What caused the C/FO to fall apart?

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mbanu
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What caused the C/FO to fall apart?

Post by mbanu »

I see a lot of fingers pointed to Randall Stukey of C/FO San Antonio, but it seems strange that a national organization spanning multiple states and even countries could come crashing down due to the efforts of one man by himself.

Is there a larger story here? Was the disbanding of the C/FO inevitable, once groups like rec.arts.anime replaced the APA for communication purposes? I know there were a few "nation-building" anime groups in the late 80s/early 90s like Cal-Animage, but it seems like by then the era of that style of anime club had passed...

So what's the story?
mbanu: What's between Old School and New School?
runesaint: Hmmm. "Middle School", perhaps?
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Re: What caused the C/FO to fall apart?

Post by SteveH »

mbanu wrote:I see a lot of fingers pointed to Randall Stukey of C/FO San Antonio, but it seems strange that a national organization spanning multiple states and even countries could come crashing down due to the efforts of one man by himself.

Is there a larger story here? Was the disbanding of the C/FO inevitable, once groups like rec.arts.anime replaced the APA for communication purposes? I know there were a few "nation-building" anime groups in the late 80s/early 90s like Cal-Animage, but it seems like by then the era of that style of anime club had passed...

So what's the story?
Short answer: We won, anime became common. :)

It's true. Stukey pretty much killed the C/Fo with political shenanigans. I was there first hand in the trenches. When the Blacks bowed out of producing their groundbreaking club magazine the C/Fo pretty much lost the one thing that made the 'national headquarters' valuable. The other, 'water empire' aspect of the club was access to anime, the ability to get dupes made of treasured Japanese cartoons. As more and more people, the clubs on the East coast, developed and worked their own contacts in Japan, invested their own money (instead of everyone waiting for James Long to buy a Laser Disc box set my god the money that man spent, and I think still spends on discs...) and started making their own 'tape cloning' groups.

The old rules were kind of draconian. Basically you had to have something to trade to get anything. I *think* there was a deal that if your chapter had some specific number of paying (to the national org) members you had access to tapes because then this was servicing the needs of the membership.

I think some of the nonsense was tied to 'old media' rules and regulations regarding rental of film prints and the culture of the underground 'bootleg movie' fandom.

But really, Dave has talked about this in greater detail and his personal journey from fan to SMOF (which, like Washington, he turned aside the crown for the good of the world and now he wanders the land dropping SCIENCE on people at Anime Hell events and otherwise fighting crime at small town antique shows :) ) Once Suncoast and Best Buy started stocking Akira on VHS it was all done with clubs on the whole. Clubs existed because one person had tapes. Now anyone with $20 could have tapes. Then came the internet and who even needs tapes?

That's my view.
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Re: What caused the C/FO to fall apart?

Post by _D_ »

James Long "now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time" (he says in his best Alec Guinness/Obiwan Kenobi voice. Say 'hello' to him for me f you see him...
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Re: What caused the C/FO to fall apart?

Post by SteveH »

_D_ wrote:James Long "now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time" (he says in his best Alec Guinness/Obiwan Kenobi voice. Say 'hello' to him for me f you see him...
Hahhaahahaah sorry, I realized the way I worded things it may have implied some kind of closeness or something. No, he's way far away from me, I knew of him originally as a guy who bought stuff for Ardith, then I learned he was the C/Fo tape librarian. I met him briefly at World Con '82 in L.A., he didn't have time for a lowly doof like me but I can look back at him walking around in Happi coat and wooden practice sword and say 'weeaboo' :)

(I do not think the various Japanese guests and attendees were very impressed)
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Re: What caused the C/FO to fall apart?

Post by SteveH »

'84 1984. Worldcon in Los Angeles (actually Anaheim, down the road from Disneyland).

See what happens when I type too fast? I shave two years off a convention. sheesh. :)
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Re: What caused the C/FO to fall apart?

Post by davemerrill »

what caused the C/FO to fall apart? Hmm.

(full disclosure: I was a national C/FO officer for a little while before it went away. It's probably my fault.)

Short answer is that the operations of the national club wound up in the hands of the San Antonio chapter, and the San Antonio chapter looked at everything it had to do, which was to process memberships, maintain a directory of members, copy tapes for members, publish some sort of regular magazine, and have its OWN local meetings... and the San Antonio chapter said, this is a lot of work, what's the point?

At the time there were chapters of C/FO in cities across America, but most of these chapters had very few members who were actual dues-paying members of the national organization. The bylaws were changed and the requirements for chapters were made more stringent - chapters had to have a certain number of its members be paid-up members of the National organization, as I recall. Suddenly the national C/FO lost a lot of chapters and wasn't so national any more.

There is still a C/FO that has regular meetings in the Los Angeles area, but it is no longer any sort of national anything.

Randall Stukey was in charge of the San Antonio chapter, and he became the de facto head of the national organization. Prior to San Antonio handling things, the club had sort of been split between official officers in LA and the Orlando chapter producing the magazine, and these two groups didn't communicate very well. Remember this was the 1980s, before unlimited cell phone plans or the internet beyond hobbyist BBSes. Both the LA crew and the Orlando crew ditched more or less at the same time and everybody was all like "we can't let the C/FO die" while also saying "oh, I can't run it, let somebody else do the work."

