Animes from 1969

Kozue is an enthusiastic volleyball player and midschool girl. Her ambition is to compete in the national japanese volleyball team. She makes it from the school district league through to the Japanese volleyball finals during the season, step by step before the international volleyball championship. Yet the faster and higher Kozue climbs up the career ladder, the more she finds herself faced with the dark side of success: too high aspirations, self-consciousness and jealousy are heading towards serious issues.

One day Kan-chan discovers a bottle of sorcery in the attic. Whenever someone sneezes, a genius named Hakushon Daimaou is brought out and has to grant the wish to someone who has sneezed before they sneeze again. However, often he fails by mistake and only causes trouble instead of granting any wishes.

Still another expansion of the series Marine Boy. 65 episodes have been added to the 1966 series this time, and all 78 episodes have been sold in the USA. The broadcast history of the show in Japan was much more complex, with only the first 36 episodes of the 78 seen at first but later on all 78, of which 65 are in this entry and 13 are in the Ganbare! The show Marine Kid.

Marine is now equipped with an underwater boomerang, a hydrojet and his girlfriend has become the Neptuna / Neptina mermaid. Any prior Ganbare episodes! For this series Marine Kid had part of their footage recycled.

The main character is a mum named Sazae-san. She and her husband, her children and her parents live in a home. The series is the ultimate family program and appears to have conventional themes followed. Think of this series as the Japanese version of "The Partridge Family" and you should have a good feel for the atmosphere of this series. Don't expect to see stuff like crime, swearing, acting kung-fu or girls sorcery. The plots are more like "Sazae-san is going to the new mall today and gets lost" These "boring" plotlines and simple art are always a turn-off for non-Japanese viewers, but the series is extremely fine for most Japanese.
As a result, it remains one of the top grabbers on TV ratings and is one of the few anime that adults find "appropriate."

Quite loosely based on finnish author Tove Jansson's Moomin novels. However, Jansson never really approved of the series because of drastic changes in storyline, setting, personality of character, appearance and names etc. The series was targeted at adults, rather than kids.