Is There Anything Beyond Cartoons? I've always loved cartoons and all forms of drawing and animation. Seeing surreal, imaginative characters in worlds all their own where anything was possible, was something that I always held dear. During most of my early childhood, I watched pretty much every cartoon that was available, either on the market or on TV, from Tom and Jerry, Winnie the Pooh, and Looney Toons, to Batman, Peanuts, and so many others. Unfortunately, I didn't have cable TV(back then, my mom didn't watch TV that much so she saw no reason to get it.) But that didn't stop me from watching as many cartoons as I could! I especially loved all the animated Disney movies. Every time a new Disney movie came out, I would obsess over it! But I think The Lion King was, and still is, my most favorite(I know the entire movie by heart...every word of dialogue, every song...yeah, I think it's my favorite!)
Sailor Moon - My First Anime My very first encounter with anime was back in the early 1990s, when I was still in elementary school. One of my friends kept telling me about this cartoon called Sailor Moon that she said was really good. This was back when the first episodes of Sailor Moon were being shown on channel 13. So I decided to check it out, and I ended up loving it! The Sailor Moon episode "Much Ado About Babysitting" became the very first anime that I ever saw! Unfortunately, Sailor Moon came on at the inconvenient time of 7:30am weekday mornings, the time when I was usually on my way to school. But I was still able to watch it once in a while. Even though I was kind of young and ignorant, I could tell that there was something different about this show...it felt like more than just a "cartoon." But it wasn't until years later that I found out that Sailor Moon, along with the other shows that I would grow to love, are the anime that I'm now so passionate about.
Samurai Pizza Cats After Sailor Moon was cancelled from channel 13, I quickly fell in love with another one of these "special cartoons," Samurai Pizza Cats, which began airing in September 1995. It came on at the exact same time and channel as Sailor Moon used to. But by then I had a VCR that could time-record, so I was able to tape Samurai Pizza Cats even when I wasn't home. Truth to say, after watching the first episode of it, I was hooked! However, like a lot of early dubbed animes, the diologue was totally rewritten and the characters faced some pretty horrid name changes. But I didn't know about stuff like that back then. All I knew was that I loved this show! Once I got familiar with Samurai Pizza Cats, I could tell that there was something in its animation that was very similiar to Sailor Moon. But I still didn't know that they were both anime shows from Japan(I thought that maybe they were made by the same company or something.) Samurai Pizza Cats ran for about 40 episodes. Once the series was completed, the episodes were shown again and again...and I never missed a single one! It was finally cancelled in September 1996, after being on for about a year. I was really sad to say the least! Oh, how I wish I kept those old tapes of mine that had the episodes...
A Few More Firsts After Sailor Moon and Samurai Pizza Cats, the only "sort-of-anime" that I kept watching was Beast Wars: Transformers. Since it was a computer animated show, and since I still didn't know what anime was back then, I didn't really notice its anime characteristics. It would be years before I find out that the whole Transformers concept originated from Japanese animation. But at this time, I loved Beast Wars to death, and I still have my collection of over 25 of the original action figures! Besides Beast Wars, the only other anime that I was continually into was Sonic the Hedgehog. I was mostly into the Sonic the Hedgehog video games and I had practically every single one for Sega Game Gear and Sega Genesis(I played them all a million times too, of course.) I also watched the Sonic cartoon on TV(I don't think it was really an anime, though) but the video games were my favorites.
I guess I wasn't familiar with a lot of anime in my early years, but like I said, back then I was too young to really think about where the shows I watched originated from and how the anime ones were so different from other cartoons. But looking back, I could tell that I was on my way to anime fandom since, out of all the many cartoons I used to watch, the anime ones were the ones I loved the most. However, it wasn't until the late 1990s that my true ascent to the anime world began. And it was all thanks to a certain yellow mouse and his little monster friends...