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let's anime looks at anime info packets

Posted: Mon Jan 27, 2020 6:26 am
by davemerrill
my latest Let's Anime column is a deep dive into the world of the photocopied anime synopsis and episode guide sheets that were distributed widely among the anime fandom of the 80s and 90s!
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it's all there at the Let's Anime, your home for everything I can haul out of my files and throw onto the scanner!

http://letsanime.blogspot.com/2020/01/t ... -info.html

Re: let's anime looks at anime info packets

Posted: Fri Feb 07, 2020 2:02 pm
by usamimi
This is the good stuff! Man, I remember how excited I was when I found out that my high school library had a photocopier that was "x number of copies free per student per day". I abused that system so much!

We didn't have a kinkos in my neighborhood, but eventually we got a locally run pack-and-mail type place with copiers that you could buy a $25 card for and get unlimited copies for half a year! My parents got one for their home business, and let me use it when I wanted to. I was sad when they got bought out by the UPS store.

Re: let's anime looks at anime info packets

Posted: Fri Feb 07, 2020 2:35 pm
by davemerrill
wait, unlimited copies for six months for $25? I would have abused the HELL out of that!!

My personal Kinko's abuse was... back before they had the magnetic stripe card readers, Kinkos had mechanical counter boxes. You'd pick one up at the register, it would fit into a little cubby on the photocopier, and it had a mechanical counter that would click off every time you made a copy. 15 clicks, 15 copies, at 4 cents a copy, that's sixty cents. So what we did was, we happened to come into possession of one of those boxes. So we'd pick up a box from the register, use it for five or ten copies, and then switch it out for our own box, let THAT box click the remainder of our printing, and then when we were done we'd just pay for the copies showing on the store's box.

is this the worst thing I've ever done in the pursuit of getting anime fan materials printed? No.

Re: let's anime looks at anime info packets

Posted: Fri Feb 07, 2020 5:25 pm
by usamimi
YEAH apparently if you weren't a real business, you could get one (they had a different deal for businesses), so my mom just lied and got the personal one rather than a business one lol. Now they have a thing where you can pre-pay for X number of copies and get a percentage off, so they keep a card on file with your name & how many you make to keep track. It was super handy when my group of friends needed to copy character sheets for D&D! :lol:

Omg my store used those EXACT counters, too! That's a sneaky trick but I definitely would have pulled the same thing I'm sure. :mrgreen:

Re: let's anime looks at anime info packets

Posted: Sat Feb 08, 2020 11:16 am
by Drew_Sutton
So very cool to see some of these. Still blows me away what fans were talking about in the 80s and 90s that didn't have domestic releases until much later or not released at all.

Agree that digital can be very transient and in a way, print is king, but man, closet and attic space is so limited...

Re: let's anime looks at anime info packets

Posted: Tue Feb 25, 2020 6:02 am
by Fireminer
Does anyone here notice the words "For: SHASHIA #8" What does that mean?

Also, I wonder where did the writer traced/copied the lineart of the Lyazner from?

Re: let's anime looks at anime info packets

Posted: Tue Feb 25, 2020 6:05 am
by Fireminer
And if even Maschinen Krieger was known in America in the 1980s, then people at the time must have had some idea about Gundam MSV and Kazuhisa Kondo's stuffs.

Re: let's anime looks at anime info packets

Posted: Tue Feb 25, 2020 8:12 am
by davemerrill
"For SASHIA #8" refers to the fact that the SPT Layzner article was produced for the APA "Sasha," and whoever was typing it up spelled "Sasha" wrong. Sasha APA was an amateur press association for anime fans, active in the 1980s, named after the character in the Space Battleship Yamato film "Be Forever Yamato."

The SPT Layzner line art likely was photocopied from an anime magazine or one of the books about SPT Layzner.

Re: let's anime looks at anime info packets

Posted: Wed Feb 26, 2020 5:40 am
by Fireminer
davemerrill wrote: Tue Feb 25, 2020 8:12 am "For SASHIA #8" refers to the fact that the SPT Layzner article was produced for the APA "Sasha," and whoever was typing it up spelled "Sasha" wrong. Sasha APA was an amateur press association for anime fans, active in the 1980s, named after the character in the Space Battleship Yamato film "Be Forever Yamato."
Thanks! I suspected as much! There is another interesting name from your article, "Japanese Animation Archives". Could you please tell me more about it?

On that topic, when these synopsis were printed separately on periodicals, could they get collected and reprinted later on?

Also, I guess that these are the thing that Sue Shambaugh did?

Re: let's anime looks at anime info packets

Posted: Wed Feb 26, 2020 9:30 am
by davemerrill
Some of Sue Shambaugh's translations would be included in these info packets from time to time.

Pretty much anything anime-related that could be photocopied might be included in one of these packets. Newspaper clippings, magazine articles, fanzine articles, convention program guide book pages, anything.

The "Japanese Animation Archives" were a collection of material maintained by Owen & Eclare Hannifen, who ran an anime club in the San Francisco Bay area in the 1980s. The JAA is referenced here: http://letsanime.blogspot.com/2007/12/a ... -1987.html - and in the Patrick Macias/Carl Horn book "Japan Edge".