(~1998)
The original Tenchi Muyo OAVs were some of the first anime I watched, wayyyy back when they were new fansubs that the ADP had gotten ahold of, before I was even a college student. This series about a young man and the myriads of alien women who love him has spawned innumberable (okay, five) spin-offs and three movies to date. Two of the movies are worth watching (none of the spin-offs are, in my opinion), but the greatest of the troop remain the original series. The art isn't the best, but the gags more than make up for it. Well-written and occasionally convoluted, the Tenchi OAVs are always good for a smile.
Memories is the collective name given to a series of three shorts done by Otomo Katsuhiro of Akira fame. Surreal and not just a little bit twisted, watching these at an ADP showing my freshman year of college, I walked out feeling like I'd sat down for a round of The Twilight Zone. Trying to do the plots justice only results in liberal use of the backspace key, so I will simply say that I love them. Magnetic Rose, Stinkbomb, and Cannon Fodder are all wonderful, though Magnetic Rose is the strongest story of the three, with the most detailed and gorgeous art (the clincher - my mother loved it). This is one of those anime that you show to people to hook them in.
Bastard!... (laughing) Bastard! indeed. Bastard! is a swords-and-sorcery anime for every twelve-year-old boy in your life. Nearly every name is a pun on some 80's heavy metal band, acid dissolves only the heroine's clothes and doesn't harm her at all, and the "hero" (if you can call him that) is one downright asshole. Sure, the art's not great. Sure, the humor's crass and juvenile. But any anime where Gara the Ninja Master shoves aside another character, and tells the camera to pay attention to him, gets my thumbs-up. Most people I know don't like Bastard!. It makes me laugh each and every time I see Dark Schneider, the bastard himself, transform back and forth between himself and the innocent little boy's body he's usually trapped in. I wouldn't have my mom watch this one, though.
Master Mosquiton now has a TV series associated with it, but the original OAVs were what won me over. Snazzy jazz music, nice art when the artists try, and an engaging story all caught my eye when the ADP showed this, sometime around the end of my freshman year or early sophomore year. Inaho, a young and pretty girl obsessed with staying that way, blood binds a vampire to her using an old book of her grandmother's, and proceeds to run all around the 1920's world looking for these items of power called O-Parts (hey, I didn't come up with the name). Well, okay, so the vampire she binds is a little bit of a wimp, a pallid shadow half-reluctantly doing his imperious mistress's wishes. But he commands a pair of pretty powerful elementals (even if most of the time they run around in child-form), and when he actually gets blood, all hell breaks loose. The series gets a tad risque by the fourth episode, but that's where the fun is at.