I don't think I've come up with much club news this month, aside from what I already rambled on the mailing list about getting your pre-registrations for A-kon in....3 months to go! If you haven't already signed on the Anime Heretics mailing list, send a message to majordomo@lists.io.com with a message stating:

subscribe ah-l

...and send it off! You'll get a confirmation e-mail to reply to, and you're all set.

Well, that's about all I have to say this month....enjoy the articles!

A Look Back at Fifteen Years of Madness and Adventure

by Scott Frazier

"Two roads diverged in a wood, I took the one less traveled by, and that made all the difference." -- Frost

Last month, Scott revealed a bit of his history, how he got into anime, and his decision to somehow enter the industry. And now, the continuation....

The Deciding Factor

One night John received a LaserDisc of the second Urusei Yatsura movie: Beautiful Dreamer. It was this film that decided me on a career in anime. I thought that anywhere where someone could be allowed to produce such a masterpiece of weirdness must be the place for me. It was the most interesting animation I had ever seen! I figured the director, Mamoru Oshii, must be a mad genius. (He is.) To this day it remains one of my favorite anime films of all time. Anybody who has an interest in anime should see it.

I wanted desperately to work on something like that. I knew that I would find my voice through anime and I would be able to communicate what I really wanted to through it. (What, exactly, I want to communicate remains a mystery to me even now.)

A Real Trip

I heard about the Japanimation ’86 tour, a group of anime fans that was going to Japan for two weeks in August of 1986, and figured that I could use this as a chance to see what Japan was really like (and to add to my ever-growing anime collection). I finally made that first trip across the Pacific (11 hours --it seemed like it took forever) and got my first look at (and smell of) the Land of the Rising Sun, or to me, Anime Nirvana.

Culture shock exploded in my face. Everything was wrong! Hey, I can’t read any of the signs! Whoa, the food is all funny! Everybody is driving on the wrong side of the road! (At least there was a Wendy’s near the hotel so I didn’t have to go into food shock too badly.)

On the way in to the city we looked out the windows of the bus and tried to find shops and logos we recognized. -- Hey, look! They have 7-11s! -- It was just such an overwhelmingly alien experience that we might as well have gone off to a different planet.

The night we arrived, I went out and wandered the streets around Hamamatsucho station for an hour or so to try to get over the shock a bit. (Keep in mind that I had never been to a city bigger than Denver by myself.) I bought a can of melon soda at a convenience store and since I didn’t understand when the clerk told me what the total was I handed him a 10,000 yen note -- the equivalent of handing a 7-11 clerk a $100 for a can of Pepsi in the US. I saw two girls in kimono and a drunken businessman fall off a bicycle.

We visited Tokyo Movie Shinsha (TMS), Toei Doga, Production Wave (now defunct), Kaname Pro (now defunct) and the offices of Animage magazine where we got to meet Shinji Kawamori, the director of the Macross movie and mecha designer extraorinare.

The studios were very surprising to me. I remember thinking there must be no such thing as a claustrophobic animator because they had stuff filling every available space in already tiny workspaces. (Now I look at Toei and TMS and think how they are so big and empty in comparison to most studios.) It was very different that what I expected and I was initially put off. How could I possibly move to and work in such a place?

The heat and humidity of Japan in August was absolutely incredible! Thankfully there were drink vending machines every ten meters or I would have melted down completely.

We saw a bunch of temples and did a lot of shopping, mostly for anime stuff. A small group of us met up with a friend from Denver who was living in Tokyo (Chiba actually), Ken McDonald, and he showed us around the various anime and manga shops and we went back to his apartment and looked at some shows right off the air. (It may seem silly but it was a thrill for us.)

After Tokyo, we visited Hakone (the beautiful hot-springs resort), Kyoto, then Osaka. (I was so fixated on anime that I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to Kyoto and Hakone. I’ve had the chance to go back to both and experience them for their beauty and I feel very lucky that I got a second chance for both of them.) We were in Osaka for Daicon V, the largest Japanese science fiction/anime/etc. convention at the time.

At Daicon we were terribly unimpressed with the opening animation, expecting something to top the wonderful animation from Daicon III and IV, which was produced by the then-amateurs who would become GAINAX.

