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).
(https://issuu.com/studioartmix/docs/glm9-fall2012sm)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.