In the late 1990s, Brian Ruh became seduced by the dark side of anime–the academic side. After reading the chapter “Vampires, Psychic Girls, Flying Women and Sailor Scouts” by Susan J. Napier, Brian decided that he wanted to become an anime scholar too. After all, what else was he going to do with a philosophy degree? He went on to get an M.A. in Asian Cultures and Languages from the University of Texas at Austin and then a Ph.D. in Communication and Culture from Indiana University. Along the way, he's written articles, book chapters, reviews, and a column for ANN. He also wrote the book Stray Dog of Anime: The Films of Mamoru Oshii, and is currently at work on a second edition to be released in 2014. He can be found on Twitter at @animeresearch, where he opines about anime and tells terrible puns.
Until I began investigating all of the shows that came out in 1992, I didn't really have any idea of the embarrassment of riches this year provided. I had originally decided to write about 1992 because it was around this time that I began re-discovering anime. I was born a couple of months after
Star Wars first came out in the theaters–this created a wave of SF entertainment, particularly cartoons, throughout my formative years. My afternoons were filled with watching the likes of
Battle of the Planets,
Voltron,
Starblazers,
Robotech, and
Tranzor Z, although I didn't know it as anime at the time. In late elementary and junior high school, I grew more towards
Star Trek and the like, but early in high school I found myself back in the anime groove, thanks to a friend with a couple tapes of
Robotech and
Gunbuster.
Although I had my own subjective experiences of anime in 1992, at first I wasn't sure how to get a handle on what the year looked like for the Japanese industry. I figured that if I wanted to hit some of the highlights, it couldn't hurt to check out the covers of the major Japanese anime magazines–Newtype and Animage. Of course, I knew this wouldn’t be the whole story, but it would point us in the right direction of what was popular (or at least what the magazine editorial teams thought would sell) that year.
