After leaving anime behind shortly after the Dirty Pair days, I didn’t think too much about it. It was easy to not think about, after all; there was almost no way to run across any anime unless you were out there looking for it. And I was not.

I was driving somewhere in my car listening to the radio, sometime in late 1998 it must have been, when the barenaked ladies song One Week came on. I hadn’t heard it before, but they were a band I liked, so I paid attention to it.

Of course, the one line in there grabbed my attention: “gotta get in tune with Sailor Moon ’cause that cartoon has got the boom anime babies that make me think the wrong thing“.

Anime? A pop song is singing about anime?

I was curious. At least the web was available by this point, so I could find out about it. So that’s how I discovered that the show’s run in Japan was already over at that point, the English dub was showing in North America but it stank, and that I could now at least get VHS tapes with episodes subbed in English to see the actual original story. Along with being able to find episodes on Usenet once in a blue moon. So I did both. (Don’t fret, when the DVDs finally became available I snapped ’em up. Much much better than VHS or downloaded junk from that era.)

Hence it was Sailor Moon that got me back into anime. I still love those characters, and the show. But… it isn’t the greatest. The animation, by today’s standards, sucks. It has so many “monster of the week” filler episodes that it really kind of breaks your heart. And the character out of the whole show that I find that I like the least is… Sailor Moon. I know. This makes no sense. But there it is. I like all the rest of the inner senshi immensely, I like the outer senshi fine, Sailor Saturn above all… but Sailor Moon is just okay.

This has more to do with me than the show, because I’m like that about many shows — I like the background or sidekick characters more than the main character. I don’t understand it either.

But after getting back into anime via Sailor Moon, I stayed involved, more or less, with it for about a decade. I watched many of the good shows of the era — which ones doesn’t really matter I guess (I might write about some of them some time if I get really bored).

And then I took a break from about 2006 to last year. Why?

It got boring. Shows were either super important statements About Things, or mindless fan service. There didn’t seem to be hardly any combination of the two in any witty or interesting manner. Because I like clever anime and I even like fan service if it’s once in a while and not the whole reason for the show to exist. I guess I just needed a break, so I took one.

Oh, there was the whole ‘trying not to die from cancer’ thing too, I suppose. Surprising how time-consuming that can be.