C/FO's 45th anniversary?

[mbanu]

Fred Patten put it this way in Watching Anime, Reading Manga:

The Cartoon/Fantasy Organization held its first monthly meeting on Saturday, May 21, 1977, coincidentally the same weekend that Star Wars was released. The anniversary of American anime fandom is usually dated from the beginning of this first fan club, which still meets monthly.

Anyone figure someone will do a retrospective for the 45th, or is everyone holding out for 50 in 2027?

[Drew_Sutton]

I am slowly starting to wonder, what can be said about the C/FO that hasn't already? I suppose someone could write up an intro paragraph and then link the various media floating around as an anniversary index. It's impact is important but it's felt so distantly through so many other threads, it really is a time capsule now.

[mbanu]

I am slowly starting to wonder, what can be said about the C/FO that hasn't already? I suppose someone could write up an intro paragraph and then link the various media floating around as an anniversary index. It's impact is important but it's felt so distantly through so many other threads, it really is a time capsule now.

Maybe a simple example, but take this photo from the 1979 C/FO thread



We know who the cosplayer is, but who is everyone else? What are their stories? Did they stick with their anime fandom? What happened to them? This is hard even for the leaders -- we know what Fred Patten thought of the C/FO, we know what Mark Merlino thought, but what did Judy Niver think? Sadly, it looks like she may be dead, so whatever thoughts she might have had are locked up in old APAs and newsletters, gathering dust in people's basements, if we are lucky.

It all goes back to the C/FO -- for anyone who has ever wondered what a lifelong American anime fandom looks like, the folks we can look to are mostly C/FO members. Daryl Surat, the AWO podcaster used to frequently joke about "otaku expiration dates", as though past a certain age anyone who has not given up on anime voluntarily simply bursts into flames and vanishes into ash. While not exactly true, understanding the C/FO helps make clear the various paths that the American otaku pioneers took, good and bad, and where they lead. For me as an anime middle-schooler at least, those seem like things worth knowing.

[davemerrill]

the C/FO is certainly part of the anime fandom scene of the time, but it wasn't the only club. There are plenty of anime fans still alive from the late 1970s and the 1980s who accomplished interesting and influential things in the fandom and who were never part of the C/FO. For many people it was merely a group that got together to watch anime on a regular basis, something they attended for a year or so and then life moved them somewhere else. Others started their own, fairly successful anime groups in clear opposition to the aims of the C/FO.

There's a tendency to look at something like the C/FO and exaggerate its importance; for sure, the C/FO is a group whose name always appears whenever people speak of pre-Robotech anime fandom, largely because of easily impressed teenagers like myself writing about it all after it was all over. But anime fandom walked away from the C/FO in 1988 and never went back, in spite of all the opportunities to do so. The current Facebook C/FO group is made up largely of people who were never members of the club and have only the faintest idea what it even was, really. The surviving original C/FO members and officers don't want much to do with it; for the last twenty years of its existence the entire club was the same six or seven people gathering monthly in the same Los Angeles meeting room to watch anime on what I think was the same TV - clearly of no benefit or even entertainment to pretty much anyone.

Any work detailing the Japanese anime fandom of the 70s and 80s is going to need to cover the C/FO, but that club was only a part of what was going on.

[mbanu]

the C/FO is certainly part of the anime fandom scene of the time, but it wasn't the only club. There are plenty of anime fans still alive from the late 1970s and the 1980s who accomplished interesting and influential things in the fandom and who were never part of the C/FO.

Might just be me, but as an anime middle-schooler, those independent fans are almost invisible to me -- I know about the other nationals that came later like the Earth Defense Force and the Starblazers Fan Club, but I have no clue about the non-nationals. I hope someone out there popularizes their perspectives before they are lost.

The current Facebook C/FO group is made up largely of people who were never members of the club and have only the faintest idea what it even was, really. The surviving original C/FO members and officers don't want much to do with it; for the last twenty years of its existence the entire club was the same six or seven people gathering monthly in the same Los Angeles meeting room to watch anime on what I think was the same TV - clearly of no benefit or even entertainment to pretty much anyone.

Even the fan-drama can be important, although I understand the reluctance to dig up old problems. The risk is that people just won't know, and will become doomed to repeat these struggles on their own without any knowledge of the past. Not that this is strictly an anime thing -- I think the same thing sometimes watching Minecrafters rebuild the MOOs. MUCKs, MUDs, and MUSHes of the past.

A couple things I've noticed:

Some offhand mentions suggest that some of the C/FO folks were doing things that were illegal. Like copying stuff in film company vaults as a form of activist preservation. I imagine that a similar reluctance will be around when people start interviewing the pirating groups of the middle-school era, and people start asking where some of the "who would even have this?" stuff was coming from.

Everyone except the furries downplayed the prevalence of furries. Most "new" C/FO stuff seems to be from digitizing furry archives nowadays.

