Thaliarchus is a recovered anime blogger (URL withheld to protect the guilty) who digs giant robots. In a tragic error of judgement his government has agreed to pay for his existence while he tries to write a Ph.D. thesis. He isn't researching anime, so unlike some other postgrads who've appeared here he has no professional interest in being identified by name--quite the opposite, in fact. However, he can be found on Twitter.
1988! A vintage year when
My Neighbour Totoro,
Char's Counterattack,
Grave of the Fireflies, something called
Akira--you may have heard of it--and a clutch of classic OVAs came out. The chances are that if you're interested enough to be reading these posts, you don't need me to tell you about 1988. Colony Drop even did a whole bunch of posts devoted to the year's highlights--
go read them.
And that's one of the reasons I asked for this year, really: I know I'm really not as qualified to talk about this stuff as some other names who've appeared here, so I needed a year I could safely mess up. My plan is to talk briefly about the general picture of anime on television in 1988, then I'll offer the specific for the general and discuss one show in particular. I'll follow by turning my attention to 1988's rash of OVAs and finish with a few remarks about what we remember. I'm an arts student, and in a time of Big Data I work with small data, so while this could be a list of titles--and in parts it is--I thought I'd try not being synoptic.
