The Old School Otaku Lounge

I got rid of a few boxes of single issue comics last summer, along with some graphic novels and other things so I could afford the down payment on my car. In the single issues I forgot I had most of the original Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z Viz stories, along with Ranma 1/2, Tenchi Muyo, Urusei Yatsura, and the Mixx Media Gundam Wing issues including the omake theater strips!! I didn't even realize I still had them when I packed up some boxes, and I wish they were still with me. I also sold off all of my 1st American printings of DBZ, Ranma, Inuyasha, and all but one of my Urusei Yatsura graphic novels. I regret it, but at least a have a new car? It's hard.

danth wrote:I wish I had kept my old Newtype model catalogs. Not the magazine, but the plastic model store that was in California in the 90's.

Here's an ad for their store from Animag: http://i.imgur.com/aEXAxqu.jpg

I am totally with you on that one! I used to get their catalogs in the mail, even though I never bought anything from them. Those were rather attractive catalogs, too. I would just drool while looking at those pictures. "Oh my GOSH! Bubblegum Crisis garage kits? I want one, but they're so expensive! What's a garage kit? Is it different from a model kit? I probably could never do a good job putting one together."

Then I later learned a lot about garage kits from watching Otaku no Video. I now actually own a couple of BGC garage kits. I have yet to build one, but my 17 year old self in 1993 could only dream of such things.

I also wish that I had held onto those old AnimEigo newsletters. Those were fun to read. I remember when they had the set of miniatures for the BGC RPG. AFAIK, those were made for the North American market and never released in Japan. There was a set of Boomers and a set of AD Policemen too. Man, those would be great to get and paint up!

greg wrote:

danth wrote:I wish I had kept my old Newtype model catalogs. Not the magazine, but the plastic model store that was in California in the 90's.

Here's an ad for their store from Animag: http://i.imgur.com/aEXAxqu.jpg

I am totally with you on that one! I used to get their catalogs in the mail, even though I never bought anything from them. Those were rather attractive catalogs, too. I would just drool while looking at those pictures. "Oh my GOSH! Bubblegum Crisis garage kits? I want one, but they're so expensive! What's a garage kit? Is it different from a model kit? I probably could never do a good job putting one together."

Yep! That's basically how it was for me too. "Hey, they have transformable Macross models! But it says they are super-deformed. What the heck does that mean?" I actually called the number in the catalog (I must have been like 13) and talked to some Japanese dude who told me that super-deformed meant "cute." I somehow actually understood what he meant at the time, so that is how I learned what super-deformed meant.

I think I had two catalogs from them: an orange one with pictures of A.R.I.E.L. and a blue one with pictures of the VF-2J Icarus from Macross 2. I loved the catalogs because they had all kinds of cool line art on them!

I actually did buy one thing from them: the big Gakken Mospeada that was re-released in the 90's.

Newtype is still around, aren't they? I can look them up on Altavista and Google and such, so I assume they're still in business.

Come to think of it, I think maybe I was on their mailing list because that could've been the store from which I mail ordered my Bandai 1:72 scale transforming VF-1S Valkyrie model kit. So in high school, the friend who had reintroduced me into Robotech in junior high had bought and built a Gundam model kit. He said, "This is from some anime named Gundam, and these are very easy to put together, even though the instructions are in Japanese. Look, the fingers even move!" (This was before the HG Gunpla came along with the static fingers.) I think by that time, I had read about Gundam in Frederick L. Schodt's Manga Manga book, so I was only minimally familiar with it. I knew it was a hugely popular mecha anime, but not much more than that. I was like, "That's cool and all, but I don't know Gundam much. Wouldn't it be cool if they had Macross models?" He said there are such models, and I was like, "Get outta here!" "No, really!"

So I think I must've found out about Newtype through an issue of Protoculture Addicts and sent off for one of their catalogs. My local hobby store would stock an occasional Gundam kit, but to think that there existed a hobby shop that actually stocked ONLY anime-related model kits! Imagine that! So about that time, I met another anime fan who was several years older than myself, and he said that he had some experience with building Macross models. I saved up for that variable Valkyrie kit and bought it from somewhere, so I am pretty sure that it had to have been Newtype. That guy helped me put it together and helped me get over my intimidation of Japanese instructions.

Part of the excitement of discovering anime back then, as I am sure others can relate to, was discovering that there are others like myself who have also discovered all this neat stuff, and it was my destiny to search out these fellow fans and connect with them. I knew about online services like Delphi, Genie, and Compuserve, but I couldn't afford the monthly fees for that. It wasn't until I discovered BBSes and connecting to FidoNet that I really could experience this fellowship. But just the concept that there was some store somewhere in San Francisco that specialized only in plastic model kits from Japan just blew me away!