More stuff from the sketchbook archives. ;p Along with Ashita no Joe and Sailor Moon, Lupin the Third composes what I like to call "my personal holy trinity of anime/manga". I can't really put one of these as my top favorite, but with certain tiebreaking criteria involved I could give Lupin III "longevity credits", to say so. :D

First of all, worth mentioning that animes and mangas had a very, VERY limited participation in Brazilian entertainment before the "Pokémon fever" from the late 90's - until then, Japanese productions down here were mostly dominated by tokusatsus and samurai movies. To be honest, I don't even know if there were any mangas being published in Brazil before that, as for animes I can tell that there were very few of them on open TV (I couldn't name ten) and a slightly bigger number of them available only in VHS, and even the arrival of the first cable TV channels in 1991 didn't help on their numbers to promote them from a narrow, niche fanbase - and yet Lupin The Third wasn't one of these few, mind you.😅

I first heard about the existence of it some two decades ago thanks to, well, such fetish I share with (almost) all of you reading this. ;p Yup, thanks to the internet I eventually came across that mythical scene of Fujiko Mine being tickle-tortured all over at the very first episode, tho a side effect I wasn't expecting was sparking my interest on the anime. The more I read about the show, specially how it has so many references to western popular culture and top sport events for an anime (something I've never seen before back then), the eager I was to find any means to watch it. At first it had to be imported region-free DVD boxsets from Hong-Kong-based online shops, as time went by it became easier to access any of its media, even if up to these days it remains almost as unknown as it always was down here.😁 Fun fact: one of my most used usernames across the web (CorukoBardo) came from a funny misspelling from one of its episodes.