The Old School Otaku Lounge

Involved with Japanimation USA out of Fullerton, California, and (it seems) an American Itasha pioneer.

Old homepage: http://anysize.org/~ashi/
New Twitter: https://twitter.com/toddashi

Was watching the first Urusei Yatsura movie and suddenly realized how great it would be if someone cosplayed as the fat-bird mailman on the little bicycle.

Are there any old-school cosplays you wish you had a photo of?

It kind of says something about the C/FO's legacy to consider that when that first wave of uncut, subtitled anime hit American video stores in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the C/FO had almost nothing to do with it. None of the companies that localized anime - CPM/USMC, AnimEigo, the Right Stuf.,...

the C/FO is certainly part of the anime fandom scene of the time, but it wasn't the only club. There are plenty of anime fans still alive from the late 1970s and the 1980s who accomplished interesting and influential things in the fandom and who were never part of the C/FO. Might just be me, but as...

It surprised me though that that late into the 70s and Trekkies were still being seen as weirdos, even to other SF fans. Guess that TNG and the movies was when the mythologicalizing of TOS became a thing. If I had to guess, I would guess that the lack of home video is what made it weird, because th...

I am slowly starting to wonder, what can be said about the C/FO that hasn't already? I suppose someone could write up an intro paragraph and then link the various media floating around as an anniversary index. It's impact is important but it's felt so distantly through so many other threads, it rea...

Congrats! Not sure if it is a typo or my own ignorance, but did you mean to say the first C/FO was started in Chicago? The standard story is that it started in Los Angeles, but the only non-Fred people I know of who talked about Fred before the C/FO were connected to his sci-fi fandom hobby and the ...

Fred Patten put it this way in Watching Anime, Reading Manga : The Cartoon/Fantasy Organization held its first monthly meeting on Saturday, May 21, 1977, coincidentally the same weekend that Star Wars was released. The anniversary of American anime fandom is usually dated from the beginning of this ...

A sign of success for all the old-schoolers, maybe, as now old anime t-shirts are viewed sort of like old band t-shirts, "I liked them before they were cool" or "I was raised liking good anime, my dad taught Kenichi Sonada how to play beer pong at AnimeCon '91-" type stories. :lo...

An early member of the C/FO from Chicago, Ed became a published author, writing The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Godzilla and co-authoring Ishiro Honda, A Life In Film, From Godzilla to Kurosawa.