You Know That Show / Anime

You Know That Show — Anime and Manga

The purpose of this page is to allow contributors to post descriptions of half-forgotten shows, those old classics that sit on the edge of the mind, with details and images remembered but names tantalizingly forgotten. Whether to gather trope examples or just for peace of mind, post them here. Be warned that, due to necessity, all entries may contain spoilers.

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Awaiting suggestions

• It's a one-shot that I found on MangaFox where this ill boy meets a mysterious man who he befriends and the older sister of the boy who takes care of him tries to keep him away from the man. I'm a little fuzzy on the rest but at the end the boy's illness causes him to turn into some sort of winged cat person and then a doctor from the military try to capture the boy and the man to experiment on them.
• A post-apocalyptic anime movie involving the Hindu myth/Terry Pratchett idea of the planet being supported on the back of a giant turtle.
• A show that was shown on fox kids around 2000-2003 in the UK. Someone's house got shrunk, and they flew around in space.
• Some anime, possible Western Animation, all I remember about it is that one scene consisted of a man with brown spiky hair a lot like Higsby running back and fourth across the screen, one arm sticking out at the same angle as a Nazi salute, but with a fist, and the man was yelling "Action go! Action go!" in some fancy way. I'm starting to become more convinced that this was from Mega Man NT Warrior
• I saw this anime in the mid-nineties, but it's probably older than that. I watched an Arabic dub so I don't know the original character names. I remember a beautiful blonde woman (named "Rim"), a brown haired woman (named "Nawal") and a pig-tailed girl who wore a brown sailor fuku. There was one scene were "Nawal" cried and collapsed next to a carousel at night.
• I think this is anime, but it could be Western Animation. A boy and his father end up in what seems like a somewhat-African area with lots of (stereotypical) tribes, and they get separated. The boy meets a girl around his age, and the girl had been in the area long enough to forget everything about where she came from (she's quite obviously not a native to the area). Later, the boy and his father are reunited, and there's something about a mad dictator-wannabe with a nuclear device. The nuke explodes (with the dictator locked in the room with it), and the boy, his father, and the girl are sent to somewhere with dinosaurs. Occasionally there will be random characters or background bits sketched in, Art Shift style. This was at least a decade ago, possibly more.
• When I was a kid I saw two anime's on video-tapes from rental office:
  • One was obviously not Galaxy Expres 999, but it also was about train traveling in the space, and has a number 777. This train was protected by Super Robot, called the same name like the show - I don't know it's original name, only polish - "Sokó&# 322; 7" wich would mean "Falcon 7" in english, but I'm not sure it was correct name. This robot has 3 patrs, that were starting from first, last and middle carriages, and conductor was looking like skinny guy from Yatterman villains trio. There was also little boy with his mo, as two passagers, that has more screentime than any else passenger.
    • Sasuraiger?
  • In second anime there was three of heroes fighting aliens with the help of Super Robot called, as I recall, Omega. I remember that their tem pet was a robot, that in in one episode (first on the tape) said that gou in trenchcoat who is alone on the empty field may be an alien spy. One o the trio's members was a girl, and her mother was somebody important in the staff responsible for their robot. In one of the episodes in was revealed that she was an alien spy who put some device in robot's head and survived jump from it. Girl's real mother was kidnapped by aliens, ad was killed in some kind of explosion in space, or something like that. Also, in another episode one of heroe's (The Lancer type-guy) meet his old friend from army, who stolen his gun.
• As a kid I saw this obscure 70's or 80's anime where aliens crash near the main character's home. I think the alien princess knew her father was impersonated by the villain and the villain had a cyborg henchman in a trenchcoat and fedora and an Iron Man-esque mask who was either not such a bad guy or did a Heel–Face Turn.
• Space superhero team. Early 1970s or earlier. The main antagonist was an evil conquering alien race named the Falta (or maybe that was the name of the planet). In one episode, the Falta send a Worthy Opponent called the Falcon of Falta, who dies and is buried on a tropical island by the protagonist team. Caveat: that showed in Brazil, so in your country the alien race could have a completely different name.
