Conventional Wisdom: the descent into anime, pt. 1

I was planning on doing a blog about how I got into anime in the first place, and I’m still going to do something along those lines next. But the preamble to that one got so long and complicated, I figured I’d better just break it off as its own post. You see, I first made the real plunge into otakudom in my teens, but when I started getting serious about learning more about this exciting, mature new Japanese Animation thing… I was surprised to find I’d already watched a ton of it as a kid.

I don’t know if younger generations can grasp just how easily anime’s “Japanese-ness” could be overlooked back in the day. After all, that in itself has become a selling point over the years, and even if it wasn’t, we’d still have The Internet dropping all the information of the world into our laps. But back in the old days, the late ‘80s, before the Earth cooled and starfish aliens still roamed? Stuff was easier to miss back then, and quite a few of us ended up getting “introduced” to anime far sooner than we realized.

Me, my first taste of Japanese Animation was provided by our church, strangely enough. They had a downright massive collection of children’s videos on hand, most of which were pretty unimpressive (the towering cinematic achievement that is VeggieTales still being several years off). But there were a few videos that really stood out to my tiny little brain, if only for how WEIRD they were. There was one series called Superbook, which was about a couple of kids who would habitually get sucked into this magic Bible and experience biblical accounts first hand… because that’s totally how the almighty works. Oh, and they had a toy robot that would get sucked in with them, growing life-sized and gaining sentience in the process, because apparently the almighty is into that too. Even better was its sequel of sorts, called The Flying House. That one was about three kids who stumbled onto a mad scientist and his robot assistant who, as the title suggests, had built a house that could fly… THROUGH TIME. Of course, it promptly malfunctioned, stranding the whole lot of them in first century Israel, giving them plenty of time to follow Jesus around. They were weird shows, and that was the fun of it. What’s more, I could tell even then that they looked a lot different than the sub Hanna Barbera stuff that usually passed as Bible story videos. I liked how different the character faces were drawn, even if I didn’t understand what the difference was. Heck, I don’t even think these videos had credits on them, so even if I’d wanted to know they were produced in Japan, there wouldn’t have been anything to tell me.

And that wasn’t all, either. It was downright mind-blowing to look back on the old Nick Jr. programming block and realize just how much anime they had lurking between reruns of David the Gnome. Back in ye olden times, they had Littl’ Bits, Maya the Bee, The Little Prince, Little Koala, and Grimm’s Fairy Tale Classics, which was probably my favorite of the bunch despite not having the word “little” anywhere in the title. It turns out my pre-school self was absorbing TONS of Japanese Animation well before my self-appointed anime fandom started up. And in those dark, mysterious, pre-Toonami days, nobody ever thought to lump them together into some kind of “Japanimation for kids” block, so I was none the wiser to what it was. Admittedly, most of these shows weren’t exactly groundbreaking (unless there’s some deeper allegorical meaning to The Adventures of Little Koala that I’ve forgotten over the years), but given where my interests have drifted over the years, it would seem they still had an impact.

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