1980, Part 2: What Anime Bloggers Would Typically Say About It

(We swear that this is the last section of Daryl Surat's analysis of anime from 1980. Seriously, this is it. He wanted to write about more, but there's absolutely nothing left for him to cover. Nothing. - Ed.)

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Now comes the easy part. The stuff you guys know about; the part of 1980 that the Internet anime fan blogging sphere has on their radar thanks to fansubs and disc-based commercial media releases. Did I forget to mention there was a Doraemon movie in the preceding parts, given its Japanese mega-popularity and English-language obscurity? Nah! I just didn’t bother to talk about it because THERE’S ALWAYS A DORAEMON MOVIE. Though not mentioning it did mean I had no place to note that a second TV series was made for one of Fujiko Fujio’s less famous creations, Kaibutsu-kun…

1978: The Year of Leiji Matsumoto

AJtheFourth is a writer for the team anime blog Altair and Vega. When she's not writing about anime or working an unfortunate retail schedule she can be found bemoaning the Red Sox and the Packers, running, painting, playing altogether too much League of Legends, and fervently wishing she owned a Bernese Mountain Dog so she could ride it like Chiyo-chan in Azumanga Daioh. Her favorite anime include Aim for the Ace!, Touch, Rose of Versailles, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Honey and Clover, and Do You Remember Love?

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Initially, I had chosen the year 1978 upon noticing that one of my favorite series of all time, Aim for the Ace!, had aired in that year. Upon further inspection, it became clear that it was the second season of the shojo adaptation and not the infamous first series that saw Osamu Dezaki burst onto the anime scene. This turned out to be a fortuitous oversight, as 1978 was a breakout year for one of the most influential creators in manga and anime history: Leiji Matsumoto.

Although previous works of his had been adapted for the small screen, 1978 saw Galaxy Express 999, Space Pirate Captain Harlock, Starzinger, and of course the continuation of his first known success: Space Battleship Yamato.

1974: It's A Creator's Story

Justin Stroman is the founder of Organization Anti-Social Geniuses, a Japanese Pop Culture blog. Has been watching anime for a good decade, but it wasn’t until he started blogging that his interest in watching anime and learning more about some of its history picked up. If he’s not blogging, you can find him on Twitter tweeting or re-tweeting any anime, manga, or sports information (good or bad) on Twitter.

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The first thing I should mention is that the Golden Ani-Versary project is what I think a great tribute to decades of Japanese animation. To be a part of celebrating 50 years of anime alongside many other bloggers and writers is something I wouldn’t have thought I’d be doing not even two years ago, where I liked anime but not enough to dig further deep into the fandom and start blogging myself. As this project continues, I hope that this site and the articles already written and will be written in the future serve as great commentary on how anime has evolved from its past to its present, and perhaps this will give us insight into how the future of anime will be.

Now, in volunteering for this project, I immediately desired to cover some of the early years of Japanese animation, if only to figure out how anime was well before I was born compared to today, and discover what works allowed the medium to keep growing to what it has become today. Needless to say, with limited credentialed information either via the web or in print, it wasn’t quite that easy to find everything, so maybe there were anime that aired during this period that I could not extensively cover, and even the ones I did maybe not enough coverage. But in the end, I discovered what I felt to be the most significant anime series of 1974.

So, let’s get started.