• Literally all I remember is the line, "I see you've dug me a grave! How thoughtful!" I have absolutely no other context, and I'm sorry - but this has been bugging me for the better part of seven years!
• An ecchi manga released in English between 2000 and 2002 featuring a schoolgirl mysteriously flung backwards in time to the feudal era, where she is the chosen one or something. Clothing Damage figures into the plot heavily, and is featured prominently on the cover and the back cover blurb.
• There are these 2 series I watched in the nineties on video tapes. Both were Hong Kong Cantonese dubs. The first one I only watched a scenes of it. I remembered a blue mecha and a white mecha or a flying support unit rushing to their target. Characters were accompanying as well in a white cruiser or something. It was a modern day settings. Might be Tetsujin 28 but not quite sure. The other was a sci fi series about 3 space cruiser fighters, 2 guys and a girl. The series ended in a few episodes so it might have been an ova. I remembered the final episode were them battling an entire planet turned into a pink life form and they had to defeat it and an episode where there was a high class banquet and the protagonists dressed in white.
• A Doraemon single story volume. Nobita and the gang were invited back to a magic world to stop an evil demon king's invasion. Nobita sacrificed himself to defeat the demon king in the war ensuing using the ultimate spell summoning seven coloured dragons but were resurrected thanks to everyone's help. Second half were them battling the real mastermind in another dimension. Their friends were fairy villagers an elf swordsman princess and a mascot character who turns out to be the dragon god. They upgraded their equipments from treasure piles found in a tree and defeated their evil selves by fusing with them. There were also many mecha and a giant magical mecha in the second half. Mine was a malay publication. I also want to know the title of the previous adventure when they first went to the magic world and any possible sequel.
• Do any of you know the show Magical Doremi? There was one episode (the last one) and there was this one scene where one character turned them into butterflies. Do you know the name of the character who turned them into butterflies? And it was not Onpu or Poppu.

Questions with suggested answers

• I'm looking for an adult-oriented anime with an art style similar to Sailor Moon and Robotech. The only scene I remember has two women having a conversation, during which we see clips of a naked, blue-haired baby crawling around a garden. As we watch, the baby clearly grows older, until he's a naked blue-haired man walking around by the end of the conversation.
  • I'm almost positive it's Gall Force.
• I remember a show from when I was young that I think was an anime, it seems like it was a movie and not series as the plot was self contained. It starred a boy and a yellow VW looking car. I can't remember if the car had a face but I know if it did it looked like a car from ever other angle. I remember two events in the story. One involves the boy and the car crossing a river on a wooden raft. In the middle of crossing, piranhas attack the raft and start eating it. Another part of the story has the duo in a junk yard and I believe the car starts to overheat/have a fever and the boy has to take care of the car thoughout the night. I wouldn't be that surprised if the car was a different color or the kid companion was girl but I am certain about the piranha and junkyard scenes.
  • Maybe it's Bumpety Boo/Hey Bumboo
• I have a vague memory of an anime movie, which I am pretty sure involved people living on some sort of giant flying machine. The thing had turrents which were spherical and could rotate or spin in any direction, and in one scene two kids, probably the main characters, go in them to have fun spinning around, but then some sort of invading army appears, and they have to help fight them off. Later there is something with a mad scientist who built some kind of evil robot, and the scientist has a Heel–Face Turn and helps defeat it.
  • Sounds like Laputa Castle In The Sky, but it's not a perfect match...
• I had a VHS tape my grandma recorded from the 80's; among other things it had the first Unico movie and The World Of David The Gnome on it. But it also had a commercial for what I recall as an anime version of "The Snow Queen". I looked up various adaptations but can't find the one I remember.
  • ...Do you have a question? You seem to have figured out what it is, you just can't find it. That said, I know exactly what you're talking about and this has bothered me as well.
  • Maybe this version?
    • Might be it. When was it made?
