How popular was anime among xennials in the 90s? In high school?

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I remember it being more niche, like the boys who were obsessed with a fantasy of what they think Japanese culture is, and watching fan subtitled episodes of DBZ online since the US dub was going slower and they also take issue with dubbing. It was a small nerd subculture.

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ParsleyMostly@reddit

TBS would play Robot Carnival and Vampire Hunter D at midnight like twice a year. That was dope. Also loaded up on Unico, Time Fighters, Warriors of the Wind, and a bunch of others at video rental places.

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jgoldrb48@reddit

I've been a big online gamer since 2002. I started breathing about it while playing WoW in 2004. I've never gotten into it because I was never willing to get off the game to watch it.

I'm currently paying for Crunchyroll (for my son) but still never watch it.

The 4 episode at a time cartoon bullshit I experienced as kid made me hate TV.

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S1ayer@reddit

I knew of Akira and Vampire Hunter D. Nothing else.

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peggysue_82@reddit

Only the super nerds were into it. I’m sure they feel vindicated now that it’s popular.

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SR_RSMITH@reddit

Funny enough, I preferred it when it was less popular. It was a cool secret club to be into.

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Fickle_Wrangler_7439@reddit

I loved watching the bootleggers run around convention halls trying to copy tapes as fast as humanly possible and resell them.

Vendors had like 6 VCRs until a blanket at the back of their booth and you'd end up buying a tape that had been copied over so many times it looked like mud.

Good times.

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gorgoloid@reddit

Man, not me. Having to pay $18-$23 in 90s money for a 35-45 minute, 2 episode VHS of a series IF you could find it, was rough. The occasional rental, or SciFi channel bootleg recording were saving graces, but man the access to good shows and movies was really difficult.

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ScallopsMoneyShot@reddit

It was hell just trying to figure out how many seasons a show had or how many episodes there were in the season.

BIRDsnoozer@reddit

Its funny seeing gym bros these days who will nerd out over anime... These same guys would have been the ones to stuff me in a locker in the 90s. Now I can talk to them for 3 hours about Dragonball Z and they love it.

Not a clue. Might as well be ancient greek.

La Blue Girl

How do you like my air dildo?!

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Fickle_Wrangler_7439@reddit

Lol, honestly I think Im still too young to watch La Blue Girl.

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Street_Gur9817@reddit (OP)

Utena fan?

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Fickle_Wrangler_7439@reddit

I have the rose seal tattooed onto my arm.

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ESPRE5S0@reddit

Where I was from, it wasn't called anime yet. It was called "japanimation" and it had to be acquired at a special video store that only carried Japanese imports. They had posters, Gundam models, and thousands of VHS titles.

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Ti47_867@reddit

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guitar_stonks@reddit

Yea, there was always that friend who’s older brother had a VHS of Akira hidden in their room because “mom and dad would flip if they found this”

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-WhichWayIsUp-@reddit

My parents were weirdly conservative about movies I watched...but my mom got me Akira for Hanukkah in like 97 or 98 ecause they told her it was the best one.

Right on. I'm Korean. 8-9 years old in 87/88. I immigrated very young. Had another kid from Korea who immigrated around early 88. The only other one, same class, my parents knew their parents since we all lived in this apartment complex. So got to be my best friend.

He had an older brother, 12-13 at the time. He was very strong into anime and definitely was crazy about Akira. Macross too. I wasn't into that at all. Astro Boy and Voltron dubbed for me. Otherwise, all the regular N. American cartoons, wrestling, NES.

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What about the fact the Super Hero stuff was like old Gen Xer campy, silly and dead in the water nonsense and totally outmoded until that Batman Movie.

There were those campy Superman’s when I was little, but Star Wars and then the toy based cartoon content was beating its ass.

Comic books existed but as an elder Xennial- very few gave a fuck- and even fewer as the years rolled on. It was almost niches

I’d have the occasional elder friend of my bros or cousin who’d mention X-Men. Kids born in 67-72, But it was supes outmoded in mid to late 1980s

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Sensitive_Pianist777@reddit

Same age. I'm Korean. I'm in Toronto, a very multicultural and liberal place. In the 80 and into 90s, Asians got made fun of. There were hierarchies. Nobody even knew Korea back then. Using chopsticks was weird. Raw fish? Blech! Drier octopus... barf. Fish breath. Kimchi? Disgusting! Cartoon from Japan was also popular in Korea as in many other Asian countries in the 80s.

So the idea of bringing up anything from Asia, including cartoons was forget it. Funny thing though is Astro Boy, Voltron, they did a good job of hiding it's "anime" roots. But no way would you be talking about a dubbed version of anything..

