Still Hearing Tico
There’s still that feeling when you hear them. Any of the themes. Tico, Lady Oscar, Sailor Moon—one chord of the opening and I’m eight years old again, sitting on the floor in front of an old television set. That was the thing about German TV in the nineties. They just played anime straight through the afternoons. No apologies, no self-consciousness. They treated these shows like they were the most important thing on the schedule, and I believed them.
RTL2, VIVA, whichever channel had whatever time slot—the afternoons all bled together. Tico one day, Mila Superstar the next, Lady Oscar, Monster Rancher. The openings weren’t filler. They had real melodies. Emotional precision. The kind of songs that made you feel like you needed to be brave about something, to fight for what mattered, to become someone worth becoming.
I’m sitting around now, decades later, and a certain synth line will surface in a sample or a memory will conjure it, and there’s this immediate ache. Not the soft kind of nostalgia. More like a tuning fork—something about those melodies was calibrated to exactly the frequency of what I needed to hear at that specific age. The resonance never quite faded.
The openings weren’t trying to charm you. They were trying to make you feel something real. They did. They still do.