Ginga: Nagareboshi Gin/YMMV

• Non Sequitur Scene: At the end of the ninja dog episode, a fairly random dog comes out of nowhere to throw the evil ninja dog boss' puppy off a cliff, with Cross throwing herself after to save it. The puppy is saved, Cross lives, and both the baby-killer dog and the Puppy are 'in quest' as the Squirrel King put it by the next episode, and baby-killer's baby-killing antics are never mentioned again. Possibly a case of Values Dissonance. Possibly.
  • A case of the anime omitting why the babykiller tried to kill the baby. Simply put, Kurojaki had killed and eaten both the babykiller's son and mate. Thus, he wanted revenge.
• Complete Monster: Akakabuto, literally.
• Crowning Moment of Awesome: Many.
  • Gin decapitating Akakabuto.
  • Akakabuto's last stand is quite epic. Dude just can't die.
  • Cross, while pregnant, crossing a sea to get a message to Gin.
  • Gin, upon thinking Ben is dead, picking up Moss the mastiff and throwing him on his back.
  • Akatora blinding Akakabuto at the cost of his own life.
  • Ben, while going blind, scoring first blood against Akakabuto.
  • Even if it didn't really do anything, Daisuke ramping off a snowbank to crash his snowmobile into Akakabuto was pretty awesome. How many people can claim they've throat-punched a bear with a snowmobile?
• Ear Worm: Plenty of synthesizer tunes repeated during the course of the series until they're stuck in your head for the rest of your life.
• Gateway Series: To Scandinavian viewers this was the gateway to anime.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: While the serie didn't recieve much attention in either Japan or America (due to animes starring animals not being a huge thing), it became a hit in Scandinavia and Finland, even having the anime being dubbed into each of the languages, the serie (while being majorly censored) released on VHS, and the manga currently translated into finnish.
• Heartwarming Moments: When Gin risks his life to save Daisuke
• Narm: "Eat it! Eat it!"
• Nightmare Fuel: Akakabuto and his minions with their ghastly visage and brutal slaughterings of humans are meant to scare the living daylights out of the viewers. For instance, in one flashback scene a group of lumberjacks are attacked, and we see how one of the men visibly panicked tries to crawl away from the bear towards the fourth wall, only to have the bear notice him and pounce him. Given the context of being a kids show, demonic bears killing people while eerie music plays is what one would objectively call Nightmare Fuel.
• Periphery Demographic: The reason we got this show in the west to begin with. The series is shounen, bust most of its (western) fans are women/girls.
• The Scrappy: Hyena
• Too Cool to Live: Riki and Benizakura
• Viewer Gender Confusion: It's not hard to mistake Smith for a female at first due to his voice being somewhat high-pitched. The sequel series thankfully gave him a much deeper, unmistakably male voice.
  • Get even more confusing in the Finnish dub, where he is first clearly male then suddenly turns into clearly female.
  • Believe it or not, but Pink Dragon is apparently supposed to be male.
• What Do You Mean It's Not for Kids?: The people behind the VHS versions of the show released in Scandinavia and Finland must have figured it was a kids' flick given how the story centers around cute, cuddly dogs. That is, until they saw how the dogs would constantly tear each other a new one, break each other's necks, commit suicide, have their eyes pierced with a scythe, cry blood and decapitate man-eating bears. Which is when they probably went into panic mode and censored about one half of the show, even cutting out how it ended (instead of Gin giving Akakabuto the final strike by tearing his head off with his Battouga, it was edited so it merely looked like it was Gohei's bullet that did the job.)