Anime Wink

The website banner gif for Otakon 1999, convention of Otaku Generation. Their scanlined red haired mascot is to the left

A red-coloured winamp skin with their mascot smiling away in her gauzy purple and pink robes

Otakon 1999's snazzy web banner and Winamp skin, perfect for listening to OP and ED midis and new kids on the block, MP2 and 3

A group photo with FF8 themed cosplays (plus Tifa!)

A brown-haired Cloud cosplayer poses with a fittingly beefy buster sword to his side.

"I Am the Pretty Guardian Who Fights for Love and Justice!" A sweep group photo of Sailor Moon cosplayers, about fifteen in all, posed for a photo, with four of them, kneeling in front of the rest.

A Slayers themed group cosplay

A lovely snapshot of the Spanish cosplay scene of the mid-2000s, with a gallery of photos from ExpoManga 2004 from Minami CD 49.

I was stateside attending anime cons in '04, so yeah, the cosplay costumes and way the photos are taken hits that nostalgia button. 💜

A photo of the cover of the Sol Bianca LD with its Vinyl LP square cover and artwork of two of the protags against a spacey background and a sleek sci-fi ship. Five Young Women Against an Entire Solar System... The Odds are About Even!

A photo of the disc, all big and shiny with rainbow relective lines across it

The back of the harder glossy cardboard cover with a very cool gallery of screenshots, premise, and credits, plus more illustrations.

Treasure's a Pleasure.... but a Blaster is a Girl's Best Friend.

The adventures of Space Girls with Guns on a shiny disc that still feels like it's from the future: the Laser Disc release of the original Sol Bianca OVA from 1990.

From a '98 DOKAN magazine cover disc in crunchy 320p: a burst of one of the coolest OVA intros that totally feels like it could be the start of a Shadowrun anime.

Armitage III. 🔥

A photo of the six volumes of the series laid out in a grid at a titled angle, with the OVA resting on top of them, striking in its pink case compared to the pale blues of series.

It's the 25th anniversary of the Zone of the Enders' video game's release in Japan, one of the cinematic masterpieces for the PS2. So, I'll shine some love and spotlight the anime series and OVA, seen here in its ADV release.

The 55-minute prequel OVA, Idolo, was released the same day as the game.

A magazine ad for Burn Up Excess's complete dvd release from ADV. It has four vertical panels with the female leads of the series posing and winking.

"No one stops criminals (and hearts) better than Team Warrior!"

Turn up the heat with Burn Up Excess. 🔥

A crt TV screenie of a scene with Tohru looking shocked at the dog and rat in front of her with an orange cat in her arms

Zodiac animal mischief unfolds as Tohru Honda finds a new home with a most unusual family.

📺: Fruits Basket, Studio Deen, 2001

From Poland's Kawaii CD Animacje 3 from 2001: Revolutionary Girl Utena's OP 1: Rinbu/RONDO-Revolution. 🎶

🎤: Okui Masami

A crt TV photo from the dvd release, with a person with short ginger hair and a red highwayman-esque costume doing a dramatic flourish reveal with a fierce smile

The foolish Willy with blonde bowl cut hair and curly stache gesturing at three people in a theatre box

A shot of one winged horses standing at rest and a nobleman sat on a stone block

Masked vigilantes, 'Willy', and pegasus steeds. Romance and tragedy flourishes in the floating city of Neo Verona.

Gonzo's 2007 series Romeo x Juliet, loosely based on the Shakespeare play. One of my favourites from that era.

I loved Viz's Shonen Jump so much back in the day. It was such an awesome way to discover manga. You'd come for one title (in my case Yu-Gi-Oh!) and discover 5 or 6 others that became lifelong favorites. Getting a batch of chapters in a big magazine each month was magic. I still kinda miss it.

Ahh, neat! That is a very pleasing shade of green, yeah xD I really enjoyed Shaman King, too.

I found this nugget about the inspiration from an old post about it on the Animax site where the site editor cites the tribute inspiration and swats away accusations of plagiarism.

A scan of Animax's issue 21 cover, with a top-down/front still of the VF's cockpit in Macross Plus, and a little circle frame overlaid with Marco from Porco Rosso inside.

Macross Plus, blazing a trail through Brazilian skies in '97 with Animax - one of the bedrocks of anime magazine fandom there.

