first show I recognized as âAnime with a captial Aâ was Tenchi Muyo⊠then I connected the dots back to Robotech, Ranma 1/2, and Sailor Moon.
And yes, despite my sister thinking I was a little strange for watching it, I did watch a fair bit of Sailor Moon. The larger story arcs from it and the other afore mentioned shows made them better than anything on the American cartoon market at the time until I found Exo Squad.
I remember Robotech was on TV quite a while before sailor moon, and whenever Robotech would come on TV, I didnât know about anime as a genre or even as coming from such a faraway place as Japan, I would just change the channel (I KNOW!) I must have been 10-12 years old when it was on the air.
It wasnât until I was in high school, and had gotten heavily into comics, that Sailor moon and Dragon Ball came on TV that I started to actually watch the shows and slowly get into other Anime.
Iâm not so sure that there was one gateway series, I actually remember Voltron, Mazinger Z, even Astroboy as some of my favorite cartoons years before, but again, I had no idea that this was anime and that there were other cartoons like it, I had to be a bit older before I started appreciating anime as its own âthingâ and be able to seek out more on my own, and Sailor Moon was the show that did it for me.
My wife and an old coworker helped fansub some of the missing episodes of R series around '99 or 2000, which I served from a win98-pentium II server(pre linux for me days) and 128k up DSL line running all out for over two years for Mario Knight Bushido Online which I think was attached somehow to senshiTV. I remember my server with the missing episodes was the only way to get the complete run until bittorrent came around. They were RAM real audio(video) files of terrible quality. The old 20Gb drive from those days, a Western Digital, lasted something like 17 years as an experiment in a server I had running in the US, it only recently died.
The weird thing was I had this tiny file in the misc folder of the collection sat_hen.ram which was the file most frequently downloaded, it was just ten seconds or so of sailor Saturn transforming, I finally decided everyone thought they had found hentai on my FTP.
Good times with fansubbed Sailor Moon and a FTP.
Please no. Iâd really rather not have yet another anime sacrifice what it is to become Darker & Grittier. This is supposed to be a light-hearted shoujo anime about issues young women face, not an existential survival-horror through Danteâs Inferno. Madoka was good for what it was, but to have all magical girl anime use that as a benchmark would turn the entire genre of magical girls into yet another hyper-masculine individualistic violence-fest where only the strongest survive, where every decision is a cold calculation, you can never rely on your team-mates, and the world is out to get you.
Why does everything in our media have to include mind-screwing the characters into deep black pits of depression and despair? Weâve had more than enough of that in all of our media recently, honestly. I just wanna see young women overcome adversity, work together, and achieve greatness as a team. Is that too much to ask these days?
Mine were âVickie the Vikingâ , âMajaâ and later âCaptain Futureâ. I think I learned back than that CF was a Japanese production, but it was again years later - in the early nineties - that I learned about Anime and Manga and only then it fell all together and I recognized the stylistic similarities between all these. Not necessarily in the drawing style, but in the gestures the characters used.
Mine was books. I hit Miyazakiâs Nausicaa of the Valley of Winds, before realizing I what anime, manga was.
Then like you realize Robotech, Odin: Photon Sailer Starlight, Starblazers, Galaxy Express, etc,.
Man Ranma 1/2 was the best. The only Anime with a dub that was every bit as good as the sub especially when it came to the comedy.
And if anyone wonders why there are so many Sailor Moon fans, just watch Nephriteâs death scene.
My gateway anime were Captain Harlock and Catâs Eye. I remember Catâs Eye with fondness because I always felt a tad licentious watching it; there was some pretty risquĂ© material in there, especially to a 7 year-old, yet it was innocuously tucked in with the other morning cartoons so the adults didnât pay attention. That said, I didnât follow either series with the same fervor as Sailor Moon (as in call your friend right after the latest episode to freak out over plot twists and the dramaaa!). Sailor Moon was arguably my gateway/introduction to fandom.
Iâm pretty darned excited about the new series.
I was a huge Sailormoon fan. I just came to point out though that although it was popular with young adults in America the same is not true in Japan. In Japan it was targeted at 8yr old girls which is where it was popular. Whereas in America it was also targeted at 8yr old girls but ended up being popular with young adults.
Iâm guessing the difference is TV shows targeted at 8yrs old girls in the USA donât usually involve romance nor are they nearly as intense into a long form story.
in the mid-1990s, when we were in our mid 20s, Sailor Moon was available to us via the local broadcast UHF station in their block of after-school cartoons. I took one look at it and said âthis is for 8-year-old girls. pass.â BUT my roommateâs friend was a very dead-end, âfuck everythingâ punk rocker and she was fucking OBSESSED with Sailor Moon. Sheâd do her hair like her and make outfits, the whole bit. So I figured there mustâve been something to it.
I was open to anime due to an obsession with five-lions Voltron when I was ten and then Akira. My friends all watched Dragonball Z and Ninja Scroll and I went to some film festivals. It just never âtook.â I still love Akira and came to Miyazaki later in life, but the bulk of it just leaves me cold.
 ¯\ __(ă) _ /ÂŻ
I imagine Sailor Moon was the gateway anime for female viewers, whereas Robotech/Macross was mainly aimed at a male audience.
The 1st anime I would have watched as a kid would definitely be âStar Blazersâ (a.k.a Space Battleship Yamato), followed by Robotech, then the Voltrons. They were just cartoons to me as a kid, and I didnât really think of anime as a separate thing from regular US cartoons until I saw⊠umm, âFist of the North Starâ.
I do remember Sailor Moon being the source of one of my favorite âgeek outâ memories though. I was at GenCon and during the costume contest there was a talent portion and this woman was cosplaying as Sailor Jupiter and singing her song. Her performance was awful, awkward and timid. It was awesomely⊠pure geek love for something among an audience of people who felt the same way about, if not Sailor Moon, something or other. It was pretty great and kick ass.
Nobodyâs first real âanime momentâ was Akira? BAH. 
I got really into anime in around '91 or '92 in junior high school, had an anime posse, we would do anime marathons, I bought import anime laserdiscs and downloaded translations on rec.arts.anime, and all that good stuff. Still adore it to this day.
Obviously before junior high, I loved Robotech and Voltron, not fully realizing what anime was at the time. I definitely remember seeing the manga of Nausicaa at a comic book store when I was a pre-teen, thinking it was the coolest thing in the world. So yeah, actually manga was probably the first thing I saw that made me understand that Japan had this very very cool comic/animation thing going on.
Hey, Madoka overcame adversity⊠after centuries of despair and bloodshed. But I was joking.
I picked up on that, but Iâve seen too many people recently seriously suggest that the Sailor Moon reboot would be better off if it starred a man (and did away with all signs of femininity, of course) and was more like Game of Thrones. Iâm just kinda sick of it, is all.
A man? Even Urobochi isnât that bizarre. /shudder/
Same here. My little corner of the midwest, I could just barely pick up KPLR in St. Louis and catch Voltron once in a while (though I was actually tuning in to see if I could catch Transformers, tbh.) We had a weird, funky independent TV station, too, that would show stuff like Tranzor Z and Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors in the morning. I liked Jayce, and liked Voltron, butâŠsame here.
And I just looked it up, and Jayce wasâŠFrench?
