Lately, thanks in no small part to the Anime World Order podcast, I've been seized by the desire to feature a little more anime on Teleport City and, at the same time, revisit a lot of the movies I watched from the 1980s, which I caught, for the most part, in the early 90s when there was the first big wave of pretty much any and every anime title distributors could get on the cheap being dumped onto VHS for quickie releases in the United States. Back in those heady days, there was no Web to steer you in the right direction, and only a couple English-language publications dedicated to covering the strange world of Japanese cartoons. There were a lot of fanzines, mind you, but even with the assistance of Factsheet Five, you were lucky to ever stumble across any in your daily life (and this from someone whose daily life included writing, editing, and publishing a zine). So you pretty much went to the video store (Specs had the best selection in Gainesville) blind and grabbed whatever looked halfways interesting. Sometimes you lucked out. A lot of times, you came home with MD Geist or Crystal Triangle (people still harbor a grudge against me for bringing that one over to watch) or Dog Soldier. But good or bad, plowing through the emerging world of anime in America always came with a tinge of discovery and excitement -- which is more than I can say for watching Crystal Triangle.

If you wanted to see something you'd read about but hadn't received a domestic release, then you had to enter the great dance that was tape trading. If you were lucky enough to live in a town with an anime fan club, you could conduct business through their front. Otherwise, you were on your own in the wilderness, searching down people based on classified ads or word of mouth so that you could swap fifth generation fan-subbed bootlegs from Arctic Animation. As anyone who was involved in the tape trade culture knows, you eventually run into some pretty peculiar characters (or are a peculiar character yourself). Because I was already trading tapes to get uncut horror films and Hong Kong action flicks, I was pretty well prepared for what tape trading involved. But anime tape traders could be even more insane than any others.

No, not more insane. Horror and kungfu film traders usually either came across as nerdy but normal, or they kept bugging you for "that video where the chick sticks live eels up her vagina." But it was a pretty free and easy trading lifestyle, especially if you happen to have the aforementioned "eel pussy" video. That thing, or a copy of Sex and Zen, was like gold. You could demand four or five Jackie Chan movies for it. But anime tape traders were often a lot more anal. Or maybe it was just that they were more organized than the whiskey-swilling scumbags who were doling out the Lucio Fulci tapes back in the day.

I didn't really start exploring anime beyond Akira and the notorious Overfiend (which pretty much everyone saw at some point during the 1980s) until I was in college, and Gainesville happened to have a decently stocked anime club comprised mostly of people I really didn't like all that much, including the guy with a gay cop moustache and disturbing bean-shaped head who used to say things like, "I had tuh drive tuh niggah town the othuh day," and used to spell furniture, "frencher." He was a dick and a racist, but he was also fanatical about scoring fansubbed anime tapes, which was a big improvement over what I'd been watching, which was mostly unsubtitled copies of Golgo 13 and Gei Gei Gei No Kitaro. I managed to tolerate him long enough to get copies of the Patlabor TV series, subbed by Arctic Animation -- who used to constantly hold what seemed to be entire conversations amongst themselves via the subtitles during the credits, which I guess was occasionally more interesting than reading the lyrics to "Midnight Blue" yet again. I think they also liked to spice up the cursing in the shows a bit.

And if you think enduring a North Florida racist for the sake of Patlabor is tasteless, remind me to tell you about the time I was fooling around with some chick only to discover that she had a giant swastika tattooed on her back.

In 1994 or so, having written everything I needed to write about punk rock, I switched the fanzine I'd started in 1987 (then called And When There's Darkness, taken from a line in a Token Entry song for you decrepit old skate rock fans) to an all-movie review and discussion format (retitled Kungfu Girl). It was mostly Hong Kong films, which were just starting to enjoy a higher profile among cult film fans in the United States thanks to copies of The Killer and a few choice other titles circulating about. But amid my reviews for scratchy bootleg copies of Once Upon a Time in China and Chinese Ghost Story, I'd slip in the occasional anime and Godzilla review (well, the more than occasional Godzilla review, I reckon). It was enough to eventually get the zine mentioned in Film Threat and Sentai magazine, which was a comic book-size zine published by Antarctic Press (no relation to Arctic Animation -- what's with the Polar ice caps, people?), which opened a whole new slew of tape trading avenues for me (and also got the zine noticed enough for me to get my first professional writing job, as a contributor to Sex and Zen and a Bullet in the Head by Stefan Hammond -- savor those Shaw Bros. reviews, baby).

Funny that being into what was, at the time, considered new school anime now makes you an old school fan (growing up watching Speed Racer, Star Blazers, Battle of the Planets, and Lupin apparently makes you "Incan ice mummy school"), but I guess that's the way it works, like how pulling an acid drop on your Bill Danforth Alva skateboard in the 1980s is now qualified as "old school skateboarding." But that's nothing more complex than the ebb and flow of time. As the years marched on and we all grew up and became well-adjusted, responsible members of a functioning modern society, we stopped watching cartoons, usually because a dust-choked old VCR shredded our precious VHS tapes and rendered them unwatchable (as if MD Geist needed help being unwatchable) while not offering up an alternative other than going to eBay and buying someone else's equally chewed up tape for $75.

