Same here but I’m not sure if I grew out of them or if it was just overexposure. I used to watch those every week along with Fry Laurie’s Jeeves and Wooster.
Other than that, many of the same things others have mentioned. Sci-fi novels but I think it’s because I have much less tolerance for bad writing (when I was younger I coudl overlook writing in favor of plot) and less inclination to wade through lots of crap to find the good stuff. I still like science fiction movies but I’m not rabid about any movies anymore.
I do still like (some) anime and manga but that could be because I discovered them in my thirties and I also use them to study Japanese.
I’m not sure how much of this is “growing out” of something or just losing the fanatic passion of youth as we age.
Inu Yasha is about a teenage girl who gets warped back in time and embarks on a quest to retrieve the shards of a sacred jewel that grants users power according to their stature.
Yu-Gi-Oh details the adventures of a teenage child possessed by the spirit of an Egyptian pharaoh. He is guided by this spirit in order to play an ancient game where-in people and monsters are imprisoned in card form.
Azumanga Daioh is a humorous account of the everday events of a group of highschool freshman girls.
I could go on and on… While it’s true there are many garbage animes and there are some cliched plotlines that tend to get thrown around, your willingness to criticize a genre that you admittedly know very little about is irritatting.
Also, although I’ve only been able to watch re-runs of shows from the 70’s and 80’s, I’m fairly certain that there were more than ‘2 or 3 series,’ and there plotlines had a similar proportion of garbage to gold.
I used to be like one of those record store hipsters/geeks in the movie High Fidelity. It was vitally important for me to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the best music, right up to what was being released next month. I came to any conversation about music ready to fill you in on the next great band bubbling up from the underground, or to condescendingly explain to you which obscure historical musicians influenced the sound of which modern performers.
I still have some of that knowledge, I guess, but I find that I have quit updating it quite so frequently. I stopped subscribing to all the music magazines and obsessively listening for the next new band. I stopped worrying about having hipper-than-thou music cred.
Now I find myself a late arrival for a lot of bandwagons.
Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone series. I had to read “A is for Alibi” as part of a women’s lit class years ago, and got hooked. The last one I even bothered to buy (“R is for Revolver”), I bought from the remainder table at CVS for $4, and I haven’t even cracked it open.
There were many things about animé that actually disturbed me but that I would excuse because of it being so foreign and for having other qualitites. But nowadays I am not afraid to point out those sides as well. These days I feel a bit ashamed for having been such a big fan.
There are a numbers of shows and comics that I will continue to respect (especially Azumanga Daioh, Maison Ikkoku and animé from Satoshi Kon and Studio Ghibli). But my days of buying unknown animé and manga for the thrill of it are probably over for good.