Let's never mind Pokemon and Digimon. Those are obvious.
My bro had a few tapes of Gundam Wing and Trigun, as well as the first DVD of The Big O. He only let me see the first... two? episodes of Trigun, because it gets really, really dark. I remember the first episode just being freakin' hilarious, though. Gundam Wing was pretty fun, too, what I'd seen of it, and not horribly heart-wrenching early on the way, say, Zeta Gundam was. It was pretty much Babby's First Sunrise Mecha Show, honestly, and had I started with something like Zeta or, God help me, 0080 when I was ten, I would probably be a broken mess today.
There was also some other stuff on Toonami -- DBZ and the like -- that I watched occasionally. When he left home, I started running into some CLAMP works and was really into that. When the whole eighth grade class went on a weekend-long trip around Chicago and I couldn't go, someone brought me back a copy of the first volume of the Chobits manga. Which is both pretty cool and pretty weird.
So basically, I think what I'm trying to say is that I discovered anime and manga around the time when you could actually get it for a price that an eighth-grader from a family of average means could afford and they are filthy enablers. Wait, what?