Comments on: Revisiting My Otaku Roots

By: Lori Henderson

Lori Henderson — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 06:45:34 +0000

The fire and water prince and princess is called Sea Prince and Fire Child. It was released on video, but as you say will be hard to find or too expensive. If you know about file sharing, you can probably find it that way.

I think the other title (which I vaguely remember as well) is known in the US as Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid. The Japanese title is Dowa Ningyo-Hime. You can find it on Amazon for $6. Hope this helps.

By: frank alviso

frank alviso — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 19:37:56 +0000

looking for movies shown on Family Film Festival. loved the asian cartoons, but not know the title and where to look. there was the little mermaid and one about fire and water prince and princess. any help would be great. they are probubly too old to find.

By: Brian Henderson

Brian Henderson — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 19:13:13 +0000

I got my start much earlier, if you want to trace it back that far, my mother always said that she was responsible for my anime fandom because she let me watch Speed Racer and Kimba the White Lion. I didn’t get to see real anime until after Battle of the Planets, which I watched with the sound turned way down because I recognized that the story sucked. A friend told me about a brand new anime club called the C/FO that had just started and the rest is history. By the time Star Blazers rolled around, I had already seen the original Japanese series so I never really got addicted to the American version. I probably never would have watched Robotech if I hadn’t been good friends with Carl Macek. Voltron… the less said about that, the better.

By: Lori Henderson

Lori Henderson — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 01:31:50 +0000

Jun: It the music that I remember most from BotP. Even though the music from Star Blazers was good, I can still here the incidental from BotP in my head. I had a recording of the opening that I would listen to. It also got me interested in Phoenixes. I love the God Phoenix. It’s what I looked forward to most seeing in the episodes.

Pira: When I hear people talk about “old school anime” and they’re talking about the 90′s, I cringe. I mean, if fans from the 90′s are old, what does that make us fans from the 70s-80s? Ancients? Star Blazers was my gateway to other shows such as Mysterious Cities of Gold, Voltron, and finally Robotech. I was in High School when these last two shows came out, and I probably wouldn’t have watched them if I hadn’t had that first taste.

By: Pira

Pira — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 13:57:14 +0000

Reading the Otaku USA article(s) brought back so many memories of this series for myself, but it’s the commentary by others who first discovered anime because of it, that opens up the flood gates of nostalgia.

This generation can’t imagine what it was like in the *good old days* when there was no chance of watching an episode again (in fact I had to watch the show on my little black and white tv using rabbit ears to catch the signal from across the boarder in the US). I also would record the audio tracks with my hand held mike, to a cassette recorder and listen to the episodes while I doodled Nova-like females and drew and redrew the Argo.

For me the defining moment of the show was when Captain Avatar died ~ I recall running to my perplexed mother, babbling about this cartoon characters’ death and while thinking it was dreadful I was also lock, stock and barrel sold on anime. The characters would from this point on out angst and I would angst along with them. It was WONDERFUL!

Starblazers is for our generation of otaku….the *Where were you when Man first Walked on the Moon?* question. We all remember the moment like it was yesterday ~ each of us has a scene from that show etched onto our subconcious, a moment when we had an epiphany so strong that it launched us out of our childhood Saturday cartoon stupor into the world of anime and we could never look at cartoons the same way again.

By: jun

jun — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 13:48:34 +0000

“Battle of the Planets” was what did it for me. I know that it was edited severely for American kids, but I still remember realizing that people were actually dying, and that the story wasn’t always resetting every single episode. I distinctly recall thinking it wasn’t like anything else I’d seen as an 8-year-old.

Later, with the advent of the internet, I looked up BotP and learned all about Gatchaman, which led to an interest in other anime and then to manga, which I now prefer to anime. I still love Gatchaman, though. I probably always will.