1984: The Year of the Fist

Milo is a hot-blooded Puerto Rican who has been writing about comics, animation and movies for the last three years on blogofthenorthstar.com. He wears a suit to work, drinks too much alcohol, and sleeps four hours a day. He also tweets at @northstarblog and tumbles images at northstarblog.tumblr.com irresponsibly.

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1984 was a year of limited options, unless you watch way too much mecha anime.

In preparation for writing this Golden Ani-versary post I reviewed all the installments posted so far, and I think we can all agree: damn, a lot has been said about robots! It was inevitable, considering the focus of this blog is upon television shows, and robot shows were among the most conspicuous parts of televised anime, especially in the 1970s and '80s. However, considering so much has and will be written about mecha, and that I cannot summon the willpower to even say the words “Yoshiyuki Tomino” (there I did it once, that’s it, that’s all I can do), I decided to skip that material entirely in talking to you about 1984, the year the Fist of the North Star television show began airing.

In my defense, 1984 was not a terrific year of anime television. In fact, aside from the third part of the Lupin the Third television show, there isn't much in the way of cartoons about adults doing interesting things at all. It's all "children this" and "machines hitting that," and while you could probably assemble a diverse Super Robot Wars videogame cast from the mecha shows which debuted in this year alone, I ultimately think Fist of the North Star was put in a position to succeed by virtue of the fact it was such a refreshing change from everything else being offered.

So while it's going to annoy certain people that I'm not waxing poetic about mecha classics like Giant Gorg, Panzer World Galient, and Heavy Metal Gaim, the simple fact is none of these anime particularly stand out from the series that have already been written about on this blog. Even the Go Nagai anime of the year, God Mazinger, is a universally-ignored property that borrows the name of one of his best-known creations to tell a pedestrian fantasy-themed story. Aside from recognizing God Mazinger's cameo appearance in the Dynamic Super Robots Grand Battle animation test released around fifteen years later, there's no reason to remember the show even exists.