Spotlight: Unico Fans Celebrate Unico’s 50th Anniversary – Jackie’s Story

It’s the final submission for this month’s anniversary posts! Woohoo!

Jackie and I have known each other since 2001, after moving back to Colorado. I’ve mentioned her in my Sentimental Memories of Unico post from a few years ago, but as a quick refresher, she was the first fan I ever came across in the wild and also had one of the earliest Unico fansites at that time. Was it destiny? Did her knowledge and introduction to the online Unico community back then help me ultimately create this site today? I was but a fledgling, rediscovering my love for Unico in the early 2000s, and look where it has led me. Either way, we know it’s Unico that brings us all together. Yes, even you, dear reader.

I’m happy she was able to submit her own story, and hope you enjoy the read! Check it out below!

The Fantastic Adventures of Unico fried my little brain sometime in the late 1980s.

I was three-or-four and my parents had recently gotten a VCR, but movies were expensive and buying them was for suckers. Renting is just fine, except what about your small child, who likes to see the same things over and over? (classic small-child move.) That’s when you embrace the power of the blank VHS. My favorite tape was lifted entirely from The Disney Channel, which was very precious about itself at that time. You had to pay extra for it, like HBO (we didn’t but there were preview weekends sometimes), and then they didn’t even show Disney movies! At least, not their all-star lineup of cartoon masterpieces you’d think they’d want to showcase. Instead it was all janky little tv shows, forgettable live-action movies—and other studios’ animation. The best international animation they could get, uncensored and commercial-free. Interesting strategy for a famous cartoon company, giving their audience so many opportunities to get hooked on someone else’s product. and it worked! I feel no loyalty whatsoever to The Walt Disney Corporation, but I am sitting here in 2026 writing an essay about a baby unicorn.

Cheap blank tapes could fit four short movies. Mine had:

• The Chipmunk Adventure (1987), ha ha ha ha. I don’t want to get in trouble so no comment.
• The Dragon That Wasn’t (Or Was He?) (1983), starring beloved Dutch comic strip characters nobody else has heard of which I learned sometime in the last five years? ok
• And finally The Mouse and His Child (1977), bleak and compelling. (and which I noticed also had the Sanrio word and picture at the beginning, linking it to Unico and Hello Kitty in some mysterious way. They hadn’t yet perfected the technology but they did have Brands in the nineteen eighties, you know, and I realized early on that the Sanrio picture meant it was for me and I’d probably like it.)

But on this beloved tape #mytape, The Fantastic Adventures of Unico (1981) came first. Is that why I watched it the most and loved it the best? It may be that simple! but I doubt it. The other movies had their moments; I still think of infinity in terms of the Last Visible Dog. But that is one thing, and Unico was everything. One strange children’s movie, seared into my psyche at such a formative age that it’s a skeleton key to my likes and dislikes, to what I think about and how I frame it, to such an extent that each time I make a new connection between some way I am now and where it came from, and it’s this movie, again…eventually ya just gotta laugh.

(hey did you ever notice there’s a typo in the title. in the opening credits of the original US release, it says “Fantasic”, missing that second t. in Hobo font no less. going to double-check this on youtube even though I didn’t need to caused me to lose an hour watching most of the movie again. I had a great time)

I’m talking circles around it because I’m sensitive about it, but let me least try to get to my depth of feeling here. What does Unico mean to me. Well first off I was spoiled forever, aesthetically. When one of the first animated movies you ever see is as beautiful as they get, where do you even go from there? To insufferable snobsville, for me. There were comparable movies I suppose, on the same tier of artistic achievement. Then they started getting cheap direct-to-video sequels, which I took as personal insults. The Return of Jafar? The Land Before Time II?? Don’t make me puke. Shoddy animation, obvious voice actor replacements…you debase not only yourselves, and your source material, but me—for trusting you. What do you mean people make these things “for money”? I thought they made them because they loved me! This is how I learned the truth.

(I never had this problem with Unico, just saying.Itssequel movie, when I eventually saw it, was just as beautiful—and this time, with disco.)

