Ah, fanservice. Whether you love it or hate it, it’s a part of many anime series, with little ecchi moments that provide shots of dopamine and serotonin to viewers’ brains. Since it’s common for many fans these days to “doth protest too much” and complain about how recent fanservice is “ruining” anime, even when they’ve gone out of their way to watch a fanservice-heavy show like Strike Witches or Okaa-san Online, the truth is that ecchi visual scenes have been part of a healthy anime diet since the beginning. Let’s look at 20 classic fanservice moments that made anime what it is today!
The Best Fanservice Moments in Classic Anime!
Since this is a post on “classic” anime fanservice through the years, I guess I need to define the term. I’d say that anything that was hand-painted on cels rather than digitally colored is “classic” and therefore, I’ll only be focusing on silver and golden age anime, and not more modern series from the year 2000 and onwards.
We’ll start with 1997’s excellent Agent Aika, which managed to fit in hundreds of PPM (panty shots per minute) in each episode.
Here’s another random anime fanservice moment that helped shape anime today. This series is called New Hurricane Polymar, from 1996.
Eva was a hugely influential series. While the “Gainax bounce” had become a famous trope by this time, there was comparatively little visual eye-candy in the original 1995 series.
Another anime that raised more than eyebrows at the time was Golden Boy, a genius ecchi work by Tatsuya Egawa, the man was responsible for me getting into hentai and founding J-List.
Before Satoshi Urushihara’s incredible Plastic Little appeared in our local Tower Record video stores, no one knew that boobs could be animated so well. It was a turning point for many of us.
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The series that officially started the 90s for me, this genius anime series by Gainax and Hideaki Anno was very much a “proto-Evangelion,” with many of the kinds of deep themes that the series would explore.
1989’s Ranma 1/2 was hugely popular, the first exposure many fans of the era had to anime. And naturally, it was their first exposure to lots of animated oppai.
What’s your favorite Rumiko Takahashi work? Here’s a blog post about mine, Maison Ikkoku!
There were tons of entertaining moments with Bulma from 1986’s Dragon Ball, which probably confused and then enthralled many fans. The Dragon Ball manga comics were frequently banned by schools in the 90s, guaranteeing kids would go out of their way to read them.
I knew about 1993’s Dinosaur Planet because my 85-year-old grandmother taped it on VHS and mailed it to me, to show me that anime was becoming popular in America.
Sailor Moon was the most genius show ever, which unified the magical girl and 5-man fighting hero genres together for the first time. And to make sure the boys were paying attention, there were plenty of panty shots inserted.
A fun anime from 1991 called Genji Tsūshin Agedama had lots of comic ecchi scenes for viewers to enjoy.
Of course, Robotech had lots of scenes cut, like this one of Mint involved in underage drinking in her birthday episode. Also, if you haven’t seen the full Macross shower scene, I have it tweeted here.
A 1984 volleyball anime that wasn’t popular in Japan yet became a big hit in European countries.
If there’s a single most important fanservice moment in anime, it must be episode 1 of Urusei Yatsura, in which Ataru was tasked with touching Lum’s horns. The way he does it is by stealing her bra so she can’t protect her horns. This might be the first sideboob shot in all of anime.
A series from the tail end of the glorious “Super Robot” anime series from the 70s.
Today we all know Mobile Suit Gundam as the legendary sci-fi anime that’s been called “the first anime where the human characters were more important than the robots.” I wonder if moments like this helped cement its popularity with viewers slightly.
Another classic robot anime from the golden age of 1970s robot anime, Combattler had more than robots fighting to entertain fans.
Before he was famous for making Gundam a household name, Yoshiyuki Tomino was churning out other popular robot anime, including Raideen, which I only knew of because of the Shogun Warriors toy line.
An early ecchi anime that featured heavy panty shots and sexy situations, 1974’s Majokko Megu-chan cemented many of the now-familiar tropes of the magical girl genre, including more adult stories that a wider audience might appreciate.
Finally, we get to Go Nagai’s Cutey Honey, the 1973 series that featured a girl whose clothes would fly off as she transformed. Although the artist’s earlier work Harenchi Gakuen is officially created with starting the genre of manga and anime so perverted, those sexualized themes become something fans start seeking out, Cutey Honey was a runaway smash that changed anime forever.
Thanks for reading this post about 20 classic fanservice moments in anime. Did I miss any influential works? Post them below, or tell us on Twitter!
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