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Sensitive_Pianist777@reddit

Success of DiC Sailormoon also lead to DragonBall being pushed much more as well..

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captmonkey@reddit

Yeah, I felt like Dragon Ball Z was the turning point. I had been into anime or "Japanimation" before that, but I didn't know many other people who knew what I was talking about. My local video store had Bubble Gum Crisis on VHS and I rented all of them and loved it. It was a little niche fascination that was too niche to be looked down upon.

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Ok-Maintenance-9538@reddit

We got it from the used book shop/card shop in town. Definitely considered hard core nerd shit at the time

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Chaos_Sauce@reddit

I saw Ninja Scroll and Akira in high school, but otherwise it was mainly for the kids who were even more nerdy than me. I more or less wrote it off until few years ago when in my 40s I watched all of Neon Genesis Evangelion and Satoshi Kon’s movies and realized that there’s more to anime than I realized and I’ve been loving it ever since. Currently working my way through Frieren and Hunter x Hunter.

It was not widely popular, extremely hard to find in the 80s and early 90s in most rural areas (I went through a friend's older brother's bootleg vhs by mail group) and the rest of the school would give you endless shit if they knew you watched it. In the town I grew up in, if you were caught watching cartoons past 6th grade, you were endlessly mocked for watching kid shows.

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Anxietybackmonkey@reddit

It was popular in a niche group of nerds. It was not nearly as mainstream as it is now. It was made fun of in a lot of groups.

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absentlyric@reddit

I was a fan back then, and I don't recall many people making fun of it, mostly because at least in my part of the midwest it was so niche that my school you could probably count on 1 hand how many people even knew what it was.

Now in the 2000s and forward, yes, it started getting popular enough and the tropes and stereotypes started to form and thats when it got ragged on.

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Anxietybackmonkey@reddit

I remember the term weebs being thrown around as casually derisive of the fan groups. There were very few “Japanimation/anime” films that slipped under the ridicule radar in my experience. The last unicorn, Kiki’s delivery service, to a lesser extent Princess mononoke. That type of animation seemed to get a pass.

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Voltron was created for US kids using two different anime and we still claim we never watched anime as kids…..

A lot of our kids shows were created using different anime.

WhoDatLadyBear@reddit

Yeah only for the super nerds. I was only a nerd, so I watched the mainstream stuff like Sailor Moon and Pokémon.

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Taanistat@reddit

It wasn't. And if you were into it you only discussed it with other fans IF you could find them. Otherwise you kept it to yourself.

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Individual-Schemes@reddit

I think of them as cult classics.

They were part of an underground scene, like finding a B-sides album of a cool band at your local indie/punk music store. Anime were hidden gems that made you cool.

I don't think they were for "nerds" at all.

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Taanistat@reddit

As one of the people who was into it you might be able to talk about Akira, Ninja Scroll or Ghost in the Shell only because they got a theatrical release and someone might have seen a preview for them. Generally speaking, we didn't talk about it openly and it certainly didn't make you cool unless you were in a group of hyper nerds.

It was definitely underground, but not in a good way for most circles. Your experience may have been different, but that certainly wasn't what I experienced.

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Salt-N-Vinegar-Lover@reddit

Japanese language class early 90s, even then only 3-4 boys were into it and Sensei was always trying to hold back eye rolls, partially because Japanimation was nearly the extent of their cultural curiosity

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webslingrrr@reddit

I can only speak for high school between 1998 and 2002.

It was just a handful of nerds in DBZ shirts. Some other popular things with that crowd like Ghost In The Shell, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Akira, Ninja Scroll... pretty niche subculture. Pretty much exclusively male.

I remember people calling it “Japanime” and being corrected by higher tier nerds to just call it anime, and then they’d explain the difference between anime and manga.

I think Tower records had some cool anime stuff next to like Hello Kitty things, and it all bled together.

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Surlyllama23@reddit

The edgy kids watched Sailor Moon, but I honestly didn't even know Anime was a genre until the early/mid 2000s.

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Dimplefrom-YA@reddit

in high school i only knew keropi and sailor moon. not really things people were into. it was a special group of folks that enjoyed it.

i was in another group… i was into techno, eurohouse, and rave…. And everyone thought that was oh those party hard nerds over there. my family called me white 🤷‍♀️

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ouijahead@reddit

I remember hearing “rave” music at a friends house. I had never been to a Rave, but it sounded like fun and I liked the music. I remember going to blockbuster music and buying random Rave CDs. I really liked them. A lot of the music I could tell was German, but it just hit my ear right (especially on LSD. I wasn’t a big drug user. I didn’t fit in with those kids. Probably because I was involved in theater and I guess they were very anti-productivity) After Highschool I eventually did go to Rave and the music was nothing like my CDs. If you wanna call it music. It sounded like a person playing 4 songs at once. And I don’t mean like clever mixing of 4 songs. Just like, let’s take four songs and play them all at once. There was no beat. It made no sense to me and everyone was really super fucking shady. Did not have fun.

