Anime Fan for 25 years (since 1995)

 

actually, technically, a good while longer, since i vaguely recall sitting through an episode of ROBOTECH  as a very young boy around what must have been sometime in 1986 or so.

a nephew gave me his old 1985 REVELL ROBOTECH CHANGERS VEXAR transformable model (U.S. market reboxing of 1983 IMAI MACROSS VF-1S Focker 1/72 VARIABLE TYPE)

around 1988/1989 or so, and then i got a taste of Mecha Anime tropes at a more readily-impressionable age around 1991,

thanks to the Mecha action-platfomer game "ASSAULT SUIT LEYNOS" (TARGET EARTH in the U.S.) on the SEGA GENESIS games console.

my Anime fandom truly began to consciously coalesce around 1995, when my dad bought me an old IMAI MACROSS 1/100 VF-1J Ichijo GERWALK mode model kit,

and PLAYMATES toy company reissued the old original MATCHBOX-made ROBOTECH Mecha toys under their "EXO-SQUAD" line.

around that time, i discovered SUNCOAST VIDEO at the mall, and their Anime selection. first i concentrated on ROBOTECH, -via the dual-episode FHE VHS cassette volumes-

found VIZ MEDIA's ANIMERICA Anime magazine, and began picking up issues often as i could,

and then i discovered MANGA VIDEO's MACROSS II and MACROSS PLUS movie compilation releases, Pure, uncut MACROSS, for the first time.

from there, i began to branch out from Mecha-themed anime, with series such as Galaxy Fraulein Yuna and Tenchi Muyo!

and then the early-21st-century and the DVD Anime boom hit, and i was well and truly off to the Anime Races.

 

i'm about as hardcore today as i've ever been, and, thanks to the internet, i now have the kind of Mecha and Character-themed merchandise

that i would have killed for as a young teen, two-plus decades ago...

 

I've been quite the anime fan for a while as well. The first thing I remember watching that was an anime (without me knowing at the time) was Rurouni Kenshin when I was a kid. I used to get up particularly early so I could watch those in the morning.

I'm not really a huge fan of mecha anime, but I do remember watching Tekkaman Blade (or Teknoman, as it was known in the west) when I was little.
Again, at this point I had no idea what anime was, and it appears it just appealed to me even if I didn't specifically knew why.

Now, just like you mention, I've got a tonne of anime merchandise that I couldn't even have dreamed of back then. I've only got my one anime doll, but I've around 100 anime figures, of which 90 are displayed. :3