HIkaru and Madoka are good friends, and that dynamic changes the triangle. And what I really enjoyed about it was that, unlike a lot of other later shows with love triangles and tetrahedorns or whatever, everyone involved was a really good person. It has great art, an amazing cast of characters, romance and humor. KOR was one of the touchstones of Anime and Manga in the 1980s often called the bible for teens in Japan during that time. But Kimagure Orange Road was THE archetypal shonen rom-com, maybe not the 'first' if there were others that were not quite as popular (hooray weasel words!), but sweet and wistful and funny and majorly influential on the whole genre.Īnd that's a fairly quick summary. Later on came Video Girl Ai, which was more sexual and angsty, and before KOR there was already Maison Ikkoku, which was slightly more sophisticated since the hero was a college student (it was technically a seinen manga). My dorm-mate in college watched all 48 episodes on fansubbed VHS in one all-nighter and later dropped out of school (these two things may or may not be related). It was super-popular then, and I watched it every Tuesday night at the anime club with all the other 18-to-23-year-old Americans imagining being a Japanese 14-year-old. If you were an anime/manga fan in the '80s and early '90s, you already know all this.

She thanks him for catching his hat, she smiles, and then she's gone, and it's a total meet cute.

('A UFO?' he thinks for a second, seeing the saucer shape.) The boy jumps and grabs the hat, and then the hat's owner comes looking for it-a beautiful girl. A teenage boy is walking up a long steep street along a hillside when a breeze comes and a straw hat, carried by the wind, sails through the air.

Orange manga box set