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Dimplefrom-YA@reddit

lol sorry.

Late-Late 90s, saw a sudden uptick. Not the gritter 'Adult Japanese animation' but the more kid friendly 'anime!" turn. UPN pick up some random animes. Including a strange one about some martial artist in orange outfits fighting space monkeys that was weirdly compelling but kept cutting off at the same spot. Around this time USA (of all networks) picked up Sailor moon. and Cartoon Network started catching on. - But dragonball was the one that took off despite only having a limited mound of episodes on repeat. It dominated kids television until Pokemon showed up and dominated kids entire childhood.

Amid as all this, you had the Internet. Usenet groups traded translated manga scans non-stop. This where i picked up obscure and uh risque content being a teenager. There was a website that had "giant" 10mb RealVid files of Dragon ball subs going several years ahead of what we saw on tv. Terrible quality. Took an hour to download if you didn't disconnect. But it also showed that that Dragon Ball in japan was a lot different than what we were seeing on tv.

tl'dr It was like there were two different "anime!" periods - Before when it was like this "unknown risque, underground Japanimation" full of sex and gore, and then the Dragonball-poken family friendly stuff that took over and never looked back.

/ramble .

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Corporate-Scum@reddit

Akira and Neo Tokyo were big. We still had American animation, so there was a domestic product that was better, like Simpsons, Duck Tales, or Dark Knight. Saturday morning and after school cartoons were still a thing in the 90s.

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Pepperjones808@reddit

In my school it wasn’t. No one freely admitted to watching it. Even Pokémon kids were made fun of. Ah, growing up in hicktown Midwest was certainly a challenge

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Drab_Majesty@reddit

It was popular in my friend group without labelling it anime. Robotech, Astro Boy and Gatchaman were my favourites as a kid. Then in high school we were all sharing Ninja Scroll, Akira, Vampire Hunter D etc around.

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BigFatHonu@reddit

The late, great Donald Gibb summed it up best, at least for the 90s, and at least at my highschool.

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tetrasodium@reddit

It was popular but pretty underground popular until toonami and cartoon network started airing it at night maybe mid-late 90s

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BasketballButt@reddit

Was not popular at all amongst anyone l knew. There were a couple kids in to it but they were mostly seen as weirdos.

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sweablol@reddit

It wasn’t mainstream like it is today, but movies like Akira and Fist of the North Star were available to rent at Blockbuster.

I caught japanimation via local TV stations showing it at 3AM when parents thought I was asleep.

There were no anime clubs, or if there were - for social outcasts. Then adult swim happened.

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this-is-trickyyyyyy@reddit

I was a huge nerd and was obsessed w Sailor Moon, my huge nerd friend had the hookup and would buy fan dubbed VHS tapes on ebay. We watched Magic Knights Rayearth, Neon Genesis Evangelion and a few others I can't remember... We were not the cool kids. Everyone else was going gaga for Dave Matthews, we were memorizing Japanese theme songs🤓

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ckglle3lle@reddit

Was not particularly popular in the mid 90s but it started to become more popular by the late 90s and early 2000s, likely owing to Toonami and Sci-Fi channel promoting it a lot as well as stores like Hot Topic and Suncoast at the mall also promoting it a fair amount. But even as it became more popular it was still very much considered geeky and a bit uncool in the same way a lot of geeky stuff was at the time.

"Nerd shit" didn't cross into being cool-mainstream until a few years later

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ActuallyAlexander@reddit

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A lot of people watched Dragon Ball Z and Pokémon, and Gundam Wing came out and was relatively well known. We bought our DVDs from Suncoast at the mall and could special order things there too. It wasn't big like it is now where people were wearing anime t-shirts like band shirts or running around like Naruto. Some people would talk about it and share their random obscure series or movies with other people who were into it. It definitely wasn't "cool."

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ChristyLovesGuitars@reddit

Outside Akira and Vampire Hunter D, I barely knew anime (Japanamation when I was a teen) existed. We were mostly the D&D, metal/proto-goth kids.

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UnderH20giraffe@reddit

O%. No one knew what it was.

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xrelaht@reddit

Extremely. There was a club at my high school that met weekly at lunch to watch an episode of a series. It was so popular we had to meet in the theater practice space instead of a classroom. Jocks, nerds, band geeks… didn’t matter. We once didn’t quite finish what we’d been watching by the end of the year, and that huge group crammed into one guy’s house to watch the last few episodes the day after school let out. There was also a group at the local university with longer viewing sessions where they’d either show several episodes or a few different series. I knew a lot of people who went to those weekly.

