The anime I’m interested in is generally very different from the shows I used to watch on Saturday mornings many years ago. Serial Experiments Lain, for instance, has nothing in common with, say, Yogi Bear beyond being animated. ((Unless you count Lain’s pyjamas.)) Sometimes I’m in the mood for something silly and trivial, though, which brings me to my next list:
Anime like Saturday morning cartoons
Ramen Fighter Miki
Animal Yokocho
Galaxy Angel A and Z
Keroro Gunsou
The Adventures of Mini-Goddess
All of these consist of short episodes with no long-term narrative once all the main characters have been introduced. (Galaxy Angel makes no pretense of continuity at all.) They’re generally okay for kids. They are best taken in small doses; trying to marathon any of them results in indigestion. None of them approach the level of the best of Chuck Jones or Tex Avery, but they all compare favorably with the typical Hanna-Barbera offering. (The writing in Animal Yokocho approaches Moose and Squirrel level.)
Bonus list: Outstanding anime battles
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, episode ten (broadcast order) — one of the very few alleged “crowning moments of awesome” that actually is just that.
Denno Coil, episode four — defines “pwned,” except that the term will be obsolete slang in Isako’s day.
Seirei no Moribito, episode three — one of the rare conventional battle scenes that holds my attention …
… because, in general, fight scenes bore me. That’s why this list has only three items. I could add the fifth episode of Crest of the Stars and the last third of Banner to make five, but I think I’ll leave it at three.
The Haruhi battle you’re talking about, that’s “Cricket”?
Nope. I mean the tenth episode broadcast, featuring Asakura and Nagato, not the tenth chronologically.
2004? A newcomer. The Pokemon Farfetch’d carries a leek and uses it as a weapon. Farfetch’d is one of the original set of 151 Pokemon. It appeared on the TV cartoons around 1999, give or take a year, and may have showed up even earlier in the games. (My kids were too young to play the games when they watched the show — incessantly — in the late 1990s. Later they moved up to the games and stopped watching the cartoons. This is why I know most of the original group of Pokemon but none of the later ones.)