Before there was Kuroko there was Sakuragi. “Slam Dunk” is one of those iconic 90s series that didn’t just leave a lasting impression, it actively influenced a whole manner of people. Both the manga and anime helped spread basketball to a Japanese as well as Chinese audience leading to the NBA gaining popularity in East Asia. Its impact on the sports genre is undeniable. For the 50th anniversary of Weekly Shonen Jump they released a collage of their protagonists through the years and had Sakuragi in the front row with the likes of Goku and Luffy. But what is the secret to its success? The best place to start is with the story.

Hanamichi Sakuragi is a delinquent at Shohoku High School famous for two things: for his explosive temper and being rejected by a total of fifty girls throughout middle school. One day he meets a girl named Haruko Akagi and is immediately smitten while she is impressed by his tall, athletic build. When she suggests he try the basketball team he hurls himself at the opportunity to impress her. The problem, however, is he has a total lack of talent or knowledge of the sport. In spite of that he declares himself to be a basketball genius, something he will boast throughout the series. After she introduces him to the sport he meets the cool and gifted Kaede Rukawa. The two immediately clash due to their opposing personality types as well as the fact that he is the boy Haruko, as well as most of the female student body, is in love with resulting in a rivalry. As the story moves forward he meets Shohoku’s team captain, and Haruko’s older brother, Takenori Akagi and the other members. Together they work towards realizing Akagi’s dream of winning nationals while Sakuragi stakes steps towards becoming a true basketball genius.

“Slam Dunk” manages to be both a great sports anime as well as a great coming of age story. Sakuragi spends a great deal of time throughout the series struggling with basketball. This I feel is as it should be. He was a total novice who never heard of dribbling before, so naturally he won’t be a star player until he really educates himself and practices. Once he reaches a point where he is playing basketball for himself and not merely to impress Haruko it shows how far he has come as a person. And it isn’t just Sakuragi who has interesting things going on with his character. We have the history behind Shohoku’s team and their struggles. Seeing how Akagi worked so tirelessly to aim for the top despite coming up short through the years endeared the character and made his iconic quote “if you give up, the game’s already over” carry so much weight. The story of Mitsui going from an MVP to falling off due to an injury and coming back around to reentering the sport was one of the emotional highlights. There is an enjoyable friendship between Sakuragi and Ryota who shares quite a deal in common with him. Even a character like Rukawa who initially seems to be just the quiet, stoic type has some layers to his personality that keep him from being dull. He is not a great student, yet he is fully devoted to the sport. So much so that his play style is perceived by others as selfish and difficult to work with. And while Haruko is there as Sakuragi’s love interest and initial motivation, we also see her as a very intelligent and helpful girl whose advice is shown to be incredibly valuable. Not to mention Sakuragi’s delinquent friends like Yohei, Shohoku’s vice-captain Kogure, the characters from the rival teams like Uozumi and Sendoh, this is a cast filled with very well constructed and enjoyable people.

“Slam Dunk” at its core is the result of Takehiko Inoue’s own personal attachment to basketball. Like Sakuragi he joined his school’s basketball team growing up thinking it would lead to him being popular with girls. In time he found himself to be just enamored with the sport and this passion definitely carried over into the anime adaptation. Despite the limitations of TV animation in the early 90s there is a real sense of excitement in these episodes. Seeing the matches play out is thrilling, you actively are hooked and want to see if Shohoku will win. And when the time came for Sakuragi to really come into his own and pull off something impressive, something that nobody expected him to do, it leaves you feeling so in awe. I am not somebody who is very interested in sports personally and I went in not having more than a surface level understanding of basketball and its rules. What I found to be extremely beneficial was that as the story progresses the audience is gradually fed information about the sport and how it works. This is something we come to understand as Sakuragi does and it’s not done in a way that would feel tedious to someone with a preexisting knowledge. It’s woven into the episodes seamlessly and this is largely due to the fact that when making the manga Inoue understood that he needed to provide this information in order to win over the audience. Again at the time “Slam Dunk” was in circulation and airing on Japanese TV basketball was a rather unpopular sport, by informing the viewer and exciting them through the material it built popularity among Japanese youth. The feeling I get when I think back on the series is one that is humble. It’s a person saying “here is a sport that brought me great joy, would you like to see a story about it”.

When I started “Slam Dunk” I only knew the basic outline of the story and in the end I feel what I was given far surpassed my own expectations. I felt as if it transported me back to the early 90s, it’s less of a case where it feels dated and more of this feeling that they captured time in a bottle. The characters, they drew me in. The story kept me entertained for all one hundred and one episodes. What I would consider to be something of a drawback though is the anime is not a complete adaptation. The manga ended just a few months after the anime did. Instead of creating a forced ending to the TV series they found a place to leave us off that, while still fulfilling, is not the way Inoue concluded his manga. When it was over I didn’t find this to be a major flaw as I liked where it stopped, but if you go in thinking you are getting the full story that the manga laid out I will tell you that is not the case. That being said I think there is still plenty of reason to watch the anime. The voice cast is fantastic, the music is great, the designs are highly appealing, and that passion Inoue filled his manga with is still present. It is that fire, that energetic love for basketball that is the key to its success. Watching it I was completely able to see why this series inspired so many people. In the words of Sakuragi himself, you’ll watch won’t you?