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The first anime series I can remember watching I don’t actually remember watching, I just remember playing it in kindergarten afterwards, in what must’ve been 1980. The series was the original Gatchaman, or rather the Dutch dub of the American reworking Battle of the Planets, Strijd der Planeten, with the heroic adventures of the Giefors team. I think I mostly played either the princess or that one fat dude, setting up some expectations for later life.

That’s obviously long before I ever heard of anime, or even Japanimation as it would still be called once I did learn about it, sometime in the later half of the eighties. Before that it was all just cartoons, mostly dubbed into Dutch and often edited for a children’s audience, not that different from all the French or English or Canadian co-productions that we would watch back then. That was in a time when we only had two national channels in the Netherlands, no cable and if you’re lucky and lived close enough to the border, perhaps you’d get a Belgian or German channel too. I remember one glorious Spring afternoon when conditions were clear enough to receive BBC one for five minutes. It was cricket.

For the better part of two decades now I’ve been following Andrew Weiss, first for his comics blogging, then for the mix of insightful commentary on pop culture and autobiographical examination of same. One of the things I envy in his blogging is his dedication to long series of posts on a single subject and ability to see them through even if they take years to complete. One of those series was about albums that mean something, looking at the circumstances in which some of his favourites albums were purchased. When I started thinking about doing a series about the anime that influenced me it was this that came to mind as a template. I’m not sure yet how regular this feature will appear or how many installments it will take, but I’ll try and do it in a rough sort of chronological order.