When I was very, very little, I was a sick little kid. I got an infection that led to inflammation of my epiglottis, and it almost killed me. The docs said that my immune system was so heavily compromised from my brush with death that I needed to stay with my grandma for a bit. Because of how worn out this made me, I wound up with a fucking weird circadian rythm, but grandma used to leave the living room open so I could watch Sesame Street or cartoons or something. Because it was so early, most channels were showing test-patterns or something equally dumb. Sometimes I'd tune in Home Shopping Channel and watch them sell random crap no sane human being would ever want. And then, one day, I found a new channel, and my life was changed forever. It was one show I had never seen before, and it ran between 5 and 6 AM, usually showing 2 episodes a night.
What I encountered was the 1983 showing of Fist of the North Star. Whilst a very violent show, and it had a lot that went over my head, I was absolutely spellbound by it when I first saw it. It was straightforward enough that I understood a bit even at the tender age of six or so. The obvious good guy of the show wasn't like the good guys I had seen in other cartoons. He was someone who, though he was very, very strong, had suffered a lot of personal losses. He didn't rescue the girl - the girl died, and it affected him. He lost people he cared about. He saw good people die and he wasn't always able to stop it. He was a hero who didn't always win, though he did his best.
This fucking mesmerized me.
He also fought enemies who were really evil, and not the sort of cartoony schtick I was so familiar with, where they did some foolery that got thwarted and we had status quo again at the end of the episode. If they were really bad guys, he flat-out killed them, not just beat them up and then let them show up in other episodes.
Sometimes he gave some weaker villains a chance, and sometimes, they actually bettered themselves, but the bulk of them were stupid, thought they pulled one over on our protagonist, and promptly got punched until their heads exploded. The characters seemed more real, the stakes bigger, than any other show I had ever watched growing up. For the entire month I was at Grandma's, I watched Fist of the North Star every morning. It was something I wouldn't encounter anything else like until I saw the Dragon Warrior anime air up in NY, which got taken off the air when parents complained.
Suffice to say this show became an instant favorite of mine when I returned to it years later.