Yoshitaka Amano (the illustrator and designer of characters from Vampire Hunter D and others) was there and we forced our way in to talk to him after his panel. (Hey, we’re foreigners—let us in!) He was very warm and interesting and we found that he had a great interest in American comic books. His favorite animation? 101 Dalmatians.

I saw Mamoru Oshii there and although I wanted to talk to him and get him to sign my Angel’s Egg book ( I had Amano’s signature in it.) I just didn’t know what to say. I had to wait 10 more years for the chance but then I got to work with him. It was worth it. (I still don’t have his signature in that book though)

A New Hope

When I got back home, the idea about moving to Japan had intensified. Even though it was a really weird experience for me and I had no idea if I could actually live there, I began trying to find a way to go over. The first thing I looked at were the animation schools but there was no way I could attend without first understanding at least some Japanese. In the November 1986 issue of Animage there was an ad for the International Animation Institute (Kokusai Animation Kenyuujyo) and at the very bottom, in small type, was:

Teach Japanese which is necessary to the foreign students.

I didn’t know exactly what that meant but I figured that it was my chance! (I figured that the school must have language training.) I sent a letter to their office requesting more information but didn’t get a reply so a Japanese friend requested a catalogue, translated parts and sent it to me. I had to do four small illustrations (none of which were any good) and on February 6, 1987 sent it off to them. I sent off the application and the requested fee ($211.74 = 30,000 yen) and waited very impatiently. I had no idea what to expect. I figured that there must be some foreigners there because of the ad but I had no idea how big the school was and how many people attended every year.

(to be continued....)

We Need New Old Fans (or is That Old New Fans?)

by Throkda Jones

As some of you may know, I was in Pennsylvania this last week, meeting my wife's relatives for the first time. It was kind of awkward for me, since my two main interests are anime and role-playing games, which aren't easy to bring up in conversation when you don't know anything about the other person. (Cons, of course, are the exception, when it's pretty much a given that the other person has some interest in it, or else why are they there?) Somehow or another, though, I managed to mention my interest without having to go through the "You're almost 30 and you still watch cartoons?" conversation. As it turned out, there were two people there who had an interest in our hobby. The problem, however, was that one person had only seen hentai, and the other, while having seen a bit more, had a collection consisting primarily of Dragonball Z, Pokemon, Sailor Moon, and others that you can tape off the Cartoon Network.

Now, I'm not trying to sound elitist, or to bash these shows, and should either of these two people happen to read this newsletter, I'm not trying to bash them, either. The only reason this was a problem for me was that I mostly don't watch the Americanized shows on TV (mainly because I haven't had cable for 2 years :) So while they were anime fans, we still didn't really have any common ground. I could talk about Sailor Moon as far as the "R" season, and I'd seen the first 3 movies fansubbed, but most of my experience there was the DiC dub job. (And just to stir a few people up, I will say right now that the dub was not a bad job -- if you were either of the market the show is meant for -- 4 to 12 year old girls -- or hadn't seen the Japanese version, and even then, you're just missing a few scenes that weren't terribly critical to the general characters. Understand that my only prior experience with this show before they started releasing the dub here was one showing of episode 1, in raw Japanese, with no subtitles, no synopsis, nothing. How many of the bashers can say that? :)

Anyway, the problem came down to one of them talking about how he'd seen a bunch of anime, and it was all hentai, and so that's what he thought it was all about -- not like I can come back with "So what, I've got live-action Japanese smut, what's your point?" As for the other, I just don't think he'd been exposed to much beyond what's on TV or the local Blockbuster.

We've all met fans like this, ones who think the cartoons are cool, but haven't been immersed in the subculture that is anime fandom yet. And let's face it, they're hard to talk to if you've been in the hobby a while, and have seen a lot of stuff. After all, they only have a few shows they can talk about, and they're all excited about them, whereas to you, those shows may be old news, or kid stuff, or whatever.

