Weird Japanese Cartoons, Part 1

We'll start today's blog with a poll. Who here has ever seen a Japanese cartoon? How about one that's not Pokemon or Dragon Ball Z? Ok, let's see if you can guess the first Japanese cartoon I was exposed to as a child. Here are a few hints:

• The main character is a princess who's forced to pretend to be a boy so she can inherit the throne.
• The princess becomes a masked vigilante in her spare time, fighting the evil duke who wants to take her throne.
• For some reason the princess and her angel sidekick end up stopping a wedding on the bottom of the ocean at some point.

Still not ringing any bells? Don't worry, I can barely remember this one too. The anime I'm referring to is called Choppy and the Princess, and it's every bit as weird and awesome as it sounds. ... or at least I remember it being awesome. I haven't seen it in years. Here's a bit more info from Wikipedia:

"Princess Sapphire has a pint-sized sidekick in the form of Choppy, a young angel-in-training out to earn his wings. When she was born, Choppy accidentally gave Sapphire the blue heart of a rambunctious boy as well as the pink heart of a prim and proper girl, and so God (in a fit of anger) sent him down to Earth to sort out the mess and retrieve Sapphire's extra heart. Choppy is stuck inside a rather weak mortal shell, and cannot go back to Heaven until he's fixed things. Sapphire won't let Choppy remove her blue boy's heart, however. As a result, Choppy is pretty much stuck with Sapphire (although he doesn't really mind).

Sapphire and Choppy experience a variety of fairy tale and political adventures, including encounters with ice witches and anti-Royal revolutionaries. Sapphire also dons a Zorro-style mask at night and fights crime as the Phantom Knight, as well as foiling Duke Duralumon's schemes to take over the kingdom and his attempts to prove that Sapphire is really a girl (and thus discredit her as the heir to the throne)."

I also vaguely remember there being a scene where some mice help her with some housework, though without all the singing you see in Disney's Cinderella.

I remember watching it as a 90 minute cartoon movie, but apparently there was also a TV series and a manga (a kind of Japanese comic book that's printed backwards since Japan is on the opposite side of the world from us so it's oriented correctly relative to Japan. That is why it's backwards, right?) I think I was about three when I used to watch it, about the same time I was watching more mainstream stuff like Charlotte's Web, The Rescuers Down Under (which I watched before The Rescuers, so when I finally saw the original a lot of things made more sense), and Flight of the Dragons. Ok, that last one wasn't mainstream, but society would be so much better off if it were. They fight a giant worm that spits acid for crying out loud!

Flash forward about 7 years to 5th grade, and we have my next big encounter with Japanese cartoons: Pokemon. I remember seeing the first cartoon for the Game Boy game and being really confused, but through the magic of TV advertising I found myself really wanting the game. This may have been because I saw that it had a dragon in it, so it had to be good right?

Heck. YES. Together with a fondness for pretzels, a long-standing theme in my life has been my tendency to obsess over things. Christmas morning I got up early and watched the first few episodes of the cartoon to see if the game was any good. The story seemed epic enough, and the talking electric mouse, while a little too cute for me to really get excited about, was still pretty cool. A few hours later I opened my presents and found a shiny red Game Boy cartridge with the dragon from the commercials on the cover:

That's when things started to get out of hand. Within a few months I'd beaten the Elite Four, captured Mewtwo, Articuno, Zapdos, and Moltres, spent endless, fruitless hours restarting the game and trying to move a truck and capture Mew. If this picture doesn't haunt you then you weren't a true Pokemon fan in the 90s:

To concerned friends and relatives I might have looked a little mentally disturbed, but I was in another, much more awesome world, where kids can train magic animals to fling elemental powers at each other for sport, topple evil corporations, and gain fame and wealth in the process. 

Nintendo Power magazine might have said that the most balanced and useful starter Pokemon was Bulbasaur, but I knew better. It was all about Charmander. I may have lost the boss fight against Misty about 20 times on my first playthrough because he was weak against water and I was too lazy to level up my pikachu, but several hours of level-grinding later it was worth it when I got the obscenely overpriced Game Boy link cable and was able to throw my charizard into battle against my friends' Pokemon. 

From a cartoon standpoint, the show wasn't half bad. Apart from the wimpy, incompetent protagonist Ash Ketchum, the characters were interesting and humorous. My favorite was always Brock, the rock-type pokemon specialist who would hit on every female character in the show at least once per episode.

I was about halfway through 8th grade when I realized that knowing the name of every Pokemon was no longer cool, and I gradually drifted away from the game. Now, years later, most of my coworkers are big Pokemon fans and I'm relapsing a little more every day. Case in point, the office whiteboard:

The charizard is dressed like Fonzy from Happy Days, in case you were wondering.

When I showed a coworker the pikachu stapler my Aunt got me for Christmas when I was about 11, I was told I needed a pikachu taser, which added another item to my bucket list.

I'll have to wrap it up for now and, like every episode of every Japanese cartoon, end on a cliffhanger. Next time I'll continue with Square Enix games, Speed Racer, and Studio Ghibli. If there's time, I'll rant a little bit about The Pirates of Dark Water.