Drew is back with another Free Talk segment here at Akihabara Renditions! What follows is a tale of 1990s Japanese Animation fandom, international piracy, and goblins.
Wait. What?
Ok, Fine, no goblins! It’s more of Drew cleaning junk out of his house. In this piece, we’re going to talk about a staple of the anime fan scene (especially the convention scene) in the mid to late 1990s and early 2000s: Son May and Ever Anime, finest purveyors of bootleg anime CDs.
I have mentioned in various Internet communities about Operation: Get Your Shit Out Of My House – the appearance of stuff, presented by my parents at holidays or other family gatherings that for one reason or another – college living, pre-home-ownership transient lifestyles, etc, stuck around at their house and they are ready for it to be gone. ‘Stuff’ is the best way to describe it. Once it was model kits (finished and unfinished), another time, it was computer stuff like floppy disks (detailed in another Free Talk). This time it was comic books.
I was really into comics in the early 1990s and my comic book fandom was, ultimately, what got me into anime. But as allowances are limited, I’d quit American superhero comics by the mid-90s to put that thin-stack of cash towards cartoons. But going through the comics in those long boxes was a trip down memory lane of not just a piece of my childhood (and getting everything priced to sell) but a time capsule of anime fandom more than I could ever imagine.
When I first decided that I was going to start running panels at anime conventions about ten years ago, I kicked around all sorts of ideas of what to talk about. Early on in my fandom, even longer before I went to anime conventions, Dragonball fansites often discussed the trivia related to Toriyama Akira’s puns when it came to naming characters in his epic. As I started watching more anime and reading more manga, I started noticing more and more of these puns and I thought this would be a fun convention topic to present. But when I started with even the most rough draft of this, I found this was a real short topic indeed and wouldn’t fit a convention format very well. Which means it’s perfect for Free Talk here at Akihabara Renditions.
Way back in the early days of Akihabara Renditions, I started a thematic piece I called the “State Of Classic Anime in North America”. As my own personal fandom tastes shifted from the shiny and new titles, I started digging deeper into the “classics” and time periods of Japanese animation that most interested me. But since I did a bunch of arm chair industry analysis, I figured an annual round up of titles and their releases was good consistent content that I could work on. Which leads us to the first, and until recently only, State of Classic Anime in North America. Now, I think it’s time for this to make a comeback and be featured in a Free Talk segment.
Drew here with another Free Talk on Akihabara Renditions! I joke that my parent’s had this plan for their retirement – Operation: Get Your Shit Out Of My House. Phases of this operation are selecting some holiday or family gathering and when they show up, inform my wife and I that they have stuff for us (usually to my wife’s chagrin). This is the story of one of the results of those phases: part of the delivery was old floppy disks I had from my early teenage years up until I left for college, which was nearly all years of heavy anime fandom. I figured this would be a good Free Talk article to both look at how Internet access and anime fandom not only correlated but how they’ve changed over this time period.
Hey everyone, Drew here with a Free Talk segment at Akihabara Renditions; the free talk articles are going to be more traditional (text-image-video-based) blog articles that cover a wide range of topics that won’t make good podcast discussion or convention panel topics.
I recently went on a nostalgia bend and uncovered one of my old anime CDs – a Rurouni Kenshin Best Themes collection – and popped it in the car’s CD player. It reminded me of just how much I loved all of the theme songs throughout the run of the TV series and the contrast presented comparing the theme songs to the actual soundtrack of the show. Since I can talk just about anything Kenshin, I really wanted to examine these songs and their relation to a cartoon I love so much.
Akihabara Renditions 