But then along came DVD and the second great wave of interest in anime. And although us aging old veterans of the glitz and sparkle of the eighties had to flip through an endless number of Pokemon and "magical transforming girl" shows, the search would, from time to time, reveal one of our beloved old titles lying cobweb-covered and ignored in a dark corner behind a janitor's pail and some moldering old rags. We would then experience a feeling of elation at having recovered this small portion of our recent past, a euphoric state that would last right up until you saw that the price of the disc was $35. Hey, it may be fun to take a nostalgic stroll down Dominion: Tank Police Boulevard, but I'm not paying $35 for the experience. And neither were a lot of fans like me who, being of a more advanced age at this point in our lives, refused to shell out big bucks for a forty-five minute DVD when we could be putting our cash toward dialysis machines.

Of course, companies put out a forty-five minute OVA (OAV if you're nasty) on DVD, charge thirty-something bucks for it, then use the fact that no one bought it as an example of how no one is interested in purchasing old anime titles. Hey folks, guess what? Old cult movies sell for under ten dollars, and we buy a ton of those, even crappy ones we don't like. Take a hint.

At the same time, the companies do have a point, even if the way they go about supporting it is sleazy. Most anime fans are younger, and most of them have no interest in titles that are even ten years old, let alone twenty or more. This is nothing unique to anime fandom, of course, but what is odd is how many hardcore anime fans, not just casual viewers, have no interest in older titles. I expect it from hoi polloi, but you'd think when someone crosses that line into becoming, if not an otaku, then at least a student of the game, that they'd be open to titles from across the span of the art form's history. After all, even young fans of cult films quickly become steeped in the films of the sixties, seventies, and eighties. Many are more resistant to black and white films, but still, they're up for exploring. In fact, cult film fandom consists primarily of rabid fans who explore the past and disdain more recent films.

Anime, however, seems to work the opposite. In younger fans -- and I mean, when I say younger, people who range in age from roughly middle school age to college age -- it seems the more they are into anime, the snobbier they are about watching anything with a few years under its belt. And those that do generally seem dismissive of it, as if they're only half-watching it at best, and certainly making no effort to understand it or put it into any sort of context. Coming from a cult film background, where the past is always considered to be superior to the present, I always had a hard time understanding this about anime fans. Why the devotion to anything new solely because it's new? And why the commitment to scoffing at anything ten years or more old? There are exceptions, of course, as there are to any generalization, but I'm frequently staggered by the sheer number of fans who devour anime incessantly yet absolutely refuse to even watch anything more than a few years old. One could, perhaps, draw some sort of parallel to Japanese society's love of the new, but Japan is no stranger to getting misty-eyed and nostalgic about its past. Plus, many of you aren't Japanese anyway.

I've always tried to devote at least a tiny portion of Teleport City to salvaging certain movies from the rubbish bin of memory, even when I think of those movies as something everyone has seen. It often turns out that just because I come from a school of thought that considers certain titles common knowledge and the basic foundation of a proper cinematic education doesn't mean that attitude is reflected in the greater population of fandom. Thus, it's worth it, for me, on a site like Teleport City to remind people they ought to see films like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, because so few younger fans think of watching those movies. It's not that they don't want to; it simply doesn't occur to them. Similarly, there are plenty of anime titles that I think of obvious must-sees that younger anime fans have never even heard of, let alone seen. So it's worth it to me to spend some time picking through the old days and reliving some memories -- most of them good, some of them...not so much.

Not everything that gets written about in the next couple of weeks is something I'd call must-see anime, though I do feel that any fan worth his salt should devote himself to seeing at least a smattering of truly awful titles, just so they can be better rounded and more aware of how bad something can be. And it is by no means anything approaching an attempt at a comprehensive survey of anime titles released in the United States during the 1980s and early 1990s. It's not even an attempt to cover all the biggest titles (i.e., no Ranma, no Urusei Yatsura, because I never was able to sustain any interest in those, be it in show or movie format, and no Project A-Ko, because I don't want to watch it again, seeing as how I'm the one person in the world who doesn't really like it all that much). Some respectable titles will slip in despite my effort to always scrape the bottom of the barrel, and at least a couple will show up that are best described as "notorious." A few of the titles will be truly horrible films which, for reasons I don't even want to ponder, I think are absolutely fantastic fun, even as I am fully aware of how mind-bendingly awful they are.

Which is a nice way to kick off our discussion Odin: Space Photon Sailer Starlight...

Labels: Anime and Animation, Anime: 80s