If you don’t know me very well then you might be surprised to learn that I’m an avid anime buff.  And with anime gaining popularity in the U.S. (with peple who wouldn’t normally watch it) i’ve compiled a list of the Top 10 Must-See Anime Series for those of you looking to pop your anime cherry.  Now while there are alot more (and better) ones out there, I decided to stick with the more popular and completed ones that you can actually buy in this country without having to look that hard.

9.  GTO (Great Teacher Onizuka)

What Wikipedia Says:

While peeping up girls’ skirts at a local shopping mall, Onizuka meets a girl who agrees to go out on a date with him. Onizuka’s attempt to sleep with her fails when her current “boyfriend”, her teacher, shows up at the love hotel they are in and asks her to return to him. The teacher is old and unattractive, but has enough influence over her that she leaps from a second story window and lands in his arms.

Onizuka, seeing this display of a teacher’s power over girls, decides to become one himself. In his quest, he discovers three important things:

1. He has a conscience and a sense of morality. This means taking advantage of impressionable schoolgirls is out… but their unusually attractive mothers are a different matter.
2. He enjoys teaching and most of the time, he teaches life lessons rather than schoolwork.
3. He hates the systems of traditional education, especially when they have grown ignorant and condescending to students and their needs.

With these realizations, he sets out to become the greatest teacher ever, using his own brand of philosophy and the ability to do nearly anything when under enough pressure. He is hired as a long-shot teacher by a privately operated school to tame a class that has driven one teacher to a mysterious death, one to nervous breakdown, and one to joining a cult. He embarks on a mission of self-discovery by breaking through to each student one by one, and helping each student to overcome their problems and learn to genuinely enjoy life.

Why it made the list:

Its the story of the teacher we all wish we had growing up.  A teacher who saw the rules as more of guidelines than boundaries and taught you a lesson one way or another.  Its a comedy at its heart that isn’t afraid to teach you a life lesson here or there.  His students kick his ass in every way possible and you can’t wait to see what they will throw at him next.  This series is a great coming of age tale where everybody ends up learning and laughing at the end like an anime Cosby Show.  If all that doesn’t appeal to you, I promise that you’ll watch just to see his reaction when a snake tries to bite off his johnson.

OCBENJI One Line Review:

“Only in an anime would a teacher have a name Onizuka, live in a closet on the roof of the school, try to bury the body of a student he thought he killed, and turn one of his students into a movie star .”