Pokémon would've been my first, closely followed by the Toonami trifecta of Dragon Ball Z, Gundam Wing and Tenchi Muyo - then Fox Kids started showing Sailor Moon alongside Spider-Man and X-Men, and I started to watch that... I never really saw them as 'Anime' though as a kid - just cartoon shows that happened to be from Japan. I think the first time I heard of something that was directly referred to as an Anime would been watching my brother's copy of Akira when I was 13. I don't really watch Anime nowadays anyway (except for Persona 4, that is, and I'll probably watch the Persona 3 movie if that gets subbed/dubbed for the west), so I don't really think of those shows as things that 'got me' into Anime... they were just part of the batch of Cartoons I watched as a kid anyway.
Drug is an apt description. And yes, yes it was. My friends were all into it so I checked it out. I couldn't stop watching, even though I really didn't like the show at all. I finally stopped when I started watching some better anime like Cowboy Bebop and Yu Yu Hakusho and Rurouni Kenshin.
I guess it sort of did. I watched more than just DBZ though. I remember watching the original Pokemon series as well. After that my brother basically got me into it more.
I watched a bit of DB before I ever saw Z, but I saw Teknoman before both of them. And that weird ultra-depressing season of Sailor Moon with the plant twins. EVERYBODY DIES
Never watched DBZ. But the manga was the first one I read. So it was a gateway kind of. After that I've watched/read things on and off. My obsession started with Cowboy Bebop, in January this year. So I would call that the REAL gatewaydrug.
I was introduced to anime by German TV of the '90s. Saber Rider, Captain Tsubasa, Rose of Versailles, Kimba, Sailor Moon, Around the World with Willy Fog, Robin Hood, that Little Prairie-like show with the kid on a crutch who carved little sculptures, that one volleyball show from the '70s...
Mine were Robotech/Macross, Great Mazinger and Captain Tsubasa. In fact, I was into Dragon Ball (original), Slayers and Saint Seiya way before I saw DBZ. I saw other early anime before those, like Kimba, Heidi, Marco and Gatchaman, but I wasn't a fan of those.
Nope. I started with a bang: Nausicaa. Unfortunately, I was exposed to the awful localization known as "Warriors of the Wind". I loved it anyway. Getting to see the real thing years later was a real treat. It's probably still my favorite piece of Japanese animation. Miyazaki is a genius.
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