When I went off to college, probably a quarter of the people on my floor watched it to some extent. My roommate had a giant collection of bootlegs (on CDs!) that people always wanted to borrow, and I soon had something similar.

I still remember catching that random broadcast of the DIC Sailor Moon in September of 1995 before it got syndicated in my local market a few months later. I taped every episode because I never knew if it would air again. I remember catching the original Dragon Ball randomly on weekend mornings, but it was never in the same time slot on the same station. I specifically remember in 1996 when a friend told me Dragon Ball Z was regularly airing on our local UPN affiliate, and giving that a shot instead of reruns of X-Men on Fox.

But the big game-changer was Pokemon. Once that hit, it introduced younger Millennials to anime, and TV stations just put it alongside all their other cartoons. It wasn't a big deal that it was anime, it was just a cartoon.

And then Toonami happened, and put Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon on a regular time slot on a cable channel. Add in the other stuff they rotated between -- Gundam Wing, Tenchi Muyo!, Outlaw Star, Cowboy Bebop, Ruroni Kenshin, Lupin III, etc., etc. Combine that with anime series being available on DVD in their entirety for the first time, and THAT was when anime went mainstream.

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she-dont-use-jellyyy@reddit

Nobody I knew watched it. I'm sure people did, but if they did, they sure weren't talking about it. I've never seen any, personally, and I have zero interest.

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TOkidd@reddit

It was called Japanimation among the people I knew and it was moderately popular. Films like Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and other big names that had been dubbed into English were pretty well-known. Personally, I liked Sailor Moon and got bootleg Japanese tapes from my girlfriend, which were a lot darker than the sanitized North American show.

Otherwise, anime did not have a mainstream or large audience in my city because there wasn't a market for it. All things Japanese had not become a pop culture phenomenon. It wasn't until the 2000's and the dawn of high speed internet when anime could start to cross over into other markets that it began to become more popular. Now you have people in their 20s who grew up on shows like One Piece and anime is a huge part of global culture, but in the 90's it was pretty niche and limited.

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Dyogenez@reddit

Graduated high school in 2000 in FL. I had quite a lot of anime back then, over 2000 CDs of burned, downloaded anime by the time I graduated college. 😅

A few people in my school (~20) knew DBZ, Sailor Moon and what you could watch on TV.

It was a whole different world for even getting access to anime. Let me explain.

Anime on TV - DBZ, Sailor Moon a Cartoon Network was the starting point. Science Fiction Channel (before it was renamed SyFY) aired a movie on Saturday mornings.

Anime on VHS from stores - Blockbuster had a few movies - Ninja Scroll, Akira, a few others. Suncoast video (our mall store) had more. In FL we had Animenatiomn, which had some more unique videos. These were all official US releases, and sometimes you could get something subbed if you were lucky. These were expensive (often up to $30 a tape).

Fansubbed anime - Back in the 90s, people would record anime on Japanese TV to VHS tapes. Then someone who was bilingual in Japanese and English would add a subtitle track and re-record it. Some people amassed large collections of fandubbed VHS tapes, and would sell copies online for extra cash. I knew a few high schoolers who had 4+ VHS players to make copies. Comic conventions and anime conventions also often sold fansubs.

IRC - Internet Relay Chat (discord before discord) was the place to get anything. I used to hangout in #animeheaven on EF Net (same username). Some channels used FServe (a command you could run in IRC to send files directly from one person to another). There were also a bunch of FTP servers that were often running on students computers at US colleges (which had the best internet of the day). This was how you found random shows that only aired in Japan.

Depending on what you were watching, it’ll immediately show where you were getting anime from because access was such a pain.

Sailor Moon was my gateway anime. Some of my favorites in 90s were: Fushigi Yuugi (cosplayed as Tamahome to a con where I met my first girlfriend 😂), Evangelion, Nadia Secret of Blue Water, Revolutionary Girl Utena (getting that in 1999 was a PAIN), Initial D, Berserk, The Vision of Escaflowne, Gundam Wing (which later aired on Toonami too!), Kenshin, Cardcaptor Sakura, Record of Lodoss War, His or Asher Circumstamces, Kimagure Orange Road, Serial Experiments Lain, Marmalade Boy and Cowboy Be op. (Those are a few favorites 😅)

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Street_Gur9817@reddit (OP)

Huh did you watch Kaleido Star and Twelce Kingdoms back then?

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Dyogenez@reddit

I’ve never heard of either of those, and they both same out when I was really into anime 😅 Deep cuts!

