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!
I think 1990 is an interesting time period for anime fandom, the transition between the C/FO days of trading raw tapes and KIKU-TV subs through APAs and chapter newsletters and the new wave of college clubs, genlock fansubs, and rec.arts.anime communication. EDC still exists. There's still a nation-building impulse, as though maybe some other national organization will fill in the gap that the C/FO left, and while there are a couple college clubs, it is mostly first-generation community clubs of the old sort, and C/FO chapters pushing on without a central organizer. Cal-Animage is notably absent, suggesting that maybe the college clubs weren't on anybody's radar yet? (Or at least, not on Randall Stukey's.)
mbanu: What's between Old School and New School?
runesaint: Hmmm. "Middle School", perhaps?
Bill Hupe claimed to have an anime club in Lansing? No way, no way, he didn't have the wherewithal to actually run a club. I think it was a scam he put together to get tapes.
I think Tim would have been amused by having his name spelled 'Time'.
I should put out there that NONE of those addresses are active, or very very few, and it might have been a good idea to black out any phone numbers.
I was just going to say that I did a tape swap with Bill Hupe and never got my end of the deal. So Steve, you may be right about his 'anime club' being some kind of elaborate scheme to get free blank tapes.
The William Chow in Vancouver I believe is the guy who started fansubbing with the group "Arctic Animation."
When the C/FO Atlanta club dissolved it became the 'Animated Film Association' for a few meetings. I had quit the C/FO Atlanta after a meeting in which I had to haul the TV, bring the tapes, decide what got shown after asking the entire room what they wanted to watch and receiving blank stares in return, and generally asking myself why the heck I was putting myself out for people who didn't care. Jim Reddy became the contact and he had three or four meetings under the "AFA" name, and then he moved to Japan and he's still there. I think by 1990 it was defunct, but news travels slowly. In the mean time I got together with Lloyd Carter and we decided to start a new anime club and have it be a collaborative effort, and one with as few rules as possible, and that club lasted three times as long as C/FO Atlanta did. That club was Anime X, and we used Lloyd's home answering machine as the "Anime X Hot Line" with a recording listing our next meeting time and place. That way we didn't have to publish a monthly newsletter. Also the mailing address was my PO box, but whatever.
Many of the EDC "clubs" were just one guy. I believe you could become an "EDC Chapter" at this point by writing to Meri in Dallas and saying "hey, I'm gonna be an EDC chapter" and she's say "OK".
DB Killings of the Greater Chicago Megazone moved to the UK and left his video tape collection for the use of the club, and that entire collection vanished under mysterious circumstances. It was a scandal to the jaybirds, as they say.
Alec Orrock now runs the Anime Los Angeles convention. I think Stephen Lin is the Anime Pavilion / Anime USA Steve Lin. Laurine White still has a club that meets regularly, I think, though it may just be her and her friends.
Also maybe interesting, the C/FO as it existed in April 1987, right before(?) things started falling apart:
(From Vol. 3, No. 2 of the C/FO Bulletin by way of the Urusei Yatsura Mailing List)
mbanu: What's between Old School and New School?
runesaint: Hmmm. "Middle School", perhaps?
For the visually-minded, the 1987 C/FO chapters mapped out:
I really wish I had chapter addresses for the Earth Defense Command in 1987, as overlaying the two groups seems like it would give a pretty good representation of the national club scene back them, and would make it easier to compare to a map of the 1990 clubs which are a mix of independents and EDC clubs... Maybe that's taking things too seriously. (^_^)
mbanu: What's between Old School and New School?
runesaint: Hmmm. "Middle School", perhaps?
One thing I'm a little surprised by is that neither the 1987 or 1990 version mention the Philadelphia Animation Society / C/FO Philadelphia, as they were one of the earliest C/FO clubs. Had they already left by 1987?
mbanu: What's between Old School and New School?
runesaint: Hmmm. "Middle School", perhaps?
