-- Disclaimer: I am fully aware that some of the following shows haven't aged well and are incompatible with today's sensitivities. My intent with these pages is to simply write about products airing during my childhood that I may have watched more or less sporadically (regularly catching a show on TV in the 90s wasn't easy, mind you) and that I want to revisit now that web archives are giving easy access to videos.
I do not, in any way or form, condone any past or present problematic actions content creators may have done; I'm only watching TV. --

Hey, let's turn on the telly! What do you wanna watch, series or toons?
Broadcasted shows were the most direct form of pop culture information youngsters had in the 80s and 90s. I used to watch some TV too, but since my many hobbies required me to stay elsewhere (aka in front of the computer screen) I was never able to really follow a show thoroughly; I caught random episodes here and there if they aired at the time I happened to turn on the TV, if I was lucky. If not, oh well.

Growing up, the Internet contributed to preservation of these old medias, a few of which would have gone lost due to unavailability on physical support, be VHS or DVD (I'm not even bringin in modern streaming services, because those are useless). I now enjoy putting these shows on while working (thanks, Firefox "Picture-in-Picture" feature!) so I can revisit and finally complete many series I used to just marginally know as a kid. Here's a few thoughts about them.

Animation
My animation section is divided in two lists: Western and Eastern. As you can see, there's a great disparity between the two!
The 90s culture in the States (aka, the one that gets most talked about on almost all nostalgic sites) mostly relied on american cartoons, but the situation was vastly different in Italy, where our main form of animated entertainment were japanese anime, as it has been so for the two previous decades already.
Italy started importing anime shows in 1979 and their popularity was huge since its beginnings, touching many more generations than our cousins across the pond. Other than the incredible variety of shows imported (from giant robots to shoujos to spokon to slapstick to serious seinen), the first italian adaptations were fairly faithful to the original material, having little to no censorship. The superviolent Tigermask and Hokuto No Ken? Yeah, we watched it all no problem! The first season of DragonBall with Bulma's hijinx? It was on our TVs. Such icons were directly embedded into our pop culture and general knowledge, so much that my generation basically defines Italy in the 80s as being indistinguishable from Japan in the 80s. Go figure.
Perception of eastern animation and its culture is very different in Italy since we now have roughtly three generations having grown with them; as a result, I know a lot of anime but a bit less about western toons, the latter of which I may have started knowing only after the advent of Internet, as many american cartoons even failed to get imported. Ironic, huh?

Anime list
Shows are ordered by production year. Click on their blinkie to view their dedicated page!


Cartoon list
Shows are ordered by production year. Click on their blinkie to view their dedicated page!
I'm workin' on it!