It’s neat to see the line between some anime’s though. Nadia to Atlantis (Disney), Lodoss War to MKR/Twelve Kingdoms, Gem and the Holograms to Perfect Blur and Kaleido Star (very different vibes, but pop stardom).

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janellthegreat@reddit

We used to trade VHS tapes that were copies of copies of fan-subs out of out lockers. The one I remember most distinctly was Revolutionary Girl Utena.

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6leaf@reddit

In 4th grade my family got severe food poisoning from a bad can of kidney beans. My mom rented this anime film, and I remember being nearly delirious with fever and dehydration and watching this film about about crying frogs. All I remember was high-pitched voices and sobbing frogs.

Because of that, I had a very adverse reaction to anything anime-related for a long time. My brother (who's 8 years younger than me and a more core millennial) ended up getting really into anime. I remember there being an "Asian film club" in high school (I don't think it was called "anime") and I imagined crying frogs and stayed far away.

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redisthebestflavor@reddit

Best friend was Korean and showed me VHS tapes. So middle school it was our thing. We found how to get cool action pictures off the internet!!!! 5 mins to download 1 thing. 5 mins felt like nothing compared to obtaining something so rare. I had a scrap book. We had to compromise who would keep the picture cause printer ink was so expensive. I didn’t think about it but I never really saw anyone else into it. HS different schools, lost touch, and lost interest. I didn’t have a connect.

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gesis@reddit

I watched classics like Mazinger Z and Speed Racer as a kid in the 80s, and classic "Movies" like Akira and Vampire Hunter D in the 90s.

They were pretty popular among my D&D playing peer group.

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rosujin@reddit

It was not popular but pretty common.

I went to high school in LA (c/o ‘96) and we had a lot of Japanese-American students. Japanese was one of the foreign language options if you didn’t want to take Spanish. My girlfriend was Japanese.

I had a lot of friends who were into anime and manga. One of my best friends (not Japanese) was deep off into anime. He gave me a giant stack of VHS tapes one summer with the entire series of Ranma 1/2.

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torino_nera@reddit

Maybe 2 kids in my entire school liked it? It was definitely not cool. Even less cool than comics and fantasy was. I knew what Akira and Ninja Scroll was, but that's only because I liked movies

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supergooduser@reddit

I've done a deep dive into this and I think anime is a bit of a dividing line between Xennial and Millennial.

The big one when anime really went mainstream is the Pokemon cartoon in 1998, we would've been 14-21 when that dropped, right out of the range of "watching afternoon cartoons"

But for Millennials it was a HUGE phenomenon, combined with Toonami which started in 1997 (again when we were 13-20)... Millenials had regular access to essentially free anime, daily and weekly.

That being said, there were 'early adopters' so some pioneering Xennials are definitely into Anime.

Prior to Toonami we had Dragon Ball Z successfully in syndication in 1996, and in 1995 Sailor Moon was in syndication. If you were in the right market, you had regular access. in 1995 you could've been 11 years old so kinda prime for thinking Sailor Moon was cool as shit.

If you go a ways back... 1984 had Voltron in syndication and in 1985 Robotech was in syndication, so if you were lucky to be in one of those markets, you had super early exposure to anime. (Battle of The Planets aired in 1977 and had some repeats, ditto for Starblazers in 1978).

The other big point of access was local stores/rentals... Hollywood video typically had an animation section with some anime selections, and SunCoast video provided it as well... but you're talking about taking a chance on an unknown property ("Wtf is a Bubblegum Crisis?") ... so it's possible to have stumbled across it, but it was nowhere near as common as Pokemon being broadcast on a local affiliate everyday after school.

RTMSner@reddit

It was not very popular. The popular video store by the park had Akira, Vampire Hunter D and Ninja Scroll. No one I knew had seen them and I didn't until I was in college.

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Impressive-Record839@reddit

There was a skateboard brand called Hook Ups that had a bunch of anime designs. I even had some red shoes with an anime girl on them.

https://www.grailed.com/listings/23098014-vintage-vintage-hook-ups-red-eyes-skate-shoes

My friends and I all watched Akira, Ghost in the Shell and had the mangas as well but we were also super nerds. Pokemon was after my time.

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Coffeeblack206@reddit

When I was in high school it was a thing that got you beat up or bullied. Personally not a fan of it but didn’t ever understand the hate

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0905-15@reddit

It wasn’t popular. I had one friend into it, he showed us Akira, it wasn’t my jam.

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JJBell@reddit

Other than Akira and Vampire Hunter D I had never seen or had access to any anime until I got to college in the late 90s.

Ghost in the Shell really put anime in the American eye again. But it was mostly a lot of guys importing VHS bootlegs of Dragonball Z.

As a fan of anime in the early 90s in middle school to high school, it was a struggle.

