Lost Stories on a Forbidden Planet

I think I’ve found the perfect accompaniment to my gaming sessions.

On my second screen, I’ve started running old anime OVAs from the ’80s and ’90s, and somewhere along the way I stumbled into an absolute treasure trove. BASTARD!!. Genocyber. Dominion Tank Police. Baoh. Cyber City Oedo 808. Crying Freeman. Lensman. Stories I’d forgotten. Stories I’d half remembered. Some I’d never seen at all. And the artwork… man. There’s something about that era of anime that immediately transports me back to being a high-schooler in the ’90s, when we traded Manga VHS tapes around school. And yes, we called them “mangas.” We didn’t know any better. To us, Manga was anime because that big MANGA logo was plastered across the tapes we were passing between each other. The correct terminology came later. We had this little ecosystem at school where somebody would discover something, bring the tape in, and suddenly everyone needed to see it. Recommendations spread by word of mouth. VHS tapes changed hands. Then we’d make pilgrimages into the West End and down to Forbidden Planet on New Oxford Street to see what else we could find. Guyver. Ninja Scroll. Cyber City Oedo 808. And, of course, Legend of the Overfiend — an extremely adult, extremely dark tale that absolutely blew our tiny teenage brains.

Looking back, we were probably ahead of the curve.

That little ecosystem we created around anime at school feels strangely similar to the enormous culture surrounding it today. Except there were no streaming services, algorithms or endless recommendation feeds. Someone just handed you a tape and said: “You need to watch this.” My own introduction goes back even further. My first anime was Fist of the North Star. My dad loved kung-fu movies and collected the tapes, and sometime in the late ’80s he came across this strange animated thing and brought it home for me alongside a bunch of considerably more child-friendly anime. Fist of the North Star was absolutely not child-friendly. Obviously my mum wouldn’t let me watch it. Obviously I waited until she was asleep and watched it anyway. I didn’t completely understand what I was seeing, but I knew I loved it. The artwork. The characters. The strange worlds. The violence probably helped.

But there was something else too. A lot of the Japanese animation I encountered back then had this almost dreamlike quality. Even when I couldn’t completely follow the mythology or understand why something was happening, I had an affinity with it. That feeling has stayed with me. Even Lensman recently resurfaced from somewhere deep in my memory. I couldn’t remember the name or really even the story — just this image of a male protagonist in some distant future with a strange jewel embedded in his hand. Turns out I was remembering Kimball Kinnison and the Lens. Nearly forty years later, that image was still in there. And maybe that’s the thing. There’s something timeless about the visual language of anime from that period. The shadows. The painted backgrounds. The machinery. The faces. Those enormous futuristic cities. The ridiculous amount of mechanical detail lavished on something that might only appear on screen for a few seconds. You can feel the work. I’m not pretending everything produced during that era was a masterpiece. There was plenty of madness, plenty of nonsense and plenty that probably hasn’t aged particularly well. But even some of the strangest productions could look absolutely beautiful. And that matters. Anime gives us an endless stream of stories today, plenty of which get lovingly — or mockingly — labelled trash. Sometimes there’s actually a great idea buried underneath, but the delivery lets it down. Animation can elevate a story just as easily as poor execution can flatten one. That’s why I’ve enjoyed seeing newer productions such as Clevatess, Sentenced to Be a Hero and the new Ghost in the Shell reach for some of that older visual richness again. Not necessarily by literally returning to cel animation, but by embracing strong line work, deliberate composition, texture, shadow and that feeling that somebody cared about every frame.

As for where I’ve been finding some of these forgotten OVAs… I’m keeping quiet. I’m not about to start naming obscure YouTube channels and accidentally get somebody’s archive nuked. That isn’t an endorsement of piracy. Pay for what you watch when legitimate releases exist. Buy the work when you can. Support the people who create it. But preservation matters too. Some of these films and OVAs spent decades trapped on ageing VHS tapes, obscure discs and releases that disappeared from circulation. Without people caring enough to preserve them, parts of this history could simply fade away. So if you’re wandering around some forgotten corner of the internet one night and happen to stumble across one of these gems, take a minute. Look at the backgrounds. Look at the line work. Look at the machines, the cities and the monsters. Look at the impossible amount of detail somebody decided to draw by hand. And maybe think about all those kids swapping battered VHS tapes around school thirty years ago, having absolutely no idea that this weird little thing they were obsessed with would eventually take over the world. Timeless art that helped pave the way for the industry we have today. Salute.