I’ve decided to get a theme going for this week.  We’re all going to talk about our “gateway” anime/manga series.  The title that got us into the whole anime/manga shindig.  We’ll spend a few paragraphs musing about it, discussing what made that anime so special to us.

Leave it to me to get things started.  Before anything else, check this clip out.

It was the mid 90’s.  A time when anime wasn’t as easily available as it is nowadays.  We had to get our anime fix via VHS tapes(yeah, I know, OLD SCHOOL).  My cousin Charlie would rent the anime titles from the Wherehouse and our local corner Anime Store…and record them onto his own VHS tapes.  We would then watch those bootlegged movies every saturday.  One of those titles was Fatal Fury: The Motion Picture.

Ahhh….Fatal Fury.  The awkward, yet charming girl in the fighting game clique.  Y’see, back in those days, SNK fighters weren’t as big as their counterparts from Capcom, Namco, and Midway (at least in the US).   They did make an awesome anime series from the videogame though.

I mean, check out the art.

Up until this anime, I was a casual fan.  I mean, I enjoyed watching, but it wasn’t until I saw this series that I seriously got hooked.  What really gripped me was the art.  Take a look at all the shading they used in all the characters.  The character art was done by  Masami Obari, and to this day he’s still one of my favorite illustrators.  To a kid in the throes of puberty, watching sexy girls fight while really buff cool looking dudes shot energy from their fists was the GREATEST THING EVER.  I mean, everybody wanted to do it.  The action wasn’t as over-the-top as Dragonball Z was, but it was every bit as intense.

And the dub…was surprisingly good.  This title stands out as one of the Ocean Group’s best dub works.  I tried watching Fatal Fury in Japanese…and I didn’t like it as much.

There is one more anime that sent me down the path of anime righteousness.  I’ll do that later, ‘cuz I really wanna give my other SSB writers a chance to talk.  I’ll just leave you guys with an anime music video that doesn’t suck.