Usually most of us oldheads were exposed to anime either on late night HBO in the late 80s (As was my case) or the Sci-Fi channel in the 90s.

But it didn't just happen in a vacuum, it was usually the Gen X older brothers that were already into it, and had weird sketchy connections from the underground bootleg VHS trade, they introduced us to those yellow fonted subtitled grainy VHS movies.

Most kids in the 90s cut their teeth on Saturday morning Japanimation on the Sci-Fi channel, but before they started doing that, Sci-Fi would once a year have a Festival of Anime, basically several hours of anime in one day, this is where a lot of people got their start with movies like Akira, Vampire Hunter D, Project A-ko, 8-Man After, etc.

But outside of the Sci-Fi channel, it was HARD being a fan of anime, if you were lucky you had a mom and pops video rental store that might have had a tiny partial shelf section of anime WAY in the corner of the store.

You "could" buy anime tapes at your typical mall Video Music stores...for 35 dollars, for ONE episode of Tenchi Muyo.

If you couldn't afford it, well...you could wait until TV started airing anime in the form of a few Dragonball (not the Cartoon Network Toonami one, that wouldn't be for many more years) episodes that would repeat, or Sailor Moon, or Samurai Troopers, but generally it was tough finding new material. Even when the Internet came out, you could see pictures and read about anime, but still couldn't watch it yet.

Once Neon Genesis Evangelion hit though, that made Anime much more mainstream, it was still expensive being a fan, but that opened the doors to anime being popular enough to finally air on Toonami.

I say all of this as someone who'd been a fan since the 80s and still is today. In fact, me and a friend started the anime club at my community college back in 2001, and last I heard, it was still going strong with a few hundred members to this day.

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The-disgracist@reddit

Not very. It was on the verge of breaking out. We all had a friend who got bootleg dragon ball tapes. And Miyazaki was around. By the late 90s Cartoon Network had some anime on, mostly dragon ball z.

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Cass_Q@reddit

I liked it, but didn't have a lot of access to it. I could watch Sailor Moon and DragonBall Z and whatever the Scifi station would play Saturday morning. It was called Saturday Anime, if I recall correctly, and showed things like Cassan Robot Hunter and Demon City Shinjuku.

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the_amazing_spork@reddit

There was always a small but passionate group of kids in HS that were into it. Then others, like myself, would dabble with some of the more well known titles. Akira and Ghost in a Shell are the two that I remember.

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K2sX@reddit

Graduated in '98. Early favorites were Akira, Evangelion, Battle Angel Alita, Tenchi Muyo, Ranma 1/2.

I went to a very upper class high school, but was not part of that demographic. My friends were the other not-rich kids in band/art club/newspaper. We also played MTG and ttrpgs.

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Ok-Maintenance-9538@reddit

Not very. We had a local used book store/card shop that had a bunch of VHS tapes, models and other Japanese import stuff.

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lothartheunkind@reddit

In rural TN we didn’t have cable so my only exposure to any Japanese animation was Pokémon and I was already getting a little old to care about it then. I do have a vague memory of an anime Wizard of Oz that I had on a recorded VHS.

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Alpha_Geek4711@reddit

In the early 90’s you had some anime in TV (e.g. Voltron re-runs and the like)

A few anime movies at blockbuster. I recall one night my friends and I rented Akira and Fist of the North Star. There was one anime specialty shop and we got Curse of the OverFiend

That was a hell of a night watching anime

In the late 90’s a few more anime shops had opened, so popularity was growing. That’s about the time we started renting DBZ

So it started a a very niche thing. My friends and I rarely discussed anime due to all of our other interests. By the time 97-98 rolled around, anime was a much bigger topic and more and more conversations were had. IIRC, A-Kon was starting up about this time, so the niche had bled fully into nerd culture.

But the mainstream was still not there for anime until Toonami/Adult Swim made it popular.

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ouijahead@reddit

Fist of the North Star 👊 ⭐️

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Dog_Baseball@reddit

I rented vhs's from blockbuster, but didn't talk about it much, except with one or two other people.

I remember seeing Nausica Of The Valley Of The Wind on broadcast tv in the 80's, before i knew anything about any of it.

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Independent-Scale564@reddit

It really wasn't very popular.

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Balthierlives@reddit

Japanese anime basically didn’t exist.

I think the closest we got to was Voltron.

it’s too late for me to get started

What a strange thing to think. Do you have a terminal illness?

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Fickle_Wrangler_7439@reddit

The majority of it is definite for teens, but I can give you some solid anime for grown ups recs if you're ever interested. A few have rereally stood the test of time.

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JaredUnzipped@reddit

Practically unknown. I was ordering tapes out of magazines and catalogs. It wasn't readily available on television yet. I could have mentioned Akira or Guyver in my high school cafeteria and no one would have known what I was talking about.