• There's this anime where a girl with some sort of vehicle that slides on water dives into the water and drowns (not so sure about the drowning) and the boy who dived with her brings her back up. They live with a scientist/old man. The boy asked him why the girl's hair turned an unusual color underwater (turquoise I think?) and the man told him it was just the light's reflection or something like that. This isn't true, and the girl is from a species that belongs to the sea or something. I also remember seeing her cry and go off on her water vehicle with the boy yelling after her.
  • I haven't seen it ages, so I could be wrong, but the description makes me think of Blue Submarine No 6.
    • It's not the one. Thanks for helping =]
  • Possibly Umi Monogatari? It sounds very vaguely like that.
• where did this ◊ delightful picture come from?
  • If I'm not mistaken, that's Kagura from Gintama.
• I'm looking for a show I saw in the early 80's. I don't remember much except it involved a love story where one character lives in the ocean and the other on land. They meet and fall in love, even though it is forbidden. There is some sort of danger the girl must be rescued from or she will die, and so the boy steps into the light and dies (maybe). One is fire element and the other is water. Something about a war between those two elements? I think it was something like Romeo and Juliet, only elemental and anime.
  • Sirius no Densetsu, also called Sea Prince and the Fire Child?
• An old-ish anime. A guy, possibly inhuman, yells "You're DEAAD! You're dead MEEEAAAAT!"
  • Not a lot to go on, but you might be looking at Fist Of The North Star.
• Does anyone -even faintly- remember an anime (Or at least, animesqe)series about a black kitten who ran around with other kittens? Each one had their own distinct personalities, and it wasn't unlike Hamtaro (Except with cats, of course). It was aired sometime around the late 90s, early 200s, and the cat's name may have been Kirk or Thomas....
  • This definitely sounds kind of like Sanchome no Tama, Tama and Friends, to me. Here's a picture that I was able to find from the show: [1]◊
• Does anyone remember an anime show. It was definitely shonen. It came on cartoon network early in the mornings. Instead of fighting they had bike races. The main character's bike was red. To start off the bikes, they had to pump these white machines with both arms.
  • Sounds to me like Idaten Jump
• This troper remembers watching an anime in the 2nd or 3rd Grade about some humans about to cut down trees (For money I'm guessing.). But in the forest were several animals and two fairies I believe. It was for Earth Day. It looked like it was from the 70s-90s, and it was a movie. It kind of resembled Animal Crossing.
  • Sounds like it might be Fern Gully, which would make it a Western Animation. Did it have Robin Williams as a wise-cracking bat and Tim Curry as Sealed Evil in a Can?
• Where does the character here come from?
  • Here. If you read the description, she's actual an original character of the deviantart user that was commissioned from someone else.
    • That image kind of reminds me of this◊
• I vaguely remember a movie I'm sure is anime that aired on Disney in the early-mid 80s. It's about anthropomorphized (not humanoid) squirrels...or chipmunks but I'm pretty sure they were squirrels because I remember they were orange-ish and had fluffy tails. The plot was they lived in a cage in a park (or a zoo) and the protagonist is a brash teenage boy squirrel who wanted to see the world beyond the cage and if there were other squirrels out there. Oh yeah, and he was wearing a little red handkerchief. The others try to convince him to stay, but he's no having that. He escapes, I think with a girl squirrel, and some stuff I don't remember happens, then they eventually finds a forest and colony of squirrels, and he befriends them. The squirrels are plagued by a fox or some other predator that been eating them and the boy squirrel fights the fox and they go over a cliff, plunging to their deaths, but the boy squirrel can fly and flies back up and yay, happy ending. I though it might have been a harmony gold dub, but no.
  • The Enchanted Journey.
• Seen on late-night Adult Swim in 2005 or 2006: A woman dressed in a tight smooth body suit walking through a darkened marketplace as if searching for something. She goes into what I think is an antique store, which is lit with a warmer light than the marketplace. There might have been an old woman was in the store.
  • Sounds like Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C.
