American Alliance for Japanese Animation (C/FO - Gardena)?

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mbanu
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American Alliance for Japanese Animation (C/FO - Gardena)?

Post by mbanu »

The home club of David Riddick and Bob Napton of U.S. Renditions. (^_^)

A bit of backstory on C/FO Gardena from a round-table interview between David Riddick, Ed Gomez, and Bob Napton in an issue of Genki Life magazine:
David Riddick wrote:I remember walking into my first CF/O meeting in the legendary “Studio A.” It was like find this cool hidden sub-culture. There was a large screening room but what I find most intriguing was the taping room. Dozens of VHS machines daisy chained together making copies of TV episodes that had been sent over from Japan. Most of the guys that were running were older than I was. Thinking back on it now, it reminds me a lot of the movie Fight Club. At the center of it all, was Fred Patten. I was determined to learn as much from this man as possible. These meetings marked the beginning of my education in anime. Eventually I started my own chapter of the Cartoon Fantasy Organization in Gardena. Carl Macek was our very first guest speaker. We met in the back room at Geoffrey’s Comics and the room was filled to capacity. Subsequently, I met Robert Napton at the Cartoon Fantasy Organization meeting in Santa Monica. Unlike the older guys from CF/O LA, we were about the same age. We also had a lot in common as we were both film students. We spoke at length at that meeting and we became fast friends. He along with Will Culpepper, Troy Augbourne, and Karl Altstaetter made the CF/O Gardena chapter one of the best-attended and well-run chapters in the organization.
Bob Napton wrote:I had become aware of anime in 1980 thanks to Star Blazers and when I moved to LA in the summer of ‘84 I was lucky enough to attend Worldcon in LA and interface with a lot of the C/FO guys and Carl Macek was at Worldcon presenting the pre-Robotech dub of Macross called "Boobytrap” and at the con I picked up a flier for C/FO Santa Monica, which is where I lived, so I started going to C/FO Santa Monica meetings with my brother. And I remember it like it was yesterday, but around September of 1985, after Robotech had aired and really started to ignite locally, C/FO Santa Monica did a screening of the Macross Movie Do You Remember Love? aka “Summer 84.”

The guest speaker was David Riddick President of C/FO Gardena who was the Macross expert in L.A. David was and is a very charismatic guy and he introduced the film and I learned he had done a translation script of the movie with translators Glen and Mario Ho which they had published themselves and it was called the “Macross Movie Gold Script.” This was a fan publication, but it was a line for line translation of the movie. I got one of those from David at the meeting and we immediately hit it off. To be candid, while I liked all the guys at C/FO Santa Monica, they were frankly older gentlemen. I say that knowing that they were probably younger then than I am now, *laughs* but at the time when I was 18, they seemed like older gents (ignorance of youth) and when David came in, I was meeting a peer—a guy my same age—and he was so passionate about Macross, which I had grown to love thanks to Carl Macek’s Robotech which had burst on the scene that same year, so I was like “I’ve gotta hang with this guy” and I started going to C/FO Gardena meetings and a lifelong friendship was born...
David Riddick wrote:The C/FO Gardena chapter split away from the main organization become its own organization known as the American Alliance for the Promotion of Japanese Animation (or AAJA for short). AAJA also had a chapter in Dallas led by Lea Hernandez (who was a founder of the US branch of General Products).
Bob Napton wrote:Around the end of 1987, David and I and the other guys were busy with AAJA, the club we formed when we official withdrew C/FO Gardena from the C/FO. We had a lot of admiration for C/FO but frankly, the national management of the club was taking it in the wrong direction we felt, so we rebelled and ended C/FO Gardena and started the American Alliance for Japanese Animation and for better or worse started a trend with other local C/ FO chapters doing the same thing at least in Southern California... The entire first [year?] or so I was at Nippan, we were still running AAJA, so anime was my job and my hobby and I was trying to get through college like David and focus on creative writing. Something had to give and ultimately at the end of 89 we all decided it was time to fold AAJA and just focus on our professional pursuits and I guess that’s when I officially exited fandom and became a full time anime “professional,” and I qualify that in quotes because the fans were the professionals in those days.
(https://issuu.com/studioartmix/docs/glm9-fall2012sm)
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SteveH
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Re: American Alliance for Japanese Animation (C/FO - Gardena)?

Post by SteveH »

I assume the 'Macross Movie Gold Script' was a translation from the (justly) famous Macross the Movie deluxe hardcover published by Shogakukan. It's probably the pinnacle of Macross publishing and owes a great deal to the various Yamato hardcovers published by Office Academy/West Cape.

Oddly enough, the 'gold' book (it wasn't gold. The cardboard sleeve that held the book was gold-ish, the dustjacket on the book itself was silver, designed to look like finely machined metal) didn't have a proper AR script but the fumettii, or photo story of the movie was broken down fine enough so that every line of dialog (and indications of the presence of BGM music cues if not actual cue titles) was written out under frame stills. The photostory takes up over 200 pages and even includes camera direction so you get a feel for the motion (pan, tilt, zoom, track, etc). I think the 'gold book' may have been the first hint of the unfilmed end credit Minmei concert footage which eventually got animated as part of a music video release called Macross Flashback 2012 in 1987.

Macross was the ticket for short-term success for Shogakukan. They embarked on a very ambitious publishing program in what seemed to be an attempt to challenge the dominance of Tokuma Shoten and their Roman Album series of 'artbook' publications. They were doing a great job (I really liked their 'The Year in Animation' books and it's a damn shame they stopped those after only two volumes taking things to around 3rd quarter 1984). Their three volume set titled "This is Animation" was an excellent source of series release dates and episode titles, the subsequent 'The is Animation-The Select' books covering specific shows or movies (their 2-volume set on Orguss is still just about the only published reference for that series) were generally very well done, up until 1984. Their last volume of the initial run, Southern Cross, was a serious letdown and not at all up to the standards of the previous volumes. This is Animation-The Select tottered around with a release here and there, I think their 1994 release of Patlabor The Movie may have been the last gasp (but an excellent book). In this way they were mirroring Tokuma Shoten who had more or less dumped their Roman Album line except for the occasional Miyazaki film tie-in. That crash of the publishers circa late 1985-1986 shook things up bigtime.

THAT is something I'd love to ask an anime fan in Japan, who was active back then, who paid attention to such things. What did the otaku of the day over there think of the sudden death of anime publishing? All those series that never got a book.
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