Let's Flashback 1993

 

By popular demand, another long-suppressed issue of the print Let's Anime is up at the Otaku Archive portion of the Internet Archive, complete with all the attitude, factual errors and translation mistakes you've come to expect from 90s zines! It's sure to be a fascinating look at what it took to put a fanzine out back in the days when Japanese translation was difficult, reliable raw information was hard to come by, and desktop publishing meant putting actual pieces of paper onto the top of a desk, trimming images and text by hand using scissors or an X-Acto blade, and pasting everything down with the old reliable UHU Glue Stick. 

You can easily see exactly where I pasted things into the layout thanks to those harsh shadows. I still have the original pasteups for this issue, which is not a thing I can say about several other issues of the print Let's Anime. The process of putting together an issue was labor-intensive. For this particular issue I found myself blessed with a variety of submissions - Wilfredo Segarra sent me a terrific long-form Mazinger Z piece, Darius Washington wrote about Macross II, and Matt and CB delivered a rant about both the depressing state of then-current anime and the dismissive attitude the American fan sphere held towards the classics. Lloyd Carter gave me an installment of his long-running anime column "Beer Can Missiles," fake advice columnist The Beast offered yet more fake advice to fake correspondents, and I managed to throw in pieces about Giant Robo, a top ten robot anime list, scene reports, fanzine reviews, and because it's the 1990s, an article about Shonen Knife. The Nausicaa drone article came from an aviation magazine, the title of which has vanished into obscurity. Rounding out the issue were flyers for Project A-Kon 4, Anime America's Dojinshi contest, and I-Con's anime experiment "Chibi-Con"

 

All this text was keyboarded into a desktop publishing program, the name of which I cannot remember; all I know is it worked on our Windows 3.0 box. All the headlines, page numbers, and text blocks were printed out on our home inkjet printer. Illustrations were provided by hauling a load of manga, magazines, and books up to the Kinko's Copy at Windy Hill & 41, which was open all night and had free coffee, and I'd photocopy whatever I thought I was going to need for that particular issue.

Raw materials in hand, the next step was putting it all together and pasting it all up, one page at a time, trimming illustrations to fit and building collages of different images as necessary. This is kind of the fun part, as long as you keep a supply of sharp X-Acto blades handy. The pasted-up 8.5x11 pages would then be assembled into 11x17 signatures - a 28 page zine would require 7 signatures - and then that 11x17 mockup would be brought back to the Kinkos, or maybe the self-service copiers at Office Depot. That's where the actual printing of the book would be done. Then I'd take the pages home, assemble the books, staple the books with my long booklet stapler, and fold them. All by hand.  

 

This stack of finished Let's Anime zines would be sold to the general public at anime club meetings, at anime fan tables at local conventions, and at the artist alley/promotional tables at Project A-Kon, which at the time was the only anime convention we were making it out to. And of course I sold issues through the mail via the PO box; anime zine publishers would swap zines and promote each other's publications, and there was a slow but steady amount of letters coming into that PO box from people who'd read about Let's Anime in another fanzine, picked up a flyer at a convention, or heard about us at a club meeting somewhere. 

Did an issue of Let's Anime ever get a print run of more than 100 copies? I don't think so. I quit doing print issues of Let's Anime in 1999 for a multitude of reasons, mostly because on top of all the actual zine writing and layout work is all the extra work of simply getting that zine into the hands of readers. Distribution is the key word here, it's a job in and of itself, and one that I simply did not have time for.  I enjoy making fanzines, I enjoy creating physical printed books, and as we sometimes see decades of internet work vanish in an instant, the permanence of ink on paper has become surprisingly valuable. But self-distribution requires a self dedicated to that and only that, and, well, I have other things to do. In the meantime, my writing about classic Japanese animation can reach an audience tens, hundreds, thousands of times wider than it ever could when it was limited to whatever I could print, staple, and fold one at a time.  

