Damn Write! Being an anime fan in 1998

Turning back the clock to the late 1990’s as an anime otaku.

Hope everyone is enjoying the new fresh May weather (Not, I did not say Mayweather… that’s a whole different topic). Our neighbors celebrated the new months by clearing out some pine trees on his property. Nice to see an actual competent logging crew instead of those mental deficient yahoos with chainsaws you see on Ax Men.

Anyway I was sitting here catching up on some anime that I had fallen behind on, Sailor Moon Crystal, Heaven’s Lost Property, and The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan, are flying on my radar right now, along with the Cartoon Network airings of One Piece (I know, severely behind but meh). But clunking down at a computer and watching any anime series you want, even legally on Funimation’s site or Crunchyroll, is far and away a whole different picture that when I started as an anime fan back in 1998. Now of course, I don’t go back to the “raw VHS tapes from Japanese pen pals” days like a few of my friends do, but still the state of anime in the United States has come a long way in 20 years. So for the benefit of any of you youngins reading this, or any old time otaku who want to reminisce, here is what it was like being an otaku (in Maine) in 1998.

Starting off we have pretty much what was considered to be the top level for where an anime cold go in the 1990’s and that was to TV. At this point in time it was still perfectly normal to take a Japanese show and hack the crap out of it to market towards kids. Cartoon Network had just rolled out Toonami with Voltron, Robotech, and Sailor Moon had just started (The series that made me an otaku). Dragonball Z and the late night anime were still a few months off.  If you had the Sci-fi Channel or International Channel (I didn’t) you were lucky enough to see some better dubbed (and maybe some subbed)  anime offerings on occasion. Pokemon and Digimon hadn’t arrived yet so Fox and WB hadn’t started airing anything anime at that point. You also had the stuff that was being put on syndication like Sailor Moon had years before, often at the butt crack of dawn on a station that you never watched otherwise.

Home media wise you had VHS. Laserdisc had fallen out of favor and while there was some DVD, it wasn’t the big collections you have no. It was the same two or three episodes you could get on VHS, just more expensive. Since VHS was a solitary format for shows, this is when you had the Dub V/S Sub BS in the fandom. There were fans looking to show how much cooler they were than everyone else by saying that only real fans watched subtitled anime and that dubs were for little kids and newbies and all that horseshit. No matter what you thought of that, you had to make sure what you were buying was what you actually wanted. You also had to spend a buttload of money to follow a series. Each tape with around $25 and had 2, Maybe 3, episodes on it.  A series like Ranma 1/2 or Dragonball Z would put you in the poorhouse. Anime’s availability wasn’t that far reaching either back in those days either. There were places like Sam Goody’s or Suncoast that would carry anime, and if you were lucky you found a local video rental store that did the same, often times in the “Special interest” section along with the French art house films and just before you got to the curtain sectioning off the porn section. Far cry from point and click shopping isn’t it?

Speaking of which anime on the internet was nothing like it is now. Streaming? HA!  Internet streaming back then was pretty rugged, if much at all. Anime wasn’t important enough for tech like that yet. At best you may find someone running a site with some VERY low grade downloads. Not legal ones mind you. Most of your internet anime was fan sites on Geocities, Homestead, and Xoom. Some of them were very well done with scream captures and episode summaries. Other sites were…..well, long time Sailor Moon fans may remember a certain website they professed about a “lost” season of Sailor Moon and that Sailor Uranus was actually a man in the Moon Kingdom reborn as a woman.

Honestly, the big thing back then were the magazines. Animerica was my mag of choice, but there were several others out there, some put out by the distributing companies themselves, while others were put out by independent publishers. That’s where a lot of your anime news came from. Release dates, new shows, new stuff coming out of Japan, all of that pretty much was put in the magazines, along with cosplay pictures, convention reports, and anything else. You also had the order forms to get company catalog’s were you could get DVDs, and merch through the mail. Magazine’s sadly have fallen out of favor for internet sites, that while you get your news a whole lot quicker, It still misses that charm.

Sure, for some of us 1998 was that long ago, for others it was nearly a lifetime ago. But either way it was almost like a whole different world in the fandom back in that day. The conventions were much smaller, and a lot less of them.  But at the same time with less connectability and less in the way of resources, the feeling you got when you met someone who actually followed anime and the same shows you did was a lot more profound than it would be today.

So while we may have gained a lot as otaku, we may have lost a few things along the way as well.

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