Sixty Years Since Mighty Atom: 1990

In observing “fandoms” of long-running things it can get all too tempting to suppose that with the passage of time some might do better to detach not just from what annoys them now but also from what’s still to come to see if they can stick with what they have liked. I suppose I’ve pulled a ripcord or two myself, and in at least one case I do seem to have stuck with a subset of the past for all that it’s not the subset a lot of other people had long made a big deal of holding up as the reproach to everything else. In other cases I’ve been more tolerant, or adaptable, or just plain “undiscerning,” but for all that I began this year with hopes of flitting past a full sixty years of anime and coming out unscathed I was conscious one dividing line has been drawn right between the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, with the death of a monarch closing the “Showa era” (although Yawara! was already a “Heisei era series”) and the crash of the Nikkei stock exchange noted too. For that matter, over here anime was shifting from “something you had to have the right contacts to really know about” to “something you could put money down in exchange for.” As if to mark this moment, I watched the first episode of a series I’ve seen more than one notable figure be indignant towards...
( The secret of Blue Water )