• An old anime I've seen while the Soviet Union was still a country. It had animals and kung-fu. I remember a monkey using a staff to beat up a tiger (Big Bad). Has a distinct animation style, so might be Chinese or Korean (also explains why I can't find it on Google). Not "Havoc in Heaven". I also remember abundance of red tones.
  • Sounds like something based on Saiyuki, but I can't get any more specific than that. Anyone else have any better ideas?
  • Sounds like this show i've seen recently called "journey to the west" which is basically the saiyuki plot, except with talking animals. a link to that series can be found here I do know it has a tiger as a (Big Bad) in one of the episodes.
  • Just to clarify, Saiyuki was based on Journey to the West, which was written centuries ago in China. There are also many, many, many animated versions of Journey to the West.
    • To clarify further, Saiyuki is just the Japanese name for the work (known in Chinese as Hsi-yu Chi). The anime and manga by the title are just one of the better-known Japanese adaptations. Japan is big on the so-called "great Chinese novels" and adaptations of them. Houshin Engi and Suikoden are also Japanese titles for some of the other Chinese novels.
• I remember watching something years ago (not sure if it was a series or stand-alone) in which humanity was living on spaceships after a miles-long alien warship appeared over earth. The twist was the ship was called Hell, and the aliens themselves may have even referred to themselves as/looked like demons.
  • I was looking for an above example with aliens but found yours instead: Big Wars.
• I'm pretty sure this was anime...I remember it aired on ABC around 1999. It was about a boy who had a pet pig. In the episode I saw, he tries to take said pig to his local swimming pool, but some man in a suit (either the owner of the pool or a school principal?) tries to stop him. The kid & pig won, predictably.
  • Tokyo Pig, almost definitely.
• Okay, this might be a little weird. When I was a kid I saw an anime adaptation for Pinocchio, called "Kashi no Ki Mokku", which was dubbed as "Saban's Adventures of Pinocchio" (with a blue haired Pinocchio). That series had all kinds of horrible things happen to Pinocchio, but I remember two scenes particularly:
  • Pinocchio has a fight with a kid, so he pushes him into a river. Problem is, the kid can't swim. So Pinocchio jumps into the water and tries to save him, but is too late - the kid's already dead,
  • Pinocchio is in a big mansion, where there's a baby eagle in a cage. At one point the house is on fire, so Pinocchio runs outside, but the baby eagle is still trapped. The poor bird cries and screams and BEGS for Pinocchio to save him, but the damn puppet it too scared. So the baby eagle dies. By the end of the episode Pinocchio is reunited with Geppetto, only to be kidnapped by an angry eagle - the father of the poor baby who was burned to death.
  • Now, here is my problem - I don't know anybody else who remembers those episodes. I know plenty of people who, like me, saw this series as kids, but NO ONE remembers those two specific scenes. So I must know - was it for real, or did I just dream everything (and in that case, I was a pretty fucked up kid)? Please tell me I'm not the only one who remembers it.
    • You didn't dream it. It's available on DVD and here.
• A young man lives in a futuristic world where all children leave their parents at a certain age. The young man is blond, I think, and his mother might have brown hair, but I don't remember for sure. He goes to take some sort of 'exam'. Before the exam, he walks through a park-like thing. He sees a small brown animal in a cage and has some sort of telepathic (?) communication with it and has a bit of internal dialogue about the animal's sadness. He goes to take the exam, and something screws up - he fails it or something. A guy called Blue or something shows up. Some stuff happens and the young man tries to return to his parents, but they are gone, and then he is on a space ship (??) which is populated by 'different' (superpowered?) humans, the animal from before is his cute little sidekick, and he meets a woman with ridiculously long, wavy blond hair. The woman might have been blind. She spends a lot of time in a coma-like state and seems to be practically worshiped by the other people aboard the space ship. The young man also meets a group of children, most of whom refuse to speak to him. That was only the first five episodes or so... This troper saw it at an anime con a year and a half ago and has been trying to remember the title of the thing unsuccessfully since then.
  • Toward The Terra.
