Well Fushigi Yugi turned me on to anime when I saw it about 2 and a half years ago. My best friend and roommate at the time borrowed a couple tapes from her little sister. And just from watching a couple episodes from the middle of the series, I was hooked. So I had to rent the rest of it from the only anime store I could find that rented out, Planet Neo. Blockbuster is starting to carry a lot of anime, but there's usually a few DVD's from a select few series'.
After I had rented all 2 seasons of FY, I realized that I should have just bought it on e-bay to begin with.
(I've seen the whole thing including OVA's probably 4 times now.)
To tell you the truth though, the more I got into anime, the more I started remembering other anime that I saw when I was super young and didn't know what it was a the time. Has anyone heard of UNICO? There's only 3 episodes in existance that I know of. It came out in the early eighties and i must have seen it when I was 4 or 5 years old.
IT'S WEIRD. It's about a baby unicorn that gets exiled to the hill of oblivion because the Gods were jealous of his power to make people happy. The West Wind is told to take him there, and she hasn't the heart to do it. So she takes him from place to place trying to hide him from the Gods. The Gods sent out Night Wind to find them and she's always close behind. But I haven't come to the weird part yet.
If memory serves correctly, Unico meets a cat named Katie that wants to be a human girl more than anything because she really wants to be a witch. She's a spoiled brat and Unico can only grant wishes to people he likes. But when the cat jumps in a river to try and save an old woman, Unico is able to turn her into a human so that she can save her. A little after that, Katie is playing around in a meadow when out of nowhere appears a dashing older man. She is enchanted by him and is invited to his castle that night. To make the long story short, she eats some crazy psychotropic berries that hypnotize her into going to his castle late at night. The forest that she has to go through is all creeps and all the animals have also eaten the weird berries (put there by the man). And the dashing older man turns out to be some sort of vampire/demon thing that tries to seduce and kill her. Unico comes to the rescue finally and just when you think that the bad guy is dead, he morphs into this uber-scary grim reaper lookin guy of monstrous proportions. Then Unico morphs from chibi baby unicorn (the form he's always in) into a very beautiful, magestic, full grown unicorn/pegasus and it gets a little gory. Good of course, triumphs over evil...
And I saw all this, as I said, when I was like 4 or 5! It's supposed to be a children's show! It scarred me for years and then I eventually forgot about it. Only when I got into anime again did I start having flashbacks of Unico. And now it turns out to be a pretty detailed memory, huh? Crazy, isn't it?
So moral of the story is, for pie's sake (mmmm pie), make sure you know what your children are watching! (Especially if its anime!)