This past weekend, a popular Barnes and Nobles bookstore
closed down after about two decades of business. As I walked through it, I recalled a lot of
time spent there growing up, lots of firsts.
And one last time, I looked at their sizeable Manga wall. A lot has changed since I was younger and
just starting to get into Anime fandom.
Things are better for sure (going to conventions, seeing more theaters
screening Anime, an Anime club at my local comic book store, etc.) However, there are times when im super
nostalgic for the days of my youth, when Anime was fresh and new and an
exciting new venture. So this week I figure
I’d lay out the Top 5 Things I Miss From my Younger Otaku Days. I’m not saying
in any way, shape, or form, that I hate being a fan today (far from that I love
it more than ever). This was just a
really magical time that I will always remember as my starting point into the
realm of Otakudom.
#5-Rare Movie
Screenings
Watching Anime weekly was awesome enough. Seeing it on the big screen was always a
dream that hardly ever came about in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. So when I got to see Cowboy Bebop: The Movie
in 2003 and Ghost in the Shell 2 in 2004 (six months after it was released in
Japan), I was in awe of the experience.
Sure I had to drag a parent along with me and they probably didn’t understand
my amazement, I didn’t care. Seeing Anime
at the movies was a dream come true and it rocks to know that studios like
Funmation and Viz are continuing to crank out screenings every couple of months
to sample new shows and movies. Back at
those first screenings though, I thought they were once in a lifetime possibilities. The fact was, a dream was slowly becoming a
reality.
#4-Making Image
and Data Books
I don’t remember how this got started initially. When Dragon Ball Z was all the rage, my
friends and I were spending countless late night hours on AOL 3.0 (yes im
seriously dating myself here) to download and print out epic amounts of
official pictures, screenshots and whatever we could get our hands on. I took
it one step further. I created not only
a couple of art books, but data books as well.
We were all researching DBZ far past what we had seen, so we knew about Cell,
Buu and even GT before the Frieza Saga had even wrapped (more on that in a
moment). This bled into Gundam Wing,
when I found a couple of sites chock full of mecha data and series
synopsis. A grand universe Gundam Book
would have been insane but I did make a Gundam Wing book and I still love
it. I don’t know why I stopped doing
there. I think my last one was for Neon
Genesis Evangelion in High School. Guess
it was just something cool at the time…but I’ll never say never to doing this
again for another show. Just needs to be the right one.
#3-International
Channel
It was a random Sunday night when I was channel surfing
in my parents room. Around 9pm-ish, I stumbled
across a channel advertising Dragon Ball Z and switched to it. Then I heard it, I saw it, I went
berserk. I was witnessing pure, uncut,
non subtitled Japanese Dragon Ball Z for the first time. Thankfully my parents let me watch this one
episode (sadly it’s where Vegeta gets the mess kicked out of him by
Frieza). It was way ahead of where we
were stuck on in the English Dub, so this was pretty big. (I should note this wasn’t
simulcast as Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball GT had both finished their
respective runs in Japan by this point in time). While this was the only time I was able to
see this DBZ, the International Channel and I kept bumping into each other from
time to time. Thanks to this network
(long since passed into oblivion sadly) I was able to see Dragon Ball GT (in
pure Japanese since it aired right after DBZ was done), Slayers Try (In
Japanese with Subtitles, just cause) and Tenchi Muyo: The Movie (in
English). Sure other Anime themed
networks…like the ADV Anime Network, would pop up from time to time. But this was the definitive experience that I
hold near to my heart and wish I had gotten more time with.
#2-Toonami
(2000-2001)
This was it. The
fandom really took shape here. Since I wasn’t
allowed to do a lot of TV watching during the week when school was in (strict
parents), I had to wait til either Friday or Summer to watch my favorite
shows. Sure enough, the Summer of 2000
and 2001 on Toonami was the line up I remember the most: Sailor Moon, Ronin Warriors, Dragon Ball Z,
Gundam Wing, Tenchi Muyo, Outlaw Star, Gundam 08th MS Team, Gundam
0079, Big O, Cyborg 009. All of these
shows thrown together for the ultimate afternoon experience that I dared not
miss out on. Thanks to the summer I was
able to see Gundam Wing in its entirety (I think we all know what that led to). It was the best time to be an Anime fan when,
thanks to Toonami, Anime was finally getting the biggest boom it had seen in a
long time (and seldom has since). I
think Adult Swim’s Anime line up in the following couple of years was a strong
next step for more mature titles like Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, Samurai Champloo
and Inuyasha. But if this era of Toonami
hadn’t succeeded, Anime would not have made it so big. Shout out to Steve Blum, who’s Tom 2.0
persona was the voice of my favorite era of Anime…along with high school cause
he voiced Spike in Cowboy Bebop.
#1-Blockbuster
Video
Believe it or not, I remember a time when Anime was
something you could only kind of luck your way into finding. Thankfully, I knew of a place where I went
every other weekend or so and trained my mind on titles across all genres, both
on VHS and DVD. Blockbuster Video, my
home away from home (sometimes more than Suncoast or Best Buy, which both had
legendary status wall of Anime like DBZ and Street Fighter). Whenever a swim meet finished or we had some
extra time to kill for the weekend, the family would stop by for some rentals
and I’d always dart right to the Anime section first. Through this, I saw Record of Lodoss War, X
and Martian Successor Nadesico in their entirety, while discovering Miyazaki
through Princess Mononoke and even the legendary (not for kids) epic,
Akira. My one regret is that when
Blockbuster finally shut down, I found out about their sales too late and wasn’t
able to get all of those complete series that they had…I think I only managed
to get Appleseed…yay? (Thank God I found that Record of Lodoss War Complete
Series set a couple years later) My
fandom might have been born elsewhere.
But thanks to Blockbuster…it was able to grow happily into the nerd that
is me today.
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