Our Flickering Bible
RTL II is a wasteland now. The afternoon used to be nonnegotiable—Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball, One Piece, Pokémon, the whole thing was there waiting for you after school. Now it’s just day-time reality garbage, people destroying themselves on camera, the embarrassing bottom of German television. But for maybe fifteen years, around the turn of the millennium, that channel was something like our Bible. Not in any sacred way—just essential. Required viewing for anyone with a shred of imagination.
I caught some of these shows again recently. An episode of Dragon Ball, some of the old games. And what I noticed, having some distance now, is the actual craft underneath. Dragon Ball isn’t just martial arts porn (though it definitely is that). The character work is there. The pacing means something. You can feel Akira Toriyama thinking about the rhythm of each fight, the escalation, when to pull back and crack a joke.
Sailor Moon was the gateway for realizing that animation could be genuinely sophisticated without losing the warmth. The romance wasn’t window dressing. The stakes weren’t trivial. A teenage girl turning into a magical soldier sounds ridiculous until you actually watch it and realize the writing has texture. The emotional beats hit.
One Piece just kept going. Still does. The commitment to it, the way it could hold a narrative across hundreds of episodes without losing momentum—that’s a kind of artistic discipline you don’t see in most television, let alone animation. It rewarded the patience it asked for.
There’s something about watching this stuff again now. It’s not quite nostalgia. It’s more like walking through a room where something fundamental in you took shape, without you knowing it at the time. The animation holds up better than you’d expect. The writing does too. And you realize you were learning something about character, about structure, about visual language—absorbing it all while just sitting there on the couch, waiting for dinner.
That window closed fast. RTL II moved on to cheaper, worse things. The cartoons dried up. And now watching those episodes feels less like revisiting something familiar and more like standing in a place you didn’t know was sacred until it was already gone.