-Dave Merrill

 

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Rosemont: 1999

As occasional historians of North America's anime fandom, sometimes we're called upon to make our research available to the general public. Gerald Rathkolb of AWO has been doing this over at the Internet Archive for a while, and when I got a request for the Anime Central program book from their 1999 show, I did the same. As I was watching the scanner do its thing to this 25 year old document, it occurred to me that what we have here is a unique snapshot of anime fandom at a critical juncture. Pokémon and Sailor Moon and Cartoon Network's Toonami block were forging new otaku out of channel surfers, the home video market was filling the shelves of Best Buy and Mediaplay and Suncoast Video with product, and all this was driving more and more people to the anime conventions that were cropping up everywhere a hotel ballroom lacked cosplayers. So let's look at the Anime Central 1999 program book, and let it tell us about anime culture circa 1999. 

Well, first off we have the bikini area of All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku-Nuku, hurling itself at the unsuspecting reader. Perhaps this amount of displayed cartoon flesh was business as usual to anime fans, but might have been a bit lurid for the public at large. This artwork was used for the ACen 99 t-shirts, leading to a lot of hasty explanations about what exactly was happening down there in Rosemont, was this some sort of X-rated adults-only thing? No, it's just that Japanese anime fandom in the 90s was still a very male, very male-gazey, fan-servicey, Gainax-bouncy, horny nerd culture that only an incoming crowd of Cardcaptor Sakura and Sailor Moon fans - that is to say, girls -  could mitigate.

Sakura Wars is a Taishō period Sega game that since 1996, has appeared in seven different animation projects and 17 different video games across multiple platforms. Were any of them available at Cyberzone in Shaumburg? Probably!

A Pokémon-filled note from the con chairs, back when you could throw licensed characters in your program books without somebody's lawyer showing up to harsh your buzz. Actually I don't think anyone in anybody's legal department really cares what we put in program books. The first Anime Central in 1998 drew 1200 attendees, and it really felt like it, it felt like Chicagoland anime fans were chomping at the bit to finally get their anime con scene started. See also Anime Boston, which also started strong out of the gate. Was ACen '99 the year a big rainstorm moved through and one of the stairwells got flooded? I forget.

The Alternative Video Warehouse spent who knows how much on a full page ad promising 1000 titles, discounts and immediate shipping, and yet forgot to include any way to find them or get in touch with them at all. Whoops. 

I always enjoy these Chamber Of Commerce style "about our city" blurbs, but come on, this isn't Des Moines or Erie or Louisville, this is CHICAGO. There was a whole musical about that toddlin' town! On the other hand, Rosemont itself is a self-contained municipality created specifically to house conventions, a rare, fascinating case of FBI-investigated single-family machine politics.

Guests of Honor include Project A-Ko's Yuji Moriyama, Bubblegum Crisis' Kenichi Sonoda, and Tsukasa Kotobuki, whose oddly proportioned skulls perhaps were the pivotal element driving me away from the Japanese animation of the 1990s. Also appearing are Jan Scott-Frazier and Doug Smith, two names that will be familiar to anyone who attended late 90s anime cons, because they were at all of them.

Toshifumi Yoshida moved from Viz to Pokémon where he continues to keep those pocket monsters a part of pop culture, while AnimeEigo recently changed hands but is still committed to bringing anime to English-speaking audiences. Chicago native Crispin Freeman is still voicing and producing in the anime field today!

I was at this Anime Central but I didn't go anywhere near the Masquerade. I'm pretty sure I spent Saturday night sampling a selection of Midwestern craft beer. 1999 was actually the last time I had anything to do with any anime convention costume contest anywhere; I MC'd the AWA 1999 costume contest and it was a nerve-shattering, demoralizing experience that caused me to question most of the life choices that had led me to that point. No more, I said. Since then it's been 25 wonderful, cosplay-skit free years. 

I'm pretty sure I was on the Corn Pone Flicks panel, and I believe there was some sort of history-of-fandom thing I was on at a shockingly early, hung-over hour. There definitely was an Anime Hell happening at this Central, though it didn't make it into the program book. 

I'm pretty sure this is the 1999 ACen Anime Hell flyer, but I could be mistaken. The flyer is definitely 90s vintage, however, designed as it is to meet your needs in a world of crisis.

Is Fushigi Yuugi the future of anime? I'm going to use 25 years of hindsight and say "maybe," considering how big isekai is now. I will say I love the "anime cel trading session" and we should bring that back, because let's face it, they aren't making any more of those things and if you have some, we should probably set up some trades. 

