Gateway Drugs. Or How I Got To Know Anime.

I got back into anime in '99 when I saw pokemon. I still remember my first episode too, The Kangaskan kid. And this is when it was still on fox people, so I got up early enough and caught it right before school.

You see, in '98, I read an artical in this magazine about the porygon episode giving people sezures....I though the cartoon they were talking about seem interesting...what can I say I was a morbid 9 year old. Then I remembered the ads I saw for the Red and Blue games (I thought those ads were animal cruelty back then). That Christmas, my dad brought the blue game for my mom (at that time I wasn't in to video games). I got a hold of it and started playing it and I fell in love with it. Sometime around mid...I think it was March or April my mom had on the TV and I was flipping though the channels and came acrossed this cute little....thing that turned out to be a baby Kangaskan so I desided to leave it on and see what it was and I fell in love with the show that day.

I saw a few other anime at that time, but I just seemed to chalk them up to being pokemon rip offs and never saw more then 2 seconds of it. I seriously thought that pokemon was the only anime out there at that time. But sadly as I grew older (A.K.A 12) I found the pokemon anime wasn't doing much for me after it made the big move to WB kids and the orange islands arc was weak. So I moved on, even if I still like the games and play them when ever I can. I'm not as big of fan of pokemon as I used to be. And believe me, I was a fanatic over it when I was younger.

The series I moved on to were Tenchi Muyo and Outlaw Star. Yeah...That was a big jump. Pokemon to those two shows. I watched them on toonami every day it was like my TV time. This was some time around late '00 early '01. Those two shows alone opened the door to more mature anime and broke the notion that all anime were copies of pokemon, just like how pokemon broke down the wall of thinking that anime were just adult cartoons that my dad installed in me after sneeking in on him watching Akira.

After those two shows moved to Adult Swim, That opened alot of doors to other anime like Cowboy Bebop (even though at first I thought that was copying OLS so it took me a while to like it.) and a few other shows. Then from that launching point I started to discover series on my own by reading the manga then finding the anime on DVD. And here I am now.

Since then, I have gone back and wached OLS un-edited. I still have yet to see anything outside of Tenchi Muyo in Love un-edit. But I hope to find the Tenchi DVDs one day and finaly get to see my second anime, and the true series that got me into anime, un-edited.

Sorry for the long post, I really am...

How ya doing, buddy?