My Interest In Anime...
After a while, I started to lose interest in comic books altogether. I liked certain comic book characters, but, I always seemed to be drawn to series that no one else liked. I struggled to find a series that would hang around long enough to really satisfy me, but, in the end, it was a losing proposition. Finally, when anime in the form we all know and love, exploded onto the scene, I was hooked.
My interest in anime started long before I knew what anime was -- with TV shows like Marine Boy, Speed Racer, Battle of the Planets and Starblazers. All of the aforementioned series used to be re-run on local TV stations for many years while I was in my formative years. They were unlike any of the other cartoons on TV at the time, but, at the time, I didn't know why they were different. Actually, my grandmother was particularly fond of Marine Boy. She would babysit my younger brother and they would watch Marine Boy together. For years afterwards, my grandmother would refer the my younger brother as Cli Cli.
Years before any of the major anime distribution companies even existed, I started collecting anime in the late-80's. There were a handful of interesting things available at the time. As it happened, the first anime titles that I collected were Warriors of the Wind and Captain Future (I'll have more to say on Captain Future later). Warriors of the Wind (aka Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind) had a rather cryptic cover box -- showing a flying horse, people with light sabers and a hooded Dr. Doom-looking character -- none of which actually appear in the movie. In addition, about 22 minutes were removed from the source material. A lot of early anime suffered from atrocious editing, poor dubbing and being re-written for the under-12 demographic. Such was the case with Warriors of the Wind. Even so, the remaining material still managed to shine, despite being hacked to pieces and mangled.
I discovered Captain Future when video rental stores were all the rage. Back in the day, a producer wanted to syndicate the Captain Future series for the U.S. market and had a handful of episodes dubbed into English to aid as a marketing tool, but, the project never materialized. VHS tapes of the handful of dubbed episodes were produced and found their way into the burgeoning video rental market. And, I stumbled upon then in a video rental store. Captain Future was actually pretty good. There is a German release, but, Captain Future is such an obscure title, that I wouldn't expect a U.S. release anytime soon.
In the mid-to-late-80's, anime in the form that we all know and love, had not yet established itself. However, one of the early and controversial anime success stories was Robotech...
According to the Robotech FAQ (v0.9) part of the Robotech Compendium:
In late 1982, Tatsunoko Productions' SUPER DIMENSION FORTRESS MACROSS premiered on Japanese airwaves. Originally intended to be a comedy, it went on to become one of the most popular shows ever in the giant robot (a.k.a. mecha) genre, right next to MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM. After MACROSS ended in 1983, it was followed in the same time-slot by Tokyo Movie Shinsha's SUPER DIMENSION CENTURY ORGUSS. ORGUSS shared some creative staff with MACROSS (thus the similarities in character designs and mecha), and there were a couple throw-away in-jokes in the first few episodes, but otherwise there was no relation between the shows. Meanwhile, an obscure mecha show called GENESIS CLIMBER MOSPEADA came and went...Robotech was actually available on video years ahead of most other anime titles. But, at that time, anime was considered more a medium that should be packaged exclusively for children. In addition, there were distribution problems with the early Robotech releases. A number of distributors entered the fray, but, most of them never made it into the nationwide video chains until years later, when distributors of other titles had paved the way. In the end, there were a number of different video releases of Robotech, but, after the dust settled in the early-90's, FHE (Family Home Entertainment) was the only Robotech distributor left standing. For those of you who don't know the infamous FHE, consider Defenders of the Vortex. It took me years to realize that this title was actually the Cyborg 009 movie (circa 1980) with about 40 minutes removed. FHE was definitely not a fan-favorite distributor, but, eventually, once they realized that there was real money to be made in anime, they did release a fairly decent version of Robotech.
Sometime around mid- to late 1984, the rights to the MACROSS series were acquired by an American company, Harmony Gold. Originally, MACROSS was slated to be translated rather faithfully, and a TV-movie compilation of the first three episodes had been broadcast. However, the "golden number" for television syndication is 65 episodes (13 weeks of daily weekday episodes), and MACROSS only had 36 episodes.