Maybe the problem lies with us older fans. We've been in the hobby a while, we remember when you couldn't go to Blockbuster and rent anime, when it didn't exist on TV, unless you counted Speed Racer, Robotech, Star Blazers, or G-Force. We remember a time before the World Wide Web, when you had to use Archie and FTP from a command line to hunt down a one-paragraph synopsis to describe an entire half hour or longer show. Maybe we've just been watching so much fan-subbed, hard-to-get anime for so long, that now there's a commercial market, we feel out-of-the loop, cheated in some way, like it's no longer a special thing to be able to watch anime. Are we just becoming elitists, shunning newcomers, acting like there's some great secret to why we love anime that they're not worthy to know? I've seen some act that way, just rolling their eyes and finding somewhere else to be when someone new to the hobby starts talking to them.

Shame on you! Shame on all of us who aren't willing to tolerate someone who acts just like we did when we were new. Do you remember that? Do you remember just after you saw your first anime, when you thought you had just found the greatest thing ever, and you had to talk about it? Remember finding an anime club when they weren't very prevalent, and talking about something that brought you joy? Remember when they rolled their eyes (usually when you mentioned you'd seen "Akira"), said something along the lines of "Uh-huh," and then walked away, making you feel like you weren't worth their time?

It's time to break that cycle! Dig out the very best stuff in your collection! Show these new people what makes anime special to you. Help them to learn more about our hobby, and encourage them to share it with others. Let's face it, we made anime go mainstream. We were the market that companies saw when they decided to start bringing more shows over here. They may not have decided to market specifically to us, but it's because we showed such an interest, that executives thought maybe they could turn a profit with this stuff to the population at large. Maybe we're not satisfied with the job they're doing, but if we can't make the companies defy censorship, and political pressures, maybe we should teach the people who have been exposed to anime just what makes this hobby so special.

It's not the animation. It's not the music, or the voice acting, or the plots, or anything having to do with the anime at all. Think back, back to when you were new. The anime was what was special in the beginning, but if that was all we had, we'd likely have gotten bored with it sooner or later, if we hadn't met that first person, that first friend, who understood. What was special in the beginning, when many of us got in, was having friends who were interested in the same thing you were, who didn't make fun of you for being a computer geek, or watching cartoons, or anything having to do with who we were, because many of us old-schoolers were geeks, social outcasts growing up. Thanks to anime, many of us found a place where we belonged. It was that camraderie that made us stay, not the anime.

Find a newbie, make a friend. Let's keep making our subculture bigger. We're not special because we watch anime. We're special because we share it.

A Splash of Something Different

Word Search created by Throkda Jones the hard way - with graph paper

I thought it might be kind of neat to do a puzzle section in our newsletter, and due to my lack of ability in coming up with good crossword clues (and no chance in hell of coming up with a unique puzzle), I thought I'd go the simple route and do a word search. The subject for this first month is none other than our favorite aquatranssexual, Ranma! Good luck!

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WORD LIST

AILUROPHOBIA	CURSE	HIROSHI	MAGIC MIRROR	PHOENIX	SHIRATORI
AKANE	DAISUKE	HONOR	MALLET	PIG	SOUN
AMAGURIKEN	DIRECTIONS	JAPAN	MARTIAL ARTS	PLUM	SPATULA
AMAZON	DOJO	JOKETSUZOKU	MIKADO	QINGHAI	SPRING
ANYTHING-GOES	DOWRY	JUSENKYO	MINT	RANKO	TARO
AZUSA	DUCK	KASUMI	MOUSSE	RANMA	TATEWAKI
BAKA	FIANCE	KAWAIIKUNE	MU-MU-CHAN	REVENGE	TENDO
BAYANKALA	FURINKAN	KEN	MUSK	RIBBON	TOFU
BET	GENMA	KENDO	NABIKI	RYOGA	TOKYO
BOKKEN	GIRL	KODACHI	NEKOHANTEN	SAFFRON	TSUBASA
CAT	GOLDEN PAIR	KOI	NERIMA	SANZENIN	UCCHAN'S
CAT-FIST	GUIDE	KONATSU	NODOKA	SAOTOME	UKYO
CHARLOTTE	HAPPOSAI	KUNO	OKONOMIYAKI	SASUKE	WATER
CHIITSUON	HERB	KUONJI	PANDA	SAYURI	YATAI
CHINA	HIBIKI	LIME	P-CHAN	SHAMPOO	YUKA
COLOGNE	HINAKO	LOVE