Your first anime

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Parents swear I watched Sailor Moon, but I don't recall it very well and we only had the one Speed Racer VHS tape. So I like to say Pokémon, Digimon, and Cardcaptors were my childhood with Yu-Gi-Oh closing in by middle school. But my first real anime had to have been either Scrapped Princess or Kodocha with the Escaflowne movie being my present for my 13th birthday sealing the deal.

Probably Digimon or Mew Mew Power (I know it's actually called Tokyo Mew Mew, but I watched the 4Kids dub, so bear with me).

Hahaha sometimes I have to catch myself whenever I talk about Tokyo Mew Mew, but the most I remember about Mew Mew Power was the theme song. Gotta hand it to 4KIDS, they knew how to make some memorable theme songs.
 
Oldfag alert

My family had a giant satellite dish when I was little, we'd pick up very random channels. I saw some Arabic-dubbed anime this way (in the US). Can't think of what it could have been, I think there were kids playing baseball? I just remember I drew the characters in a notebook because the style wow'd my child brain.

Anime when I knew it was anime, probably Sailor Moon and stuff on Sci-Fi's Saturday anime like Project A-ko and Tank Police. I also got into Tenchi Muyo around the same time, the mid-90s, through friends and VHS rentals long before it came to Toonami.
 
Classic!

My family had a giant satellite dish when I was little, we'd pick up very random channels. I saw some Arabic-dubbed anime this way (in the US). Can't think of what it could have been, I think there were kids playing baseball? I just remember I drew the characters in a notebook because the style wow'd my child brain.
Doesn't surprise me. I remember when International Channel played a few Arabic-dubbed anime like Sandy Bell and Cooking Papa. There's always some obscure show nobody's ever heard of that found it's way to the Middle East.

Anime when I knew it was anime, probably Sailor Moon and stuff on Sci-Fi's Saturday anime like Project A-ko and Tank Police. I also got into Tenchi Muyo around the same time, the mid-90s, through friends and VHS rentals long before it came to Toonami.
The 90's was a good time to find out!
 
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Outside of the usual translations that aired on TV, Digimon, Pokemon and Cardcaptor Sakura, I think the thing that drew me back in was when film4 aired all of the (at the time) current Studio Ghibili movies in both sub and dub. Really Enjoyed Naussica, Princess Mononoke and porco rosso.
 
My cable's Cartoon Network and Toonami don't have anime. The local channels do have a share of local dubs of popular titles, though. While my parents are waiting for the news, I managed to catch some Doraemon and Crayon Shin Chan. The dubs were so shitty but at the same time unforgettable to some extent. There's also a bunch of anime I watched whenever I had time to take over the TV but only managed to catch an episode or two, like Mermaid Melody and Mirmo de Pon!. I remembered watching an episode of Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicles before I even knew this was part of Clamp's multi-verse.
 
My cable's Cartoon Network and Toonami don't have anime. The local channels do have a share of local dubs of popular titles, though. While my parents are waiting for the news, I managed to catch some Doraemon and Crayon Shin Chan. The dubs were so shitty but at the same time unforgettable to some extent. There's also a bunch of anime I watched whenever I had time to take over the TV but only managed to catch an episode or two, like Mermaid Melody and Mirmo de Pon!. I remembered watching an episode of Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicles before I even knew this was part of Clamp's multi-verse.
At least your country gets to watch Doraemon and Crayon Shinchan locally.

Akira in the first US release. It blew my mind.
As it had for most of us! That was the kicker.
 
Robotech on the Sci-fi channel combined with Record of Lodoss War . I missed the last fucking episode of Robotech since I was going to be late to school since they aired that shit at like 6 am and it'd be the only thing that'd get me up for. I still remember that shit.

Man, you had Anime and 'The Real Ghostbusters' as a kid to wake up to. Now what do you have? Some faggot shit like Steven Universe. Nothing with humanity fighting for its life, or horrifying creatures from beyond trying to possess people to start your day, only this garbage.

I also used to watch Sailor Moon but don't tell anybody.
 
I know of at least two examples.
A) The 90s anime adaptation of the Moomin novels, which I long assumed was a Finnish product because I watched it dubbed in Fenno-Swedish and knew the author of the source material was Fenno-Swedish.
B) The 70s anime adaptation of Maya The Bee, which I assumed was French for a very long time as that was the language I watched it in. For some reason, finding out that it was a Japanese cartoon based on a German children's book was very surprising to me.
 
Robotech on the Sci-fi channel combined with Record of Lodoss War . I missed the last fucking episode of Robotech since I was going to be late to school since they aired that shit at like 6 am and it'd be the only thing that'd get me up for. I still remember that shit.

Man, you had Anime and 'The Real Ghostbusters' as a kid to wake up to. Now what do you have? Some faggot shit like Steven Universe. Nothing with humanity fighting for its life, or horrifying creatures from beyond trying to possess people to start your day, only this garbage.

I also used to watch Sailor Moon but don't tell anybody.
I know where you're coming from. I remember when it was like that too.
 
First for me was Dragonball Z, it always gets shit on for being kinda long and annoying but it really got me into anime as a whole even though I'd consider myself relatively casual when it comes to what anime I watch. It'll always hold a special place to me in regards to anime.
 
My first anime besides Pokémon was sao I was around 12 or 13 when it hit netflix it kinda turned me off anime for awhile until I started watching gundam.
 
B) The 70s anime adaptation of Maya The Bee, which I assumed was French for a very long time as that was the language I watched it in. For some reason, finding out that it was a Japanese cartoon based on a German children's book was very surprising to me.

When I was younger than around 10 years old or so, I wrongly assumed that anime was French too since I associated the animation style with fleeting glimpses of anime I'd see on French-language channels from Montreal like "Goldorak" (the French-language dub of Grandizer), "Albator" (the French-language dub of Captain Harlock), Candy Candy, and possibly also "Lady Oscar" (the French-language dub of Rose of Versailles), Anne of Green Gables, and maybe even "Lamu" (the French-language dub of Urusei Yatsura, though I'm not 100% sure whether that one ever aired on Quebec television).

Like I said before, I had seen Battle of the Planets/G-Force (Sandy Frank's heavily-localized version of Gatchaman) which I think aired on CFCF-12, Montreal's main commercial English-language station, when I was Kindergarten-aged but I don't think I remembered enough of the style for me to have noticed similarities with the French-dubbed anime I'd see while flipping channels to whichever mostly terrible early 1980s Saturday morning cartoons I was going to watch on the American border stations.

I think Robotech was the first anime I watched where I had some vague awareness that it was from Japan. Tranzor Z was a little more obvious since they'd often show maps of Japan, which is a pretty good clue where it took place even if they never really acknowledged it in the dub.
 
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When I was younger than around 10 years old or so, I wrongly assumed that anime was French too since I associated the animation style with fleeting glimpses of anime I'd see on French-language channels from Montreal like "Goldorak" (the French-language dub of Grandizer), "Albator" (the French-language dub of Captain Harlock), Candy Candy, and possibly also "Lady Oscar" (the French-language dub of Rose of Versailles), Anne of Green Gables, and maybe even "Lamu" (the French-language dub of Urusei Yatsura, though I'm not 100% sure whether that one ever aired on Quebec television).
Quebec got all the great stuff as far as I could say.

I think Robotech was the first anime I watched where I had some vague awareness that it was from Japan. Tranzor Z was a little more obvious since they'd often show maps of Japan, which is a pretty good clue where it took place even if they never really acknowledged it in the dub.
That was pretty much a case in those days. I recall one 80's dub that said this was taking place in California yet a sign in Japanese shows up in one scene they forgot to do anything with!
 
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