(Image above via Wikimedia Commons. I believe this falls under fair use, for the reasons outlined on the linked page.)
I guess Robotech was my first anime, strictly speaking. I ended up with a VHS tape of a single Robotech episode back in the...late 80s, I am pretty sure. I have no idea where it came from beyond "my parents got it for me." It was from the middle of the series, meaning I had no idea what was happening or who the characters were. Also, I wanted talking robots more than piloted mechs...I was a Transformers kid, though for the moment I'm not counting that as anime.
I ended up watching the whole first Robotech series as an adult. It's wild and has things you might call "problems" that are documented in a thousand places on the Internet, but I had a good time watching it.
(Image above via Wikimedia Commons. The linked page claims that the image is in the public domain due its particular composition. I somehow doubt that, but I do think its use here falls under the doctrine of fair use.)
Cowboy Bebop was the first anime that I watched all the way through. (I'm sure it is that for many American anime fans of a certain age.) A very special person bought me the complete series on DVD, which I still own. I think it is a bootleg set of "The Perfect Sessions," because it was bought at a time when such a box set was expensive and difficult to come by. This very special person went the extra mile of also giving me the series soundtrack, to really complete the "Perfect Sessions" set recreation.
Flawless, 10/10, A+ series. I still think about bell peppers and beef, at odd times.
(Image above via Wikimedia Commons. I believe this falls under fair use, for the reasons outlined on the linked page.)
I first saw Sailor Moon via the legendary, or infamous, original English dub on Cartoon Network's Toonami block. I didn't get much into it because "it's for girls." Revisiting it as a grown man reveals that...yep, it was made for girls. And that is a fine thing to be, and it does not mean that anyone else can't watch it. It is a fun, goofy show. I watched the entire 1990s anime and had a good time. I have even started reading the manga, which is different but also enjoyable.
I'm still watching this, at time of writing. I call this "my space opera war story that's mostly people taking about space opera war." That isn't entirely fair, of course, but it does get at why I like the show. There's talk of the battle strategies and tactics used, but also of the consequences of war and the phiolosophical underpinnings of it. The actual fighting is not the most interesting part of the show to me, as it's often just space ships shooting rays at each other from a distance. It makes me think of history class descriptions of "neat lines of soldiers shooting at each other across a field" battles of the past. The ships look neat, though their numbers give a sort of generic quality to them. I wonder if the battle animation was intended to convey a mild sense of banality-of-evil.
One notable thing is that person-to-person contact inside ships often takes the form of combat with axes/halberds. This is due to either a technobabble thing that prevents laser gun usage in ships, no one wanting to breach the hull with a laser gun and thus doom themselves along with the enemy, or both. The deaths in these battles are presented as grisly things. Deaths via ships being hit by lasers are similarly ugly. The show does not let the viewer forget that human beings are dying.
Another thing: I just like older animation, as this list makes clear.
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