Japanese animation became popular in Europe in the late 70s and early 80s with the robot animes, Lupin III, Future Boy Conan, Heidi, Lady Oscar, etc. I was in primary school. Dragon Ball started much later and I watched it when I was at university or maybe later. Everybody of my age already has been an anime fan for at least 15 years by then.
It was a different phase. At least in scale. It seems you a few years older than I so maybe you can tell me, but did the late 70s felt like japanese animation or just "animation", I was too young to really sense how captain harlock and such were perceived ? To me that was a big change, dragon ball made people crazy about mangas per se (it was around the time Glenat started to produce a lot of french translations too IIRC), imports, merch, japanese language and culture .. all like one big tsunami
There were no mangas in Europe in the 70s AFAIK or they were extremely niche. Every kid was watching anime by then (and there were way more kids then than now) and we explicitly called them Japanese anime. We knew the difference between them and anime from the USA (Popeye, Bugs Bunny, etc) and the ones from our country and other European countries.
Then we grow up, manga translations and scanlations became available and we started reading too. That was about around 1990, when Dragon Ball was aired for the first times.
> That was about around 1990, when Dragon Ball was aired for the first times.
In France, Dragon ball first aired in 1988.
Kids in the 80's didn't say they were watching anime, they said they were watching japanese cartoons. They knew it was different from Disney and Tom&Jerry and other productions but it didn't mean yet what anime meant in the mid 90's with Ghost in the shell, Lodoss and other anime that weren't aired on TVs (and that weren't long running serie).
And then there was someone at FR3 who somehow slipped 3 or 4 hours a harlock captain movies on christma and new year's eve in the beginning of the 90's. That was dope.
Agree, I watched all robot animes but dragonball gave me the first kick to explore Japanese animation and mangas. I guess because I was older and looking for answers regarding the next transformation.
That depends strongly on the country and shows. Some countries had original anime, some had Westernized anime like Heidi and other WMT-series. Some had localized original anime, and people didn't know they came from Japan. France for example had a very original experience of Anime from the beginning, while others started decades later with the late 90s boom of Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball.
I can at least confirm that in my home european country japanese animated series did not start appearing until late 80s, early 90s, and by all means they were outliers and not _popular_ at very least til some heavy hitters came around the 90s.
I also don't know how applicable is making broad statements to europe as a whole in this specific regard. I feel cultural barriers have traditionally been pretty tall and what might be applicable to a country might not be applicable in the same timeframe to a neighboring one.
