Every day I would rush home (we lived just over a mile away and had to walk back then); I would leave my older sister to finish the last half-mile or so alone, while I ran until I got a stitch and then speedwalked to get in the door, turn on the little color-tv we had, get UHF channel 25 dialed in, and then watch entranced for 30 minutes. The fate of the Yamato and her crew was everything to me - it was like my animated soap opera, the Japanese cartoon answer to "Days of Our Lives" or "General Hospital."
In retrospect, I think that’s also a point worth noting. It was one of the very first examples I had of serialized storytelling that wasn’t a soap opera, and more to the point, that came to an end.
Almost everything else on television, adult or for children outside of soap operas, was mostly episodic.
I would have to dig back through my memory, but I believe until deep space, nine, Babylon 5, and the Sopranos, while there may have been elements that carried forward in other TV series, pretty much nothing else was actually an ongoing story as the primary focus.
That's what hooked me - and I was like 9 or somewhere in there. It was a driving narrative that you had to keep up with every day. I would be horrified when I missed an episode because then - when I watched the next episode - I had to intuit and infer what happened in the episode I had missed. IIRC, the way it was structured, they did do some occasional "on the last episode..." recap stuff, but the initial setup was just so good - especially the clock - that you couldn't help but be dragged in by the story. I would love to own the DVDs of (and binge-watch) the version I saw as a kid.
Every day I would rush home (we lived just over a mile away and had to walk back then); I would leave my older sister to finish the last half-mile or so alone, while I ran until I got a stitch and then speedwalked to get in the door, turn on the little color-tv we had, get UHF channel 25 dialed in, and then watch entranced for 30 minutes. The fate of the Yamato and her crew was everything to me - it was like my animated soap opera, the Japanese cartoon answer to "Days of Our Lives" or "General Hospital."
In retrospect, I think that’s also a point worth noting. It was one of the very first examples I had of serialized storytelling that wasn’t a soap opera, and more to the point, that came to an end.
Almost everything else on television, adult or for children outside of soap operas, was mostly episodic.
I would have to dig back through my memory, but I believe until deep space, nine, Babylon 5, and the Sopranos, while there may have been elements that carried forward in other TV series, pretty much nothing else was actually an ongoing story as the primary focus.
That's what hooked me - and I was like 9 or somewhere in there. It was a driving narrative that you had to keep up with every day. I would be horrified when I missed an episode because then - when I watched the next episode - I had to intuit and infer what happened in the episode I had missed. IIRC, the way it was structured, they did do some occasional "on the last episode..." recap stuff, but the initial setup was just so good - especially the clock - that you couldn't help but be dragged in by the story. I would love to own the DVDs of (and binge-watch) the version I saw as a kid.
There was nothing else like it on the teevee.