In the dream I was for some reason making one of those super long YouTube slop style video essays that’s really just a glorified summary of a movie or TV show. The show I was summarizing was called something like Wild Boy (わいるど☆ぼーい). It was a “forgotten” mid-1980s Studio DEEN anime, which was stylistically very similar to that studio’s other extremely long 1980s adaptations of Rumiko Takahashi, those being Urusei Yatsura, Maison Ikkoku, and Ranma ½, if you’re unfamiliar.

Wild Boy was called “Japan’s answer to Dennis the Menace” and was apparently considered “a seminal work of the slice-of-life genre in animanga, due to its down-to-earth atmosphere and realism”. It followed a mischievous little boy who slowly grows up over the course of the series, experiencing births and deaths in the family, divorces and remarriages, big moves and all sorts of other big changes that can be hard on a little kid.

But obviously the detail that stood out to me the most from the dream is that all of Wild Boy’s OPs and EDs came very specifically from the (various Ethiopian artists) album Yebruh Tesfa Eshet (የብሩህ ተስፋ እሸት, 1977 Ethiopian calendar / 1985 Gregorian calendar). For that detail alone I really wish Wild Boy was a real anime. Like imagine starting an anime and its OP is just inexplicably in Amharic and about socialist revolution for zero discernible reason. That would fuck so hard.