Well, I remember one show that was associated with that. When I was a kid TVO (That's TV Ontario,
not TV Osaka...) aired a show called Tales of the Green Forest or something like that, about talking animals in a forest. It had an opening theme that was pretty annoying and sung "the stories you read about all come to life," but I never read about them, knew anyone who read about them, heard about anyone who read about, or for that matter ever even saw the books the series was allegedly based on in any bookstore or library.
Keep in mind this was like 25 years ago or more. In fact, I had no idea at the time that this was anime. I also watched "Battle of the Planets" (
id est, Gatchaman) more or less during the same years, and I didn't know that was anime either. I sure as hell didn't know that Gatchaman never had 7-Zark-7 or that virtually every one of their adventures was set on Earth and not Outer Space.
Here's the Animenewsnetwork link to their Green Forest page:
http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/anime.php?id=432
BTW, I don't think you're missing anything by not seeing this. I had to choose between this and "Jeremy" (aka "Colargol", a French-Polish stop-motion animated talking bear) which I also watched as a kid, I'd pick the latter.