Anime Blog #4: How I Got into Anime (Part 4)

In the fourth segment of my retrospective on anime, I will be discussing my gradual hook into anime from 1997 and beyond.  For many of you, this can be quite relatable, as most – if not all of us – was there when the big anime boom happened.

Early on in 1997, the Sci-Fi channel was the main TV hub to get a basic fix on mainstream anime movies and the like.  Meanwhile, syndicated shows and even some of the FOX Saturday morning shows were becoming hit-or-miss.  In spite of this, several distribution companies were steadily releasing official releases of decent contemporary anime to the then-niche US market.  Among these companies, ADV, US Manga Corps, Manga Entertainment, Viz, Bandai, and AnimEigo stood out the most, releasing a handful of great stuff on VHS at the time.

My dad was not a heavy buyer of anime, especially considering they were being sold at nearly $25-30 a pop.  But we did however manage to collect Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory after seeing a compelling TV ad for it on the Sci-Fi channel one day.  Following this, we also binged on Record of Lodoss War, Ranma ½, the Street Fighter 2 animated movie (which was a sigh of relief after a sour reception of the live action movie) and the Fatal Fury anime collection, just to name a few.

Sometime in the spring of 1997, something I was never expecting was surfacing on Cartoon Network—something of awesome, exciting, nostalgic proportions that I wasn’t expecting to happen for another 3 years at least.  At 4PM on a Monday morning, I managed to see Thundercats.  Yes, Thundercats.  A runaway hit from the 80s was somehow back on cable airwaves on this edgy programming block called “Toonami”, whose slogan was “bringing us a better cartoon show”.  But that’s not all… Voltron followed immediately afterward. The rest of the programming block was basically throwback action cartoons from the 60s-70s as well as the still-new “Real Adventures of Johnny Quest”, which I didn’t care too much about.

Along with the rise of Toonami also came the advent of the internet, which I would soon be exposed to in the privacy of my own home.  I would never forget that Friday when we got a Pentium processor Compaq computer with 56k wired connection, which by today’s standards is pretty mud.  But for the time, this was a big deal for me.  I could go to America Online (AOL) and get a chance to chat with random people over the internet about shared interests.  It was a dream come true.  When I checked a forum that discussed Toonami, there were requests everywhere about getting several anime on the Toonami block, with Ronin Warriors, Sailor Moon, and DBZ being the easiest ones to gain traffic.

The following year, Toonami would expand its lineup and replace Thundercats with Sailor Moon, and in addition, add Robotech and Dragonball Z to the roster, effectively removing the “roulette” of old cartoon shorts.  Toonami would then experiment with exclusive premieres, TV movies, and marathons such as the Sailor Moon “Lost Episodes” marathon (which was essentially the remaining episodes of Sailor Moon R that never aired in its initial 65-episode run stateside)  Around this time, Cowboy Bebop was a hot topic in Japan, and would go on to be one of the most successful and critically acclaimed anime when it became available stateside.

 

But the real kicker for the anime boom started in the fall of 1999, which many declare was when the programming block hit its peak in popularity, surpassing even Monday Night Raw at its best in the Attitude Era years.  In September of 1999, “The Real Adventures of Johnny Quest” would be replaced by none other than Ronin Warriors, thus sealing the deal that anime awareness was at an all-time high with the incredible lineup that was Ronin Warriors, Sailor Moon, Robotech, and Dragonball Z.  In addition, the DVD market was also catching on in the anime industry, as many companies were announcing their VHS lineup to make their move to DVD the following year.  Thus, the anime revolution in the US was born.  Everyone wanted to buy anime on DVD.

Soonafter, Toonami was a big deal everyday at my neighborhood.  Some of my friends would always gather in one house to watch this lineup after school while finishing whatever homework we had to do at the time, and I would always talk about it with close friends I made at school in certain classes and at lunch.  Incidentally, a local comic store –then-called Excalibur Comics – was also stockpiling with anime fansubs.  And get this… they were actually for rent.  Back then I didn’t know any better, but it was illegal to rent fansubs.  However the owner kept this on the down-low and expected us to do the same.  This was how I was able to sink in as much anime content as possible when the internet and stores such as Best Buy and Media Play were not enough.  Granted, some tapes were in poorer quality than others, but for the most part, they were definitely worth watching.  Fushigi Yuugi. Martian Successor Nadesico. Akazuzin Cha Cha. Maison Ikkoku. Urusei Yatsura. The remaining seasons of Sailor Moon. Dragon Half. Evangelion. Gundam F91. Rurouni Kenshin.  And a shitload of others I couldn’t think of.  For six months straight, 20% of my allowance (and later my work pay) would go into fansubs.