Carl Macek, a producer for Harmony Gold, came up with an idea which to this day he insists was brilliant, although many purists might disagree. Macek bought the American broadcast rights to SOUTHERN CROSS and MOSPEADA, and rewrote the plots of the three series to get a more-or-less coherent plotline. The "chapters" in this generation-spanning story were now known as "The Macross Saga" (MACROSS), "The Robotech Masters" (SOUTHERN CROSS), and "The New Generation" (MOSPEADA)...
With the addition of a "bridging" episode between "Macross Saga" and "Masters" (created entirely from re-used footage), the episode count was brought up to 85 episodes. ...And so, ROBOTECH premiered in October 1985 on American airwaves. The rest is animation history.
Anime, in the form we all know and love, didn't really begin to appear until the early 90's. The first uncut, unedited, subtitled-only anime that came home with me was Project A-ko. Project A-ko was just so different from anything that I'd ever seen before. There are girls, weapons, senseless destruction, an alien invasion and plenty of fan service. Needless to say, I was hooked. Soon afterwards Dominion Tank Police and Bubblegum Crisis came home with me. At the time, anime was packaged in a one-episode per volume format and a typical price would be between $35 and $45.
Bubblegum Crisis was really a tough call at the time. The first volume contained less than an hour of content and was initially priced at $45. I had to let that title sit on the store shelf for quite a while before I could bring myself to spend that kind of cash for one "cartoon". At the time, I was making $3.35 an hour working a part-time job and $45 (or rather $60 with the combined effects of sales and wage taxes) represented about 18 hours of work or nearly all of my take-home pay. Anime was definitely not a hobby for fans on a budget. As it happens, many of the earliest offerings to make it to video in the early-90's were, in my humble opinion, actually very good.
By the mid-to-late-90's, anime as we know and love it was fairly well established. Anime was usually available in subtitled-only format, but, once distributors like Streamline and Manga Entertainment began to release anime in dubbed-only format, other distributors began to take notice. Fairly soon, anime fans had to choose whether or not they wanted to read their anime. Since VHS does not support multiple languages, anime fans had to decide in advance whether to buy the dubbed version or pay a bit more for the subtitled version.
By the way, for those of you who are wondering why subtitled anime on VHS was always more expensive then dubbed anime on VHS, here's the answer... It costs distributors more to produce dubbed anime than subtitled anime. But, distributors can sell more dubbed anime than subtitled anime. It is what it is -- many anime fans prefer not to read their anime. So, distributors shift the extra cost of dubbing to the subtitled version. There have been a number of insensitive comments from distributors over the years regarding "anime purists" that have reinforced this logic.
Early in my development, anime was scarce, so, if I wanted my anime fix, I had to take whatever was available. Sometimes I would discover something new and wonderful and sometimes I would discover something not so wonderful. There was no resource to turn to to discover what was good and what was not so good. You just had to pick something up on blind faith. After a while, I developed a feel for what I was likely to like and what I was likely to not like. As it happens, I'm not a big fan of the giant robot genre, but, there are exceptions, of course. Likewise, I'm not a big fan of the sword and sorcery genre, but, of course, here too, there are exceptions.
All this would change as the turn of the century approached. At the time, anime was available on your choice of Laser Disc or VHS. I wanted a Laser Disc player, but, at $500+, it was going to be out of my reach for a while. Even so, I picked up a handful of discs. For those of you who don't know, Laser Discs look like giant CDs and could hold one hour of content on each side. So, for a typical two-hour movie, you would have to flip the disc over half way through the movie. Or, if you had a really long movie, like Star Wars, you would have two discs.Then, one day, there was a secret meeting at the video store where I worked. Senior members of the corporate staff from the company headquarters met with store managers and staff to discuss a new technology that was coming -- DVD. It was expected that Laser Disc sales would be impacted by this new technology. At the time, their main concerns were how DVDs would be packaged, priced and how to limit losses due to theft. No one had any idea how quickly Laser Discs would become extinct once DVD took hold.
Once the obvious benefits of DVD were revealed, one by one, anime distributors began to announce that they were switching to DVD-only releases. I was on the fence for a while, but, once AnimEigo had made the decision to go DVD-only, that inspired me to take the plunge. I haven't looked back since. By the way, I still have my Tenchi Muyo laser discs. I got some frames that were designed for record albums and the laser discs fit just fine.
