Dollarhyde wrote:@deaf would be cool to know what other OVAs you watched back in the day
I first experienced the English-dubbed/edited
Robotech around 1985 or so, and it launched my overall appreciation for anime and mechas at the same time. I was also heavily into
Transformers, and it was not lost on me that the "new" Jetfire character was a direct rip-off of the VF-1 Valkyrie/Veritech mecha from
Macross/Robotech. I still remember a banner day when I found a transforming model toy version Roy Föcker's Valkyrie with the skull & crossbones logo at a local store. I was so impressed that Robotech was popular enough to have toys made based on the mechas, and that they would be stocked on the shelves in a small town in the middle of nowhere. I wish I still had it, heh. Anyway, it was a big influence on me at the time.
Shows like
Astro Boy and
Speed Racer were a couple decades before my time, but it's now humorous to me that I was also exposed to anime in the early 80's at bible school/church. My family was very religious, and I had to attend a weekly youth group where the church would source copies of dubbed VHS tapes of the Christian anime shows
Superbook and
The Flying House. Those shows are terrible, but the art style kept growing on me. I really wish I could have had access to the
Mazinger Z show (it was only on TV in Hawaii, I believe), as it now feels like a missing part of my childhood that a lot of other folks on the west coast were able to watch. I also missed the Roger Corman dubs/edits of
Galaxy Express and
Nausicaa of The Valley of the Wind. This could have been because our local video rental stores in the rural Midwest were shoddy (no
Akira or Studio Ghibli films that I could find), and we didn't have cable TV at my home until I was a teenager. So, there is a large void until I went to university in '94 and joined an Otaku Society club. We would all meet up once or twice a week and watch anime OVA series and feature films: Appleseed, Bubblegum Crisis, Cat Girl Nuku Nuku, City Hunter, Cutie Honey, Crying Freeman, Demon City Shinjuku, Devilman, Dirty Pair, Fist of the North Star, MD Geist, New Dominion Tank Police, Patlabor, Record of Lodoss War, Vampire Hunter D, 3x3 Eyes, and all the Ghibli films, etc. I remember some of them better than others. I believe we actually watched
Akira on my first night there which just blew me away. I was instantly hooked on the entire culture, and that led me to seek out the original manga for the first time (something else I had not yet been exposed to). All of this sent me down a dark path to discover Wicked City, Ninja Scroll, and eventually the hentai back allies of La Blue Girl and Urotsukidōji. I remember catching
Ghost in the Shell on the US theatrical run ('96?), and it was like the art form had been elevated to a new level. I burned out a bit by the the late 90's with the explosion of anime in the US and the whole
Dragon Ball Z thing (which I completely avoided). I still found some comedy gems though like
Golden Boy and
Ping-Pong Club (hilarious! one of the best). Curious if anybody else had a similar experience. Anime OVA in general seems very hit or miss outside of Japan in those decades, and it seemed to depend heavily on whether you had a source for bootleg dubs or fansubs for most of these series.