That would all change sometime at the end of the spring of 2000, when my dad invested in getting not one, but two DVD players… which at the time was quite the feat.  Around this time, the market for the DVD market was as ripe as could be, as the box-office success of “The Matrix” spearheaded interest in DVD to the masses and no longer became a niche format for the wealthy, especially in Japan, where it never caught on until the release of the Playstation 2.  Among the first DVDs we purchased, we got The Matrix, The Mummy, Enter the Dragon, Groundhog Day, Home Alone, Terminator 2, and the first anime I purchased on my first paycheck was none other than Vampire Hunter (Night Warriors): Darkstalkers’ Revenge, which was a hot buy at the time. Having recently rented this anime at Blockbuster, I was blown away by the picture clarity and then-earth-shattering sound quality of Dolby Digital 5.1 goodness, all running on a 52-inch flat screen TV with component video.  It was truly an experience I would never forget, especially considering this is an adaptation on one of my favorite video games OF ALL TIME.  It was then that I knew… the anime DVD revolution was here.  And it was gonna change the world.

Later that year and through 2002, a major shitload of anime started exploding onto the DVD market one after another.  Yeah, you had your typical moneymaking crack that was Dragonball Z on DVD by Funimation, but the real variety at the time was with ADV, Viz, and Bandai. I swear to God, they were chuckin’ these DVDs out like machineguns, and boy, were fans ecstatic. Ranma ½. Lodoss.  Evangelion. Golden Boy. Gundam Wing. Agent Aika. Sailor Moon S.  Dagger of Kamui. Patlabor. Fist of the North Star.  You name it, you were likely gonna find them at Media Play, and word of mouth was a strong driving force to buy them.  In addition to Animerica, I also began to subscribe to Newtype Magazine for the most up-to-date in the anime industry around 2002, and it did not disappoint. Finally, there was Anime Network, a premium cable channel which featured on-demand anime (with available licensing limitations, of course, but it was still something).

But amidst all of this going on, nothing – and I mean nothing – prepared me for what was actually happening in the spring of 2002.  After years and years of hard-fought online petitioning, my most-wanted anime finally got the long-overdue push to DVD.  After 2 years of airing on Toonami, Ronin Warriors finally made it to DVD on April 22, 2002.  And ever since that announcement, I bombarded Media Play on the day each volume came out to a point where I was recognized as the “Ronin Basehead” by peers.  Never before have I ever been so ecstatic about picking up an entire series on DVD at full price (though buying the ultimate edition of the Escaflowne movie and the Japanese Sailor Moon boxsets come pretty damn close).  But I damn sure wasn’t expecting a DVD release of all three OVA series which never made it stateside.  It was at this point where I had all respect for Bandai as a media distribution company more than any other.  They went the extra mile just for fans like me, and ADV would soon do the same for fans of Evangelion by bringing out a remastered package of the original TV series, dubbing it the Platinum Edition.

Later that year, for the first time ever, ADV would release the first two seasons of Sailor Moon in its original Japanese version uncut and unedited… but with mixed fanfare.  While it was refreshing to see the series as originally intended without all the nonsensical censorship, the quality in which this series came out left a lot to be desired.  The most glaring of these flaws were the (extremely) poor audio mastering, as if they were taken from a worn VHS tape.  And if that wasn’t enough insult to injury, the second season omitted episode 67, though the packaging suggests the episode is in there! WTF?  Granted, it was a filler episode and removed itself from the plot, but still… WTF?  At any rate, moonie fans still bought it to support the cause in the hopes ADV would bring out a remastered edition much later.  But unfortunately for anime fans, these times of DVD mania wouldn’t last for very long, and many disappointments would be foreshadowed...

In part 5 of my anime retrospective, I will discuss the recent to current state of the anime DVD industry stateside and how anime still holds my interest in these modern times.