The Big Trip Back (or, anime club re-creation)

By just about any measure I’ve been watching anime for a long time. Weighing explanations for this (that don’t cast me in too bad a light, anyway), I’ve pondered whether I avoided “aging out of a teenaged diversion on realising I’d grown older than the typical ‘anime character’” through not having seen any of it in high school (save for a few videotaped relics of the mid-1980s “giant robot boom” I was then only just sorting out had come from Japan and been followed there by much more animation). On arriving at university, though, I noticed posters for an anime club, and all of a sudden one long showing a month was available for the reasonable price of a membership. It was significant enough I’ve been making an indulgent deal of “five-year marks” since (save for that first “five years later,” when I was getting some working experience too far from university to drop back in on friends on the weekends of showings but supposing my salary too low to start building a personal collection) and working out various “personal showings.” Now, after returning to memorable titles from the club years and after, sorting through my growing collection by years of production and picking “one sample episode a year” (my collection has stretched on either side since then), and settling on “one long series per decade,” I contemplated a preserved poster from the club’s old web site for the first show I attended and realised I could return to what had been shown then. It would be just a bit more than “seeing what I’d seen then,” too.
( Cyber City Oedo 808 and Phantom Quest Corp )

( Macross Plus )

( 3x3 Eyes and El Hazard )

( Bonus addition: Castle of Cagliostro )