Grendizer, Adnan wa Lina and our childhood heroes and crushes at MEFCC

Merchandise featuring the Japanese cartoons of the 1970s and 1980s that were dubbed into Arabic at Middle East Film and Comic Con 2016. Rym Ghazal / The National

If you were an Arab child who lived here in the Middle East in the 1980s and 1990s, then you grew up and fell in love with the same Japanese animation as everyone else.

Merchandise featuring these Japanese cartoons from the 1970s and 1980s that were dubbed into Arabic proved to be a big hit at Middle East Film and Comic Con this year. But they came at a hefty price.

Fans of shows like Grendizer, Al Rajol al Hadidi (Iron Man or Kyoryu Daisenso Aizenborg in Japanese), Adnan wa Lina (Conan Future Boy), Lady Oscar (The Rose of Versailles) and Captain Majid (Captain Tsubasa) were seen at stalls haggling for discounts, and some even fighting over the "last" piece of a toy or object featuring their old favourites.

At one such stall, I fell in love with a music box featuring Lady Oscar and her love, André, from the cult-favourite manga and anime. It is a tale of a female heroine raised from birth as a man who commanded the palace guards at Versailles before the French Revolution. But the man who found it and had it on display was not willing to part with it.

"I am a man and I can't let go of this girlie box. I know it is silly but these cartoons are part of us," says Mohammed Al Mahmid, from Kuwait, who goes by the name "bu dizer" after the Grendizer sci-fi anime.

He sold me teacups with the Lady instead as well as a magazine with sketches of the handsome pirate Silver from Jazerat Al Kanz (Treasure island). My friends and I had a crush on this one-legged anime, and to some extent, we still all do.

Anything anime — be it pillows, posters, T-shirts, mugs or key chains — is good business. Three Emirati men argued over a particularly large and beautiful Grendizer action figure before one was able to outbid his competitors.

A Saudi couple are selling cels (the celluloid prints used to make an animation) of the old classics. The cels features characters, with information of the time and place of each still image from its film. One from Captain Majid for instance was being auctioned off for Dh9,000. Others were cheaper, and people were buying.

Childhood cartoons have a strong hold over us, and while there have been hundreds of new anime and cartoons since we were young, we always go back to the ones we grew up on.

In my case, I wanted and still want to be Lady Oscar, and have a dashing adventurous pirate husband like Silver, hopefully with two legs, though.