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Thedirtyone522@reddit

Everyone loved dbz. I mean it was fucking everywhere. Even people who made fun of anime liked dbz.

If you watched anything other than dbz you were too into the scene. Dbz was the only cool thing to watch.

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_chubby-puppy_@reddit

gif

Not at all. It was some vhs tapes passed around.

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Mmphska@reddit

My brothers were SUPER into DBZ in the late 90's early 2000's

It was not popular at all. You kept it to yourself. Toonami & Adult Swim really helped expand anime's popularity in the US, but that was more early 2000s. I loved watching Japanimation on the Scifi channel with my dad and my grandparents had HBO, so they would record anime off the channel on VHS for me. Project A-ko, Iria, Macross Plus, Gunsmith Cats, Battle Angel Alita; they were so fun to watch, though probably not entirely appropriate for a middle schooler.

Fun side note: the reason my dad finally consented to buying a DVD player for the household was because one Christmas I really wanted a couple of anime movies & manga, but when my parents took a trip to Media play (I miss that place!), they realized that anime sold on VHS was shrinking and being replaced by DVDs more rapidly than other genres. My mom usually has little interest in technology and my dad could be a real cheapskate, so I think the plan was to wait untill more media had converted over to DVD and generally less expensive, but my mom was determined for her weird daughter(me :p) to have a good Christmas and talked dad into getting a DVD player for the family. I got Dragon Half with dub & sub, my sister got Moulin Rouge and it was a pretty awesome Christmas.

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DuranDourand@reddit

I loved Cowboy Bebop. I still do, but I used to, too.

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s_nation@reddit

love Cowboy Bebop!

I haven't seen any other animated series that surpasses the quality of storytelling that this one had. The soundtrack (composed by the genius Yoko Kanno) is magnificent, i think Archer copied or borrowed heavily from its opening credits. Their illustrations of different ethnicities was something I haven't seen either. It should be considered alongside other highly rated drama series imho.

The netflix Live Action remake tho, 🤦‍♀️

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BigBabyWhale@reddit

I watched DBZ and Fist of the North Star. Wouldn’t say it was popular though.

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ouijahead@reddit

Exploding heads 🤯. Blew my mind. Accidentally saw Fist of the North Star for the first time while high. It had a deep impact on me. My friends and I even filmed a short movie heavily influenced by the violence in Fist of North Star. We made an entire bucket of blood to use .

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CPT_Shiner@reddit

Same here, plus Ninja Scroll

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SaveusJebus@reddit

I grew up pretty poor. Only had cable every once in a while. When I was a teen in the 90s, didn't have cable unless it was when cable companies did like a free month so missed a lot of the popular ones when they started like Sailor Moon etc.

Not popular at all, and only when I met white college kids into anime was I introduced to serious personality disorders. Turned me off of anything to do with anime to this day.

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Scharlach_el_Dandy@reddit

Yeah we were definitely not the cool kids for watching ninja scroll and Akira, but in the late '90s dragon Ball z started becoming mainstreamed.

Anime was incredibly niche growing up. Broadcast started showing sailor Moon and dragon Ball z on syndication early in the morning. Many of us were starting to age out of cartoons and didn't talk openly about it at first.

After a while it started becoming an underground topic to talk about. Not out in the open, but discussed enough that people took notice. Eventually the t-shirt business capitalized on this and it became apparent there were many anime fans.

It wasn't until the 2000s after I graduated from high school did I see it approach mainstream acceptance. Adult swim was a big push. I think had it existed in the 90s, the acceptance would have been quicker.

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rdldr1@reddit

If you liked anime back in the 90s in high school, you would be considered a nerd. I knew a few kids who were getting into Linux and they were also called nerds.

Anime wasn't really popular because you had to put in the effort to get access to anime back then.

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anOvenofWitches@reddit

Slightly after high school.

Sailor Moon accessories were big at raves!

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ouijahead@reddit

Fist of the North Star ⭐️ 👊. That was the only one I had seen, oh and of course ninja scrolls.

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mangocalrissian@reddit

I grew up in Japan and watched Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon, the show that became Power Ranger, and others on the Japanese channels we got. It was wild to see it come over to the States basically at the same time I did.

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TTACcollector@reddit

It was only popular with the weird kids. Maybe 10 of the kids at my 1000 strong highschool knew anything about it. We had a dubbed VHS copy of Fist of the North Star OVA we lent out. I saw Akira and MD Geist at a friends house on his big screen 27inch tube tv.