Take note of the Y2K references in the NekoCon ad - when January 1st 2000 rolls around all the software that wasn't updated for the new millenium would crash and civilization would end. And that's exactly what happened. Anyway, it sure felt like it the next morning, thanks to...  let's just say that New Year's Eve featured a lot of Jell-O shooters.

Oh man, the Con Suite.  Remember Con Suites? That there would be a hotel suite set aside for con attendees to just, sort of hang out in? With snacks and drinks? The Con Suite was a vestigial organ left over from the anime con's evolutionary ancestor, the literary SF convention, which were quieter affairs of a few hundred attendees. Some events naturally scale up as attendee sizes increase, and some don't, and the con suite doesn't work so well when it's expected to provide hotel sofa space for two or three or five thousand. 

Speaking of literary SF conventions; was there enough crossover between the Worldcon audience and the anime convention crowd to justify this two-page ad confusing everyone with two options for hosting Worldcon? I still don't know what a "pre-opposing membership" is. What I do know is that the 2002 Worldcon wound up being held in San Jose, and attendance was 5916, which made it a fairly large Worldcon. Meanwhile, in the 2002 anime convention world, Otakon had 12000 attendees and Anime Expo did 15000 that year. I think we all see where this trend is going.

The dealer's hall is a key part of any anime con, and in 1999 my recollection is that the tables were loaded with VHS and laserdiscs, because the domestic anime DVD market wasn't even a year old at this point. Localized manga wouldn't become a bookstore-filling phenomenon until the early 2000s, so most of the manga you'd buy in 1999 would be Japanese editions, American-style 32 page comics, or Viz graphic novels. Of course T-shirts and wall scrolls and figures and model kits and gatchapon toys snared a good proportion of the ACen '99 attendee's spare change. I'm seeing a lot of familiar names on the vendor list; Houston-based Planet Anime did a ton of conventions before the owners sold the store in 2005. AD Vision had, um, some exciting times on the road to bankruptcy. Norcross GA's House Of Anime went online only a few years back; they still vend at shows, I think. Nikaku Animart is still open in San Jose CA! Musashi Enterprises had amazing vintage anime stuff at their vendors tables and I was *always* too broke. They also developed the Star Blazers Fleet Battle System tabletop gaming system. Anime Pavilion? Still your VA home for anime goods! Manga Entertainment is now owned by Starz. Joy's Japanimation remains a time capsule of rental anime VHS in scenic Greensburg PA. Media Blasters survives, Neko-Con still happens every fall, Katsucon still happens every spring, Otakon happens every summer, Anime Fest is having its last show this year, Fantasticon holds comic cons in the Midwest, turns out AnimeVillage dot com was Bandai all along, and Dan Kanemitsu continues to lecture about Japanese doujinshi culture. And if you were still wondering about how to find Alternative Video Warehouse, they're at tables 5,6,7,8 and 9! 

Look at the staff list and you'll see some con chairs, some manga editors, and overall a bunch of people that I still talk to or toss jokes at across social media on a regular basis. In '99 the scene was still a small community; if you staffed an anime con you probably knew a dozen people who staffed other anime cons; chances are you could poke your head into any event at the show and see someone you knew or at least looked familiar, or who maybe you wanted to avoid. That's one of the pitfalls of a small community; you don't always get along with everybody you're sharing that small community with.

"Animevillage dot com" is no longer totally free, but whatever holding company wound up owning the URL will probably sell it to you for a reasonable price ($12k, last I checked). Instead, why not go back in time and get Mari Ijima's autograph at Anime Expo '99?

Here the ACen book takes the bold move of making their back cover look like the front cover of a magazine. AWA did this in 2005 and the print shop put the covers on backwards. Oops. Seems to have worked out for ACen and Planet Anime and whoever that is from whatever anime that's from, though. One thing that stands out when looking at this program book is what's not in it - for one thing, there's a definite lack of mecha. No robots, no transforming jet planes, no super mechanical fighting machines, not even a stray Scopedog, Giant Robo or GaoGaiGar. Absent are mentions of the shows we now regard as emblematic of 90s anime - no Dragonball Z, no Gundam Wing, barely any Evangelion. The name "Hayao Miyazaki" never appears. However, let's remember this program isn't representative of anything other than a con committee trying to put together what turned out to be a really slick, professional looking publication on a deadline and a shoestring, so you can't draw too many conclusions from what made the cut and what didn't. Sometimes it just comes down to what's available at the moment; anime cons haven't the luxury of waiting around for things to be perfect. Perfect is for next year, let's get this year's show out of the way first.

