Kotetsu no Daibouken

The criteria here is simple: Anime released in any year, with under 15,000 MAL Members, and which I've rated a 6 or higher.

Now that I'm including anime from any year, I've lowered the MAL member threshold. The rating threshold remains at a 6, because sixes are still pretty good.

It is perhaps worth noting that I rate things entirely on gut feeling. It's just, "I like that, that was good, it gets a 7.", that's the whole process. I can also find enjoyment in just about anything and there's very little that bothers me.

Ascend: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/9615
Descend: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/13938

Tags: Old, Obscure, Oldtaku, Retro, Underrated, Hidden Gems

ADV Films, the former incarnation of Sentai Filmworks, produced most of their English dubs in Houston, Texas. However, from the late 1990s until 2005, ADV also employed a secondary studio in Austin, Texas, known as Monster Island.

Monster Island could be considered ADV's "2nd-string" studio, as many (though not all) shows they dubbed were lesser-known and perhaps lesser quality. Shipping them to MI may have been a cost-cutting move, as many of the dubs are marred by fast-and-loose scriptwriting, questionable name pronunciations, and a general sense of roughness and inexperience.
Still, a lot of them had their own sort of charm, and some are well-regarded. You can find some comments about the dubs from me on some individual entries. Some may be approaching "lost media" status, or are not commonly available online by legal or illegal means.

So if you've encountered an ADV dub from the early 2000s and wondered why the cast was full of names you hadn't heard of, or why it felt different from the average ADV dub, chances are it was a Monster Island show.

*Note: some related/sequel titles dubbed by MI are noted only in the comments, in order to stay under the 50-item limit.

Short form anime series on this site can often be underappreciated. In the same way poetry is radically different from fiction novels, which are radically different from screenplays and so forth, I view shorter series, typically OVAs, in the same way. Too frequently they're compared to TV series, and there will be many comparative allusions roughly paraphrasing, "You can't expect much from the story/characters because of how short it is", or other similar comments. The value of the efficacy of the presentation in both shorter and longer series are for the most part incomparable to each other. They both strive to do very different things through very different means despite the shared medium of "anime". Of course, what constitutes the differences or goals of a creator is quite vast, but the point is that from my personal view, because the context of the existence of shows that would either be shorter in length or longer are so different and require much different means for communicating the information that they present, I think they should be judged by different standards. How a person judges them is up to themselves, but I do believe short series are worthy of the praise that many would only attribute to more lengthy series. What I want to do is give reverence for the fun-sized length series I have come across and enjoyed to some degree.

What constitutes a “short” series is something shorter in length than a standard minimum length TV series, which is 12 episodes in length. The focus is not on the number of episodes, but rather judging roughly the amount of time. So, if there is a series with 24 episodes, but they are only 3 minutes in length, for example, that would constitute a short series.

Part 1: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/57297
Part 3: https://myanimelist.net/stacks/61468