In late high school, one of my favorite television programs was the Sci-Fi Channel’s Saturday Anime. While it wasn’t a hosted show per se, Saturday Anime was a block than ran Saturday mornings, showcasing various anime films that had often fallen under the radar. See, this was before anime became the mega-popular juggernaut that it is today; back in the early 1990s, anime fandom was reserved mainly for the hardcore anime nerds, not pop culture.

At any rate, Saturday Anime was my first exposure to many anime films and original video animation (OVAs) from the 1980s and 1990s, such as Demon City Shinjuku, Armitage III, Ghost in the Shell, 8Man After, Lensman, Vampire Hunter D, Robot Carnival, and Ninja Scroll. Prior to that, my only real experience with anime was stuff that had been mixed and matched for a US release, like Robotech and Voltron, or shows that were only partly produced by Japanese studios, like Mighty Orbots and Ulysses 31. (Of course, I’d also heard of Sailor Moon and the like, but that wasn’t my cup of tea.) In fact, I’d say that Saturday Anime was directly responsible for turning me into a fan of the genre. Don’t worry, I’m not one of them, but I still enjoy quality anime quite a bit.

Saturday Anime went the way of the dodo a long time ago, and sadly, much of the anime they showcased went along with it. Some of the stuff was released on VHS in the 1990s, but never made it to DVD; others did make it to DVD, but they’re either extremely overpriced, out of print, or both. My favorite anime is definitely from the 1980s and early 1990s, and it’s incredibly annoying to see that much of it is extremely difficult to come by in a viable format. Cripes, I had to find a VHS copy of Lensman on eBay just to watch and rekindle memories of that old film! I’ve since burned it to a DVD, but that’s just not the same as a professionally produced, high-quality disc.

I did own VHS copies of some of the other aforementioned films back in the 1990s, but of course, I’m a fucking idiot and parted with them many years ago. Time to start selling platelets so I can snag the few that made it to DVD…