I went to the first six Anime Centrals before life scheduled me away from Chicagoland, but the show continues to fill Rosemont with midwestern anime fandom every spring. Why not drop into the convention next year and let me know how it compares to 1999? 

-Dave M

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I Was A Teenage Anime Club President

As a former teenage anime club president, I spend a lot of time these days sitting on my porch in my rocking chair with my elderly cronies, sneering at the kids today with their hair and their clothes and their streaming video and their instagram influencers. Actually, I don't do any of that. Instead, occasionally I pull some stuff from my files and use that junk to write about our anime club experience. Like now!

 

The 1980s were tough for anime fans. Streaming video on the internet didn't exist. The internet pretty much didn’t exist. Funimation, Sentai, Nozomi, and Discotek weren’t around to sell us DVDs or Blu-Rays, which also didn't exist. Sure, there were video rentals on every corner, but their anime selections were limited to Ninja The Wonder Boy or Chatterer The Squirrel or Jim Terry compilations of super robot cartoons shoved into the kiddy section. If you wanted anime, you had to know somebody who had it and was willing to copy it for you. In practical terms, you either cultivated a network of Japanese pen pals with whom you'd trade off-air American TV for Japanese anime, or you bought bootleg anime videos from a dealer at your local comic-con, or you joined one of several anime clubs, hoping they’d put you in touch with somebody who'd copy tapes for you. It was a complicated process.

In Atlanta I'd been attending comic conventions and Dr Who club meetings since I was 14, trying to get a line on somebody who knew how I could get my hands on anything with those big-eyed Japanese cartoon characters. The people I met at those conventions and clubs were grownups from places like Florida and Michigan with tapes of Lupin III and Space Cobra, and most were members of something called the Cartoon/Fantasy Organization.

C/FO New York meeting flyer from 1980

There were two other guys in Atlanta also trying to find anime and find others who liked anime. Eventually we put our heads together and decided to start our own local branch of this Cartoon Fantasy Organization. We'd meet once a month in whatever community room we could reserve, we'd screen whatever anime we could find, and we'd generally nerd out. That was our plan and we're still kind of following that plan, some of us.

C/FO Atlanta newsletter 1,3,4,5 (#2 is lost)

For us in Atlanta, those two or three years of C/FO activity were busy times. We had a meeting once a month, we went to every comic con, Trek Fest, and fantasy fair that would let us in the door, and we were constantly meeting at somebody's house to daisy-chain VHS decks and copy Vampire Hunter D or Project A-Ko or some other future Blu-Ray release over and over again into the wee hours, at which point we'd adjourn to Denny's for bad coffee and heartburn.

April 1987, for instance: we watched Time Stranger in somebody’s apartment, we’re going to defy the Omni Hotel’s ban on in-room VCRs, here's some fan art, who wants a button.

Screening anime at meetings meant borrowing the library's Media Cart - a big metal wheeled cart containing a 27" CRT TV and, if we were lucky, a top-loading VHS deck. Eventually we began bringing in our own TVs and VHS decks, and we began splitting the TV signal to secondary monitors and running the audio out to a boom box or somebody's stereo. It got kind of complicated up in there.

C/FO Atlanta newsletter #6-8

March 1987's news featuring Harlock, Gundam, Urusei Yatsura, Dirty Pair. Sounds like my Twitter feed. It only took us eight years to get that proposed anime con off the ground!

C/FO Atlanta newsletter 9-12

Our club screened pretty much whatever turned up that month; a lot of members were swapping VHS with people all over the country and the world, and usually there would be two or three decks in the back of the room copying something for somebody. I'd come home from anime club meetings with a stack of blank tapes that needed Dancougar or Dirty Pair or Yamato copied onto them. The soft whir of the Toshiba M-7850 was always in the background of my life at that time.

tips for home tapers from July 1988

The monthly newsletter we published was a lot of work, but it had benefits. Most importantly, the newsletter told the members where and when our next meeting was. C/FO Atlanta met in a wide variety of locations, including private homes from Smyrna to Stone Mountain, libraries in Little Five Points and Virginia-Highlands, and even a few community rooms located, for some reason, in banks along the Buford Highway corridor, one of which is now a restaurant called “Shaking Crawfish.”

