Today I watched the eight episodes of Bubblegum Crisis and three episodes of Gun Smith Cats, which I borrowed from my brother. I bought as a birthday present for my brother, who only wanted GSC, but BC is a classic (so I've heard) so I bought him that too.

Some people really like Japanese Anime, compared with cartoons in the US. Anime does have some really good graphics, but the art is different than cartoons. Cartoons in the US also have good graphics, but the subject matters differ. I don't think you can really compare the two artforms.

Anime is quite silly at times. The plots can be quite unbelievable. Too many cute/fuzzy animals and weird mystical powers. I'm more for the techno stuff. So for the most part Anime is too silly for me to watch regularly.

Both GSC and BC have female protagonists, which a lot of Anime has. It's kind of cool and almost could be something girls could watch. But at least these two Anime are more for adults, and maybe more oriented at a male audience. Too many underwear shots and even a couple of nudity shots in the BC series.

Anime people have big eyes, small mouths. At least the girls and young boys. Adult males are drawn normally while everyone else has that childlike quality to them. That's just another style thing. Also, the robots in GC can do too many things for the mass they have. They can project a huge amount of cables and wires which looks weird.

But they're good series which I think most geeks would enjoy. The music is good and the english dubbing is great. It's hard to tell that it is dubbed. They both have good plots and the fuzzy animal quotient is zero.

I watched Robotech when I was attending Middle School. It was shown at 07:30 so I'd wake up and watch it then walk to school. That was a good trio of series, which was an Americanized version based on the Japanese. I also watched Starblazers, which is another good series. The plots of those are better than GSC and BC since they ran a lot longer: 70+ episodes for Robotech and 30+ for Starblazers versus 3 for GSC and 8 for BC.

Characterization is developed over the course of a bunch of episodes. You need a long series so you can see the characters grow, develop, and slowly be defined. That's one thing that both Robotech and Starblazers were able to do while GSC and BC had a good start but couldn't do too much in a limited number of episodes.

One of our local PBS stations has been showing Anime on the weekends. They started with Robotech which I saw again and enjoyed. Then they started showing Tenchi Mucho (?) which had way too many fuzzy animals and mystical occurrences. I think they just finished showing Key the Metal Idol (?) which was ok for the couple of episodes I saw. Now they're showing Please, Help Me Save the Earth (?) (Anime has some funny titles) which again is ok but you need to see every episode.