It’s possible that sequel, Unico in the Island of Magic (1983), was the first thing I ever bought online. A VHS from eBay, for about ten bucks when I was about twelve. Although the very first thing I bought online might have been a store-bought copy of, you guessed it, The Fantastic Adventures of Unico (1981)! Got me one of the nice Magic Window editions, in the plastic clamshell. Sure I still had my tape #mytape, but what if something happened to it? Besides, that was just a rip from the TV; we as a society weren’t into documenting the metatext of that kind of thing yet, the interstitials and so on. I thought it was disposable, and now I know I was wrong, but it’s too late. my tape has been sent to the Hill of Oblivion.

A little earlier, the first time I ever gave an online stranger my real address also pertained to Unico. I had to have a serious talk with my parents about how risky it was, but they let me do it. The other person’s motives were pure, of course, and they wound up doing a very nice thing for me. I knew it would go down like that. Anyone who liked the same obscure cartoon I did, I was sure, must be a good person with good intentions.

(Ha ha, I no longer believe this. It is, nevertheless, the reason I cut my state governor more slack than I should for longer than I should. He has not met this historic moment of fascist terror the way he ought to…but on the other hand, I once spotted him backing the same Unico Kickstarter as me! isnt that wild.)

Unico was the subject of my last hand-coded website (that I made) and my first email listserv (that I joined). It was the first thing I looked for online specifically because it seemed like nobody I knew had heard of it. Turns out, on the internet nobody is alone in any of their niche interests. This is how I learned that making rare—but not impossible—connections was what the internet was for. Going online in 2026 feels like it has less to offer me all the time, but I haven’t forgotten its potential.

Caring so much about one of their movies also led me to find and document the other Sanrio animation releases, to the best of my ability (meager), back on that iteration of the internet that barely exists anymore. (good luck finding the site! I zapped it 25 years ago, sonny.) If you’re reading this as an old head maybe we’ve crossed paths before, decades ago. could be! I’m still e-pals with a couple of you. (Xellis doesn’t count—not to brag, but we are irl-pals actually. we met in high school, and bonded over an obscure movie about a baby unicorn. jealous??)

What else, what else. I learned Unico had originally been a comic so I tracked down the comic, and learned to call it manga, and then I found more manga and I’ve been reading manga ever since. I found out its creator was considered the Walt Disney of Japan, and since then I’ve learned much more about Osamu Tezuka. interesting guy!

Though I deeply appreciate animation as an art form, I never quite became a Cartoon Person™ if you know what I mean. Did The Fantastic Adventures of Unico set the bar too high, too early? Ah, maybe. Did the conundrums posed by The Fantastic Adventures of Unico, instead, guide me to my adult hobby of wrestling with questions of fate vs. free will? Could be. Do the gods, alone, decide when people can be happy, or can we do that for ourselves? Or can a baby unicorn with magical powers defy the gods and hack the system, creating joy in any life it touches just because? And for its crimes, should it be banished to the Hill of Oblivion to die?

My interest in these questions expresses itself less through worrying about what literal gods think and more through studying esoteric fortune-telling materials and methods, but whatever! It’s the same picture. By the way, the fortune-telling stuff is only one facet of my larger aspiration to be a witch, so right there’s another thing that must have started here. It’s a strange thing to say with a straight face—but what else can I say, it’s kinda the most succinct way to explain my deal. It’s also the way to say it that makes me the happiest, and it will continue. I have to. Katy the Kitty Witch, she gets it. Katy was the blueprint.

I learned to discern between the different types of devils. There are different types, if you didn’t know. Is someone the kind of devil that plays a little rough, but who—when it counts—will bend time itself to keep a promise? Or, are they the kind of devil I may need to impale on their own house, eventually? Sometimes even the cutest little creature has to fight the devil, is what I learned.

I could go on but you get it. Unico, the movie and the character, meant a lot to me growing up and it still does. My life would be different in a thousand large and small ways if we’d never crossed paths. I will always love them very much.

p.s. if you somehow read this, haven’t seen it before, and are now inspired to go watch The Fantastic Adventures of Unico (1981) for the first time, you can NOT get mad at me when it turns out it’s a children’s movie. I literally said it was a children’s movie. a wonderful children’s movie. you should check it out! bye.

– Jackie / USA

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