I remember watching Captain Tsubasa, Dragon Ball and Pokemon on the TV when I was a child, but the first I watched because it was anime was A Place Further Than the Universe. I was looking how to get into anime and found a guide on reddit with this in the genre Cute Girls Doing Cute Things. I got curious about what CGDCT could be so decided to check it.

Probably Speed Racer as a kid. The first I really got into was Robotech TV series and the Macross movie. I really loved the world crafting and I was beside myself when Palladium dropped the Robotech RPG.

If Pokémon doesn’t count, then grave of the fireflies

Until around 2021 I ignored anime because of the typical cliches. But one friend always tried to push me into it. One day he talked me into watching Evangelion. Probably one of the worst “first” anime you can watch xD It took me multiple months after that to try some more. But I need to admit Evangelion still turned into one of my favorite anime’s.

I did not expect to be alone on this, but I scrolled through and didn’t see it:

Record of Lodoss War from 1990. I had an older cousin who had fansubs of the series on VHS in '92 or '93. We watched through the whole thing probably a dozen times.

This is a tough one… the first anime I saw was Space Battleship Yamato, imported into the US as Star Blazers, but outside of thinking that it was completely different from other cartoons I didn’t know anything else about it.

Eventually I caught some episodes of Harlock and saw that there was more than one show with this style, but didn’t realize they both came from an entirely different industry.

Through the next 5~6 years I came to recognize the “anime look” in various other media - many American cartoons farmed their intros out to TMS or Toei and it was obvious that there was something different going on - and Japan was constantly in the news as their economy (actually The Bubble) took off and big American businesses reacted to that “threat”.

Around this time I saw the Galaxy Express 999 movie on VHS, partly because it looked cool but mostly because I knew by then that Lieji Matsumoto was the artist behind Yamato and Harlock and wanted more of that.

So that might be the first anime I watched because I knew what it was. But “anime” wasn’t really in the vernacular then; it was still “Japanese cartoons”, or maybe “Japanimation”.

The first anime that I watched because I knew it was “anime” was probably Bubblegum Crisis: a friend’s brother got fansub tapes at the big local university and brought them back to share around over summer break.

He also brought Urotsukidoji, but that’s a story for another time…

Excluding cartoons like Maya the bee and Moomins then probably flip flappers in 2016. There were probably other anime series or ghibli films. But Flip Flappers were the first one that I remember waiting for next episode every week.

Digimon. Got disc from my cousin and since it was English dub, I thought it was just cartoon. Also I didn’t know what anime is back then.

Bleach, probably? My friends in school dragged me into an anime club they were running back when the first season was airing.

I definitely saw other shows before that – Pokemon, of course, and bits and pieces of Ranma, Speed Racer, and other shows that occasionally made it to broadcast TV – but I didn’t distinguish them from other cartoons.

Stayed up late to watch blue gender as a kid. I think it’s the reason I love mecha anime the most.

It’s one of those 3:

• Heidi, Girl of the Alps
• Maya the Bee
• Captain Future

I don’t remember which one of those was actually the first (most likely Heidi or Maya, just going by the kid-friendliness), but all three are in my earliest core childhood memories.

Sailor Moon.

…space battleship yamato, circa 1979, on broadcast television no less: i tried to take pictures of the screen because we didn’t get our first VCR until a few months later…

The first anime that I watched that I thought of as an anime was Cromartie High School. My college roommate called me over to his desk and in the end we watched the whole show on his monitor with me looking over his shoulder. I really enjoyed it, but I didn’t think too much about it and didn’t watch another anime until I saw Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood about 4 years later. It was all downhill from there.

Beyond the usual Dragon Ball and Pokemon things, along with catching random episodes of Sailor Moon, Hamtaro, Cardcaptor Sakura etc on morning TV before school, It was Evangelion, Bebop and couple of years later FLCL on late night TV. I also remember seeing a few random episodes of Escaflowne as well in the 90’s.

I later completely watched and got very into Eva and Cowboy Bepop, but i still didn’t really think of it as Anime for some reason.

so beyond those the first “modern” anime that I watched and actually got into the media properly with was Haruhi, then the first thing I watched in Japanese instead of English was Hibike! Euphonium.

so that’s where I stopped watching dubs for shows other than the classic dub series where most people also listen dubbed.