In my area the only place to get 'japanimation' was Suncoast at the mall and you were paying through the nose for it. $35-40/tape depending on the show and that got you 2-3 20 minute episodes. I gave $53 for VHS copies of 8-Man and Wicked City during a buy one get one 50% sale back in 1995. For context gas was $.94/gallon and a large double quarter pounder meal was $4.36. I remember the cute little 'not for kids' stickers on the front covers of the tapes. There was no way to know what was worth watching as all we had was word of mouth and the cashier as Suncoast as guides.

A few years later in college it became much more available, but still a niche interest. Now there is so much and most of it of high quality that it overwhelming.

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Aggressive-Delay-420@reddit

I lost all interest in Japanese animation when the first couple of rentals ended up being tentacle porn.

Went back to American stuff that was more appropriate.

There weren’t ratings on imported media at the time, and to see what were schoolgirls being raped by demon beasts was a step too far for me.

It wasn't at all. It was relegated to extreme nerdom with people passing around fansub VHS tapes.

It did get more popular in that group over time and in the late 90s companies started licensing animes and professionally dubbing them to sale in stores. Anime popularity didn't really get to the mainstream until 99/00ish with Cartoon Network and Toonami showing things like DBZ, Sailor Moon, and Gundam Wing (this is what hooked me).

This increased sales, got more shows licensed, more shown on TV, and with internet speeds increasing and huge increase in fansubs being shared online. With more internet speeds streaming sites with these fansubs became more common. Then things like Cruchyroll jumped on that huge pirate market, made watching a lot of anime legally affordable, and it became firmly mainstream.

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mrcheevus@reddit

Anime was going to become mainstream no matter what. Seeds were already planted in the 80s.

In the 90s, Anime felt more like cult status, but most video stores like Suncoast had a section. Wasn't totally obscure.

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BigManWAGun@reddit

Had no clue it existed until after ‘01.

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DDrewit@reddit

You gotta be a real NERD to be asking this question, NERD!

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generalfailure2077@reddit

Grew up in Australia and I can talk you that it was not popular AT ALL with the exception of DragonballZ (if you count that) and even then, that was extremely limited to like 2% of kids who even knew what it was.

And if you did know what it was, and enjoyed out openly, you were a fucking nerd.

I remember going to a Evangelion convention when the end movie came out and it was the first showing - it was impossible to even get legally and very very few people back then knew how to pirate, but the whole convention was like, 30-35 people.

Experience was epic. We were true connoisseurs back then. Golden memories.

The definition of “into it before it was cool”

Late-Arrival-8669@reddit

Sturgeons Law definitely applied and you got a lot of shit with nothing more than gore and tits for the teenage boy (actual or mental) crowd.

It was also expensive, and you'd get tapes with one half hour episode of something like Guyver.

For these reasons, it didn't really keep my interest beyond a few movies.

We didn't get Dragonball until the early 00s after Pokémon, and I'm almost certain it's the same for Sailor Moon.

Automatic-Arm-532@reddit

A bunch of nerds liked Sailor Moon and shit like that

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JettandTheo@reddit

Rare and made fun of. We mostly knew only of hentai so it was extra weird when it was mentioned

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PlagueDrWily@reddit

There were two camps of anime fans at my school - those who were into the popular shows like Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z, and those who would rent or buy tapes of lesser known stuff from the limited selection at the local video/record stores.

SR_RSMITH@reddit

In my country (Europe) anime came really early, we were getting some stuff like Mazinger Z or Gatchaman in the late 70s and some pre-Ghibli stuff (Heidi, Sherlock Hound, etc) in the 80s, but the "anime" or Japanese factor wasn't there, they were just perceived as cartoons.

Then everything exploded in the early 90s with Dragon Ball, Saint Seiya and Captain Tsubasa. But ironically while those series were really mainstream and popular, for most teenagers they weren't connected to a particular phenomenon such as "anime".

Only for a few of us who started buying manga, fanzines and early Manga Video VHS it was indeed a subculture, but even we were mocked as "freaks". Girls were absolutely absent from it and also even despised it. I can't blame them, teenagers want to feel popular and we geeks were the opposite of that.

I was one of the weird anime kids.

I had DBZ folders in High School and was always drawing anime stuff in my margins. 😅 It was completely vexing to the popular jocks and cheerleaders.

I was raised in the SF Bay and I would hazard a guess that it was more popular for us than for other parts of the country due to having a larger Asian and specifically Japanese immigrant population.

Pokémon was the only anime anyone knew about. I remember Sailor Moon coming on in the mornings before school, but it wasn’t my thing. A few kids watched Dragonball. That was it. My best friend got into anime big time in high school. I just didn’t like the animation style. Now as an adult there’s quite a few old anime movies from my childhood that I’ve enjoyed. Especially Ghibli stuff.

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