• Alright, my parents showed me an animated movie on VHS once when I was very young (it was probably the early to mid nineties). It was either an anime movie, or at least from some Asian country. I think the story was about this kid with incredible strength, and I think he was looking for his mother. And at the end, he finds his mother, but she's a dragon, and he's riding on her, but he hold on too hard and crushes her, and they crash, but when he's examining the dragon's bones he finds his mother waiting in there. I don't really remember much else... Please! This has been driving me crazy for over fifteen years!
  • I did a Google search and came up with Taro the Dragon Boy. Does it fit?
• I'm sorry, rather little to go on - it was mid nineties and it was shown a few times on the local FOX affiliate on saturday afternoons. There was a guy with some alien suit of armor fighting aliens after his transformation sequence, where the armor grew out of his skin. when he finished fighting, the girl helps him and he's STARVING - he used all his energy. I don't think it was Guyver.
  • Tekkaman Blade, badly dubbed, butchered, and released on UPN as Teknoman.
• So, this was a movie I've seen on VHS. It was adventure in space, main hero escorting some princess, giant space spider and a train in space with machinegun shooting with three spirals. Also, I'm not sure, that it is anime. Western animation, may be?
  • thats almost certainly Galaxy Express 999.
• Anime set in future after genetically modified plant experiment on the moon was able to jump over to Earth and take over the Earth. The plant was conscious and intelligent. This girl wakes up from the past with a special instrument, kinda like a cell phone, but she can't get it to work. There are only two human communities left, the ones who find her are the "peaceful" ones who are trying to get along with the forest and not make it mad. They inhabit an old city/apartment complex. And the other one is warlike and just tries to keep the plant out of their area by destroying everything. The peaceful people also have the opportunity to get special powers from the plant if they offer themselves to it. This makes their hair silver and then they can kick major ass, but they also have to contend with the fact that the plant may take them over and there is one character in the film who is sort of stuck in the plant growing out of his body and he doesn't move around anymore. It turns out the girl is the daughter of the scientist who screwed up the experiment and she goes on a quest to save everything...meets a cute boy, etc.
  • This would be Origin: Sprits of the Past.
• When I was a kid, there was a show that was on what I think was the Fox kids network. It was about these people who traveled around getting into large-scale battles (a la Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh) where they would cook up monsters that would them have fights to the death. I remember one of the catch phrases was "Spaghet about it!" Anyone know what the name of this show is?
  • Fighting Foodons, known in Japan as Martial Arts Cooking Legend Bistro-Recipe.
• I'm just curious, but in this image (the one with the girl wearing a hat standing behind another girl wearing a Sailor Suit (like the girls from Sailor Moon), at the far right) Maylu/Mayl from Mega Man Battle Network mentions Miyuki Chan In Wonderland, but is the image from the show she mentions or a different one. Oh and just so you don't get confused the image to its left, (a teenage boy in blue armor and a teenage girl in pink armor holding hands against a background of roses) is a closeup of this image (not the one with the wedding clothes, but the one right above it, you have to scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page) from Mega Man NT Warrior.
  • Yeah, that's Miyuki Chan In Wonderland alright.
• I remember this mecha show involving a husband and wife team that drives robots that fuse together. The wife is in high school and had to hide the fact that she's married. They fight giant creatures that had threatened the world. There are other teams that are pairings, mostly male/female. There is even one that is a slave and mistress. Another big thing is that there are lots of big boobs.
  • That could only be Shinkon Gattai Godannar.
• A show that either I saw an article on or was All Just a Dream. The main protagonist used a big orange Mecha, probably Eva-like. He has a big Limit Break, (I think that's the right trope) which somehow steadily ate from the souls of his cyborg friends (Who don't use the Mecha when this happens) with each successive use.
  • That's definitely a show, my SO says it sounds familiar to him too, but he can't recall what it was. If he remembers I'll let you know.
  • The "Big orange Mecha" and "Eva-like" comments make me lean towards Jinki Extend, but I really doubt that's it because I certainly don't recall cyborg souls in that show.
  • Reminds me of Dual! Parallel Trouble Adventure.

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