Whenever my niece Reina watches anime on TV, I always make it a point to poke my head in the room and say something along these lines in a high-pitched girl voice: “Yuki yuki suki! Teriyaki fried chicken! Let’s kill the monsters! Yay!” The first time I mocked her shows in this way, she marched up to me and yelled, “Don’t make fun of my show!” before giving me one of her patented tickle attacks on the armpits and belly. Little does Reina know that there was a point in my life where I enjoyed anime just as much as she did. Whenever someone asked me what anime shows I watched, I said, “Just the ones they show on Cartoon Network”. And boy, did Cartoon Network have a huge rolodex of anime back in the late 90’s and mid 2000’s. My very first anime show was a gem from the 90’s called Robotech. I kept falling head over heels in love with Lisa Hayes and Dana Sterling. I never wanted to admit being in love with anybody since I feared gold-diggers back then, but Lisa Hayes and Dana Sterling are both cartoon characters, so I’m pretty much safe. But not all of the anime shows in those days were lovey-dovey kissy-kissy escapades. Most of them were action-packed thrill rides like Dragon Ball Z and Gundam Wing. Just once I would have loved to see Heero Yuy (whilst piloting a giant robot named Wing Zero) battle it out with Vegeta in a knockdown, drag-’em-out blood brawl. Only in nerdy fan fiction would that ever happen. A few years after the emergence of TV-Y7 anime shows, we had something called Adult Swim (before it degenerated into mindless filth). Cowboy Bebop was the premiere anime to come from that programming block. Spike Spiegel was a calm and collected badass and Fay Valentine was a gorgeous bombshell: what else could you want from a show about intergalactic bounty hunting with a jazz soundtrack? Since Cowboy Bebop had tons of success on Adult Swim, we began seeing more anime shows in the TV-14 category such as Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Samurai Champloo, and Inuyasha. Rule number one: don’t watch Ghost in the Shell with a schizophrenic brain; you won’t understand a damn part of the plotline. Rule number two: combining a music genre with an action genre will always yield positive results; Samurai Champloo combined hip-hop with, you guessed it, samurai action. Rule number three: give the ASPCA a call every time Kigome uses the sit command on Inuyasha; because Inuyasha has dog ears, that counts as animal cruelty. I guess you want to know if all this gushing over anime is going to go anywhere. It is. I once read a quote on Writer’s Circle that advised aspiring authors to soak in as much media as they could so that they could have inspiration for their books. I spent my entire teenaged life doing just that with anime shows and videogames. While I don’t partake in either of those two mediums much anymore, I am getting things done with my writing in a way that wasn’t possible with limited skills in my teenaged years. Despite how grateful I am to Japanese anime for the inspiration it gave me, I’m still going to haunt Reina every chance I get with the “Yuki yuki suki” quote…whether she’s watching anime or a god-awful show on Disney or Nickelodeon.
***JOKE OF THE DAY***
Q: What does Dan Schneider drive to work every day?
A: Toe truck.
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