Hello there

Tell the old school world who you are, and let us welcome you into the forum!
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Daniel
Site Admin
Posts: 525
Joined: Sun Jul 24, 2011 2:56 pm
Anime Fan Since: 199X年
Location: USA

Re: Hello there

Post by Daniel »

Welcome! Glad to have you!
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Boite Diabolique
Posts: 26
Joined: Thu Jan 09, 2014 6:06 pm
Anime Fan Since: 1994
Location: Queanbeyan, NSW, AU

Re: Hello there

Post by Boite Diabolique »

Kame-Sen'nin wrote:Welcome to the forum! It's definitely great to hear from members who experienced early anime fandom differently than those of us in the United States, so please keep the stories coming! :D
Ta! I don't have many stories from the "olden days". Being stuck in western New South Wales away from the major cities, you're really cut off from anything that isn't mainstream culture. I didn't have access to a comic book shop until I came to Canberra in 1994. The big turning point was moving there and discovering the wide availability of Japanese pop culture found in smaller stores dotted around the city.

We had a massive independent record shop called Impact Records which began in the 1970's (I think) but got booted out of retail to due to a national CD/DVD/Electronics chain pricing them out of the market about a decade ago. They stocked records and CDs, tons of imports, fanzines, tour t-shirts and bootlegs, but also had a really large comic section and large video section with UK and US imports - laserdiscs and VHS. Here I discovered Anime UK magazine and the weird stuff coming out of the UK (in particular the stuff that Western Connection put out). There were a few US releases, not many. I picked up a couple of Orguss tapes and the Ultimate Teacher. Most of these were special orders not picked up and dumped on the shelves. The staff who ran the comic book counter decided to open a comic book store in 2004 when Impact closed its doors. Still operates today.

We also had a dreadful pizza shop/gaming centre/pool hall which sold anime stuff at an inflated price. It was a weird, dodgy looking place near the bus interchange (which wasn't place you'd wasn’t to go at night) which shut down around 2000 - 2001. Not sure where they were ordering stuff from but that masses of NTSC (US/Japanese video format) tapes, lots of Streamline stuff and even a couple of Japanese tapes (I bought Yamato 2520 volume 1 on VHS there!). They also sold bootleg VHS and had some copies of Newtype.

We also had a Sydney comic book chain called the Phantom Zone here in the late 1990's. they sold some weird stuff, Dirty Pair Flash bootleg tapes of fansubs (think these were coming out of a anime shop in Box Hill in Melbourne) and bootleg garage kits.

Over the years we had numerous second book shops which stocked second hand anime artbooks for whatever reason. However we soon released that Chinatown in Sydney had better merchandise and I would often go up there with a friend to copies of Newtype and Animage (long before Kinokunya set up their massive store in George Street) and the occasional bootleg garage kit. My friend used to buy bootleg VHS and I warned him he'd get bitten. A couple of the tapes were blank or just unwatchable. There was also the Cartoon Gallery in the upmarket Queen Victoria Building who charged a small ransom for US VHS and DVDs for years before releasing that everyone was mail ordering their DVDs from Right Stuf for a fraction of the cost, and so they shut up shop (they still do mail order though).

In the last 15 years or so, the Chinese newsagents have moved out and the only anime stuff in Chinatown are those dreadful Malaysian bootleg DVDs. Some of the model shops have disappeared over time as well.
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