C/FO newsletter volume 2 #1-3

Assembled at first using a law firm’s then state of the art word processing software and laser printers, we later downgraded to a dot-matrix printer, markers, glue stick, and scissors. Producing the C/FO Atlanta newsletter was a crash course in graphic design and guerrilla publishing. Print runs happened wherever and whenever we could get access to somebody’s copier, and this usually meant abusing the hospitality of whoever in the club worked somewhere with a photocopier. But the newsletter was all for a good cause, documenting what the club had been up to for posterity (that’s us now) and cluing members into what was happening in the world of anime. Sometimes the news was even accurate!

your "trusted" source for anime "news"

You might even have been lucky enough to live in a town with enough of a Japanese community to support retailers that sold imported Japanese home goods, Japanese groceries, and Japanese media like magazines, books, comics, and videos. Atlanta was one of those towns, and in our part of town Satsumaya Oriental Grocery was our headquarters for Pocky, Zeta Gundam coffee candy, and rental tapes featuring Dragonball, whatever Sentai show was on the air that season (Choushinsei Flashman), Dragonar-1, Maison Ikkoku, Saint Seiya, Metaldar, City Hunter, and Red Photon Zillion, which seemed to resemble a game some members were playing on their new Sega Master Systems.

Satsumaya rental VHS

Occasionally we'd pack up our VCRs and get a hotel room at one of Atlanta’s fantasy or SF conventions like Dixie-Trek or the Atlanta Fantasy Fair, and we'd screen anime on the TV in our hotel room for our friends and whoever happened to wander in for free snacks.

Thanks to our tapes and the hunger of convention organizers for programming, by 1988 we were running the anime room at Atlanta's largest fantasy convention, the Atlanta Fantasy Fair. Most of what we screened was in Japanese without benefit of subtitles, with a smattering of off-air English dubs and a little fan subbing taking up the slack.

How many people were awake on Sunday for Cyborg 009 Legend Of The Super Galaxy? I don’t know. I can confirm that we had a full house for the Fist Of The North Star movie and Project A-Ko. That’s a room full of non-Japanese speakers watching entire films entirely in Japanese, a testament to the storytelling power of the medium.

C/FO Atlanta newsletter vol. 2 #4-7

C/FO Atlanta newsletter vol. 2 #8-11 (end)

big news for Dec. 1988

Eventually the C/FO would skid to a halt. Leadership devolved to the San Antonio club, which basically decided to game the system, set the national org up to fail, and then act surprised when it failed. Our Atlanta club let inertia decide for us; the national C/FO left us behind in its headlong rush towards oblivion and we decided our new name was going to be the "Animated Film Association" and our newsletter was going to be called “Anime-X”.

the three issues of "Anime X". Look at that great Josh Timbrook Akira cover!

The club kept going under this name for a few months, but after a few years the never-ending cycle of monthly meetings and monthly newsletters and manhandling televisions across town so a room full of slack-jawed strangers can stare at Akira proved too much for me and in early 1989 the club petered out. Was this the end of Atlanta’s anime club scene?

meet the new club, different from the old club

Absolutely not. After an eight months cooling-off period, Lloyd Carter and myself started a new anime club. This new club didn't have a newsletter, wasn't part of a larger club, and wasted no time on bylaws or elections. “Why waste a great name?” we figured, and so we dubbed the new club "Anime-X." This group lasted all the way until the early 2000s, leading to both the print "Let's Anime" and Anime Weekend Atlanta. So we must have been doing something right. More about Anime X later. In the meantime, why not haul a CRT television, a top-loading VCR, and some VHS fansubs to your local community center and start your own anime club? Tell ‘em Dave sent you!


-Dave Merrill, with special thanks to Scott Weikert, Jim Reddy, Shaun Camp, Newton Ewell, Ted Delorme, and a host of C/FO Atlanta members. You know who you are.

we'll let this pencilled-in editorial comment have the last word

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