First Anime & First Manga

[Usagichan]

Hey everyone!

What was your first anime?

My 10 year-old stepdaughter is just getting into anime and she started with some of my firsts. It has me all sorts of nostalgic! But that only gets you so far, ya know? 'Cause I mean... hey, nostalgia isn't what it used to be.    Anyway, so, what was it? Did you like it? Did it get you into anime or did a show later on really start you looking into more anime? Was it also your first manga? If not, what was your first manga?

I look forward to reading everybody's answers!

[Prinz Eugen]

My VERY first anime was 'Speed Racer,' but it was dubbed so I didn't know it was Japanese. Heck I was like 4 or 5 so I probably didn't even know what 'Japan' was.
Then in college I was in an SF club and some of the members were also into 'Japanimation' and I wasn't excited about it at the time, just kinda knew it was there.
They were all into 'Bubblegum Crisis' and 'Bubblegum Crash' and Robotech, etc. I tried a game of Battletech for a bit, and some of them moved on to Shadowrun and Traveller.
I did some hang-gliding in my college days and I liked Nausicaa's flyer in "Warrier of the Winds." I also enjoyed 'Lensman' and 'Kiki's delivery Service.'
The 'Lensman' anime prompted me to read the Lensman books (E.E. 'Doc' Smith) and some of his other works, then I got into Heinlein, Gordon R. Dickenson, David Drake, and David Weber, and other hard/military SF and alternative history stuff.


A few years after that I was working in Japan and was renting anime VHS tapes from the corner store - to help learn the language, and I was watching 'Record of Lodoss Wars'


First Manga that I really 'read' was 'Shikabane Hime' (Corpse Princess) which I liked because ALL the kanji had furigana on them ALL the time - so you could look them up in a Word-Tank or other digital kanji aide. I loved the Todoroki arc, the Makina/Hokutou thing was entertaining while sometimes a little bizarre, and the ending was expectedly incomplete but still somewhat satisfying.
Many manga have furigana for a bit, and then turn them off, expecting you to have 'learned' the characters and retained them. This is OK until you want to look at Volume 5 of something after a few years, and if you forgot those kanji it's a LOT harder to get in there and pick it apart.

[BlackjackGabbiani]

First anime I ever saw was when I was about 3. It was a Christian series called Flying House.

[Animeman73]

First anime and first manga. Excellent question. My first anime was years and years ago around the early 1980's it was a movie called Galaxy Express 999. Ironically it was created by the same man who would later create Star Blazers.  And  I didn't know it was anime at the time. As for the first manga I ever read that's easy yu-Gi-Oh, the original series created by Kazuki Takahashi. No surprise since I'm, at my age, a huge Yu-Gi-Oh fan.

[ldkstar]

First anime I remember is Dragon Ball Z. First anime I went otaku over and obsessed about, was CardCaptor Sakura, especially when I found out the dub on tv was an inferior, censored mess.

[Sailor-Jeimi]

First anime I ever watched was teh original Speed Racer. I only BARELY remember though as I was a little LITTLE kid. My dad had that and the original Astro Boy, which was my second anime. First manga? I THINK Dragonball? I can't fully remember..i remember back in the 90s I had the Dragonball Manga, but I know I had a few others, but i can't remember what I had FIRST..lol

[Washougal_Otaku]

Technically, my first anime was a 1970s Christian propaganda series called "Super Book," which was aired on the Trinity Broadcasting Network as part of the alternative line-up against that which most American kids watched on Saturday mornings and was followed by another such series called "Flying House."

As far as first anime in which I knew that it was a Japanese animation... I guess that would have been "Voltage Fighter Gowkaizer" (not sure on the spelling), but the first one that I genuinely fell in love with was "Blue Seed."

As for manga, that would have been "Ranma 1/2."  I started watching the anime in 2005, and found some random issues of the manga at Kumoricon 2006 (which was my first year here).