The cover is a tribute to an Anime UK magazine cover from two years prior, the magazine that inspired Animax's style and article layout.

Oh wow, that is an amazing collection! Fingers crossed you do pick them up. And yeah, I'd seen some character images online for those, but otherwise it was how I first saw them too .

I had a SJ subscription out of the gate, and for a 12 year old boy, it was magic. Not only was it a taste of this fabled comic magazine I’d heard about online, but we were getting monthly DBZ, weirdly dark Yu-Gi-Oh, and a bunch of other PG-13-feeling comics I’d never heard of. It was just cool!

Ohhh Shojo Beat, yeah, for me too.

Yeah! it really did. I was back and forth between the US and UK during this time, and it was amazing to see Shonen Jump and volumes of manga on the shelves of major chain bookshops on both sides of the pond.

A photo of an ad for Shonen Jump's premiere 288-page issue from Animerica December 2002. Yu-Gi-Oh and DBZ feature prominently

Luffy from One Piece delivers a V-Sign alongside a list of the manga running: DBZ, Yu-Gi-Oh, Sandland, YuYu Hakusho, and One Piece

Bursting onto the US manga scene in November 2002: Shonen Jump!

This premiere issue of the US version of the long-running manga anthology featured the first official translations of One Piece, Naruto, and Yu-Gi-Oh.

Would run for a decade until 2012.

I managed to track down the Armitage III Visual File CD-ROM I posted about earlier, and got it running in a Japanese version of Windows 98 for the proper language support.

Appropriately cyberpunk vibes for the video viewer. ⚡

Agreed!

Same here as one of mine!

A Japanese ad with a cool cutaway style illustration of Naomi Armitage and techie-themed presentation. On sale on 1996.5.24

“A cyberpunk OVA from the golden duo of AIC and Pioneer LDC.”: Armitage III.

A cool poster ad for the Visual File CD-ROM accompaniment released in 1996 for one of my favourite OVAs.

Yellow, blue, and red rangers hold up a massive chrome shoulder mounted cannon and prepare to unleash their conjoined energies and heroic spirit at their rubber suited foe.

Three rangers, yellow, red, and blue pose by some simple titlecards on this Club Dorothee compilation video. Liveman Bioman est de retour

Another shot of the squad, yellow, red, and blue.

Well, when you're up against all sorts of otherworldly horrors dispatched by a secret organization based in an orbital station, then you really are going to need a massive cannon.

Liveman (1989) was the fourth super sentai series to air in France, further stoking the tokusatsu popularity there.

A screenie of the game running on a PC-98 with a snap of the intro showing headshots of the sabers with their armour on but visors transparent so you can see their faces, all lined up. All done in that sharp style characteristic of Japanese PCs due to their need for higher resolutions to render text properly.

Knight Sabers assemble!

A Bubblegum Crisis game didn't take too long to appear after the release of the OVA, doing so for the PC-88: Bubblegum Crisis: Crime Wave.

A photo of an ad for Burn Up! An illustration of Maki stands posed in tight body armour with a pistol raised over here head. Other AD Vision vids are shown including Battle Angel and Sol Bianca.

Munitions, Marksmanship, and Motorcycles: stuff hot enough to BURN UP!

The original OVA released in 1991. It would spawn another OVA and two short TV series, the last airing in 2004.

📖: Animerica, February 1994

Amother sill from the Appleseed OVA, this time of Deunan shot in the seat of a car in just a tank top and with a mop of frizzy blonde hair and tomboy energy <3

Deunan Knute appreciation post. 💜

A crt tv photo of a still of Deunan and Briareos sat in a car in uniform sipping milkshakes and with fast food fries and stuff on the dash.

Buddy cop lunchtime in the city of the future.

📺: Appleseed OVA, 1988 (VHS)

This was snapped from the Manga Video release which had copious amounts of profanity. It's uh, quite the experience to rewatch these days xD

Aww, lovely! I picked up the Mixx's I have these days in a bundle of anime mags last year, but I remember reading it back in the day at the anime club I was a member of. Rayearth was my gateway into CLAMP too.

It was a lucky find on eBay last year! I spotted an expectedly cheap listing for it and snapped it up immediately.

A photo of an ad for Graduation from Mixx 'The First Anime Game Released in North America!' Special offers for Mixx Readers: $24.99!

Yeah, Graduation. Ads for it are all over the Mixx's and Animerica's I have from the time.