japanimation is back!!!

The roughly mid-90's and earlier (generally pre-Toonami, pre-anime boom) era of anime & manga fandom: early cons, clubs, tape trading, Nth Generation VHS fansubs, old magazines & fanzines, fandubs, ancient merchandise, rec.arts.anime, and more!
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Daniel
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japanimation is back!!!

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Originally written by davemerrill on 2016/01/13, 09:18:26 PST :

japanimation is back!!! :

There was an Answerman column recently over at ANN that dredged up the term Japanimation, and the discussion was far-ranging and interesting, and hearing about it reminded me of a zine that I had stashed away, a magazine titled simply Japanimation. So I dug it out and wrote a Let's Anime piece about it!

http://letsanime.blogspot.ca/2016/01/ai ... ry-of.html

It's an interesting time capsule of a magazine and it really made me remember how tied together the comic shop culture and the anime fan culture were at that time. Anyway, give it a read, you might find it interesting, or goofy, or both...





Originally written by AVHodgson on 2016/01/13, 11:58:34 PST :

Re: japanimation is back!!! :

Those were the days... In the sense that they were, in fact, days.

When did the term Japanimation go out of favor, anyhow, not just in anime fandom but in the wider world? I can recall seeing a promo from Cartoon Network that said it was where you could catch the latest in Japanimation that being G-Force , which was very much not the latest in Japanimation - this being from 1995. By the anime boom of the early '00s, it seems, anime was the term used by both fans and the wider world.




Originally written by davemerrill on 2016/01/13, 12:35:54 PST :

Re: japanimation is back!!! :

my experience with the term was that... it was kind of a newbie term. Fans who were just getting into the fandom would use it. If a Star Trek con or a comic show had an anime room they'd label it the Japanimation room or they'd list anime events on their flyers as Japanimation. I'd have to check but I don't believe it's a term we used in our anime club newsletters 1985-1988 , and by the time I started the print Let's Anime zine in 1991 it was definitely out of favor among our crowd.

The Answerman piece goes into detail about the term's use by Central Park Media and other industry media groups, and it certainly survived well into the 90s, as you can see by the packaging of the Spaced Out Japanimation set of VHS tapes seen here http://letsanime.blogspot.com/2009/07/s ... n-man.html

My issue with the term, apart from its newbie connotations, is that it pretty much utilizes a racial slur, depending on how it's pronounced and who's doing the pronouncing. JAP-animation is how you'd hear it used among some of our less tolerant fan brethren.

What's even more interesting is that Japan itself adopted the term and used it well past its sell-by date in English-language materials, as Daryl Surat has spoken of.
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