[davemerrill]

It kind of says something about the C/FO's legacy to consider that when that first wave of uncut, subtitled anime hit American video stores in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the C/FO had almost nothing to do with it. None of the companies that localized anime - CPM/USMC, AnimEigo, the Right Stuf., etc., were started by C/FO members or involved C/FO personnel (with the exception of Fred Patten & Jerry Beck's involvement with Streamline). Instead, the national C/FO's reaction was to start a slap fight with Robert Woodhead in the club newsletter. Anime got bigger and bigger in the US in spite of, rather than because of, the C/FO. At times I see the club as more of an evolutionary dead end, rather than a link in a chain.

[mbanu]

It kind of says something about the C/FO's legacy to consider that when that first wave of uncut, subtitled anime hit American video stores in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the C/FO had almost nothing to do with it. None of the companies that localized anime - CPM/USMC, AnimEigo, the Right Stuf., etc., were started by C/FO members or involved C/FO personnel (with the exception of Fred Patten & Jerry Beck's involvement with Streamline). Instead, the national C/FO's reaction was to start a slap fight with Robert Woodhead in the club newsletter. Anime got bigger and bigger in the US in spite of, rather than because of, the C/FO. At times I see the club as more of an evolutionary dead end, rather than a link in a chain.

I wish unofficial company histories were easier to find. I remember one interview I listened to, I think it might have been an old episode of ANNcast, where a former employee mentioned how shocked they were when they started by how few anime fans were actually at certain anime companies -- it was just a way to make money. But how did they know there would be an audience for non-localized stuff? How did it move on from Battle of the Planets and Speed Racer on TV, or the dollar-store VHS buy the cheapest overseas cartoon you can find and slap a bad dub on it, parents will buy it and kids won't know any better model? Why Japanese animation in particular rather than just continuing to pull from everywhere?

I am probably looking at it the wrong way, but it seems like there has to be a missing link in there that lead to the formation of American anime fans as a coherent idea, distinct from Saturday Morning Cartoon fans, or dollar-store kitsch fans. How did fans of Speed Racer and Battle of the Planets come to realize that they shared a larger common interest that made them both anime fans?

I probably am mythologizing here, but it seems like that was what the C/FO did. It took all these disparate things and said, "You like this thing, I like that thing, but they are the same thing, which is why we have a shared interest."

One thing that puzzles me is that it is not really clear how things split apart fandom-wise after the gathering together. Like eventually I suppose there was a point where the cartoon historians who were fans of old Warner Bros. cartoons realized that this was a distinct interest from being a fan of the Japanese robot shows, and that there was also something different about the sort of fan who drew their own funny-animal artwork but wasn't really looking for comedy. Plus there were odd cross-overs, like when the Japan fans and the funny-animal fans both liked something like Bagi the Monster while the classic animation fans didn't like the limited animation.

Maybe the C/FO isn't the place to look at for understanding this. Sort of like to a middle-schooler like me, the question, "What fandom is a website like cartoonresearch.com promoting?" is hard to answer, even though just based on the writers the answer is clearly "vintage C/FO fandom", something that jumbles Warner Bros., furries, anime, and other foreign cartoons together into a morass that is indistinguishable to me as an outsider but to a member of the site has clear boundaries of "this is on-topic and this is not".

[davemerrill]

there definitely was a sorting-out that happened at some point, as the "general animation" fans and the "Japanese animation" fans went their separate ways. I'd say once Robotech hit TV there was no going back; the comics and books and magazines afterwards were very distinct in seeing Japanese animation as something unique.

I know Robert Woodhead (AnimEigo) and Shawn Kleckner (The Right Stuf) were/are anime fans. Most of the American staff of Viz - Trish LeDoux, etc., were anime fans. They were finding anime and engaging with anime fandom, and they didn't need a membership card from the C/FO to do it.

From this perspective it does kind of seem like the C/FO always had the attitude of, we're a club, we're doing these magazines and tape trades for the club members, if you aren't in the club, we aren't going to worry about you. Whereas fans like Rob Fenelon, Trish LeDoux, etc., started their own magazines that were available to anyone that had $2.95 and wanted to find out about Dirty Pair or Zeta Gundam, no club necessary. Robert Woodhead was making anime available to anyone with a VCR and a copy of Madox 01, and that meant thousands of tapes in thousands of video stores in thousands of towns that would never have a local anime club, thousands of copies of ANIMAG in thousands of comic shops. If a C/FO Magazine print run ever went above 500, I'd be amazed.

Certainly, there was value in the institutional knowledge of an organization with members that had been collecting information and video since the 1970s and could connect the dots between Speed Racer and BOTP because they'd watched them both as they aired. One of the tragedies of the club's demise is how most of that sheer data - mostly contained in the Kurt & Jane Black C/FO Magazines, I think - is now unavailable, unless someone happens to have the issues at hand. OTOH, most of that sheer data is now in five or six different places online, easier to access and reference.

I'd never say there wasn't value or worth in the C/FO, it served an important purpose and put a lot of fandom together. But I wouldn't say anime fandom wouldn't exist without it. You don't have a show like BOTP or Star Blazers or Robotech without a fandom forming, and when their production and creative staffs have so much overlap, when it becomes obvious there are dozens and hundreds more similar shows to find out about, anime fandom is going to happen whether there's a C/FO or not.