Stukey had a deep love for running things 'by the book' and the C/FO under his authority published both a regular fanzine and a business zine full of bylaws and proposals and minutes. There were elections and officers and Robert's Rules Of Order was quoted. One example; when AnimEigo released MADOX O1 on VHS, the first subtitled uncut anime home video release in the US, rather than be positive about this development, Stukey wrote three pages on how AnimEigo's MRSP was too high and they were obviously ripping people off. AnimEigo responded with a three page rebuttal and Stukey rebutted THAT rebuttal for a couple of pages. This what what C/FO dues were paying for at that point. Stukey was later involved in a lawsuit when he wrote a newsletter article calling a San Francisco couple "video pirates".

Anyway, the vote to make chapter membership stricter pretty much ended the national club, and around the country people realized that they did not need this kind of national club at all, whatsoever, their local clubs could get the job done, and other outfits like Anime Hasshin would fill their newsletter/tape trading needs very well.

Also: this was not a very short answer at all.
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Re: What caused the C/FO to fall apart?

Post by SteveH »

"San Fran couple/video pirates"

Would that have been the Hannafens? I probably spelled that wrong.

It's interesting how the C/Fo implosion happened about the same time as the EDC/Star Blazers Fan Club shenanigans.

I can't think of any smart way to compile all that into some grand observation.
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Re: What caused the C/FO to fall apart?

Post by DKop »

davemerrill wrote:
Stukey had a deep love for running things 'by the book' and the C/FO under his authority published both a regular fanzine and a business zine full of bylaws and proposals and minutes. There were elections and officers and Robert's Rules Of Order was quoted. One example; when AnimEigo released MADOX O1 on VHS, the first subtitled uncut anime home video release in the US, rather than be positive about this development, Stukey wrote three pages on how AnimEigo's MRSP was too high and they were obviously ripping people off. AnimEigo responded with a three page rebuttal and Stukey rebutted THAT rebuttal for a couple of pages. This what what C/FO dues were paying for at that point. Stukey was later involved in a lawsuit when he wrote a newsletter article calling a San Francisco couple "video pirates".

Anyway, the vote to make chapter membership stricter pretty much ended the national club, and around the country people realized that they did not need this kind of national club at all, whatsoever, their local clubs could get the job done, and other outfits like Anime Hasshin would fill their newsletter/tape trading needs very well.

Also: this was not a very short answer at all.
Was that your or someone else about a year ago or so that scanned that write up and put that on Twitter? I believe I have images of that on my phone that I saved because it was so dog gone interesting to read about it. Even to this day, the things Robert has said back then is what he would say today, and why would he change it, he still runs the same company as he did when Madox came out while most of everyone faded away.
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Re: What caused the C/FO to fall apart?

Post by davemerrill »

Steve: Yeah, that was the Hannifens. They were Bay Area fans who ran a local club ( I think Carl Horn's first anime club meeting was theirs) and they'd copy tapes for people, charging a couple bucks per tape for "handling fee". To Stukey's mind this constituted "video piracy", and he felt a club newsletter was the best place to put this forth.

Dustin: I did post those newsletter excerpts featuring the debate between Stukey and Woodhead on Twitter. I found them while digging through old C/FO newsletters and was just stunned at the sheer... I don't know what you'd call it, hubris or entitlement or chutzpah or whatever, that AnimEigo would come into the industry and do exactly what fans had been asking for, and all Stukey could do was handwave up some completely bogus reason to complain about it.

And that's the bigger picture about why the C/FO collapsed, was that to make it work, people all over the country had to spend a lot of free time writing letters and making APA contributions and writing newsletter articles and spending a lot of time at the post office and the local Kinko's, the whole time dealing with people all over the country, some of whom were easy to work with, and others who were not - and there were people all over the country who were difficult, not just Texas. Dealing with complaints from members because the magazine was late or didn't have enough material in it. Dealing with queries about tape copying, which meant more trips to the post office. Dealing with the people who were all excited about helping out and then would vanish and never be heard from again.

Add to this the normal regular daily life stuff - school, work, family, pets, vacations, laundry, groceries, any other hobbies you might have felt like having. A lot of people burned out quickly. What I did, and what a lot of others did, was to figure out what level of participation they were capable of, and to only participate at that level, and to learn to say "sorry, nope" when asked to participate further. Keeping a national club alive was more work than anybody was willing to commit to, and I don't blame anybody for that.
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Re: What caused the C/FO to fall apart?

Post by davemerrill »

and yeah Steve, part of the EDC "shenanigans" was Stukey again - the EDC's yearly zine "Nova" was late, and Stukey was like, hey, I paid for my Nova, where is it? And he complained a lot, way more than his ten dollars worth. It caused a lot of friction and stress, way way out of proportion to what was at stake - 80 pages of bad fan art and Yamato fanfiction - and at the heart of it was, I believe, Stukey seeing the EDC club as a loose, barely organized thing run by two or three people without any oversight, and that offended his Robert's Rules Of Order sensibilities, which is that every single organization everywhere should have elected officers and posted rules and parliamentary procedures, all the time.

As a member of both the EDC and the C/FO at the time, I was in contact with pretty much every party in this situation, and I saw it as a big fat waste of time. "Fan Politics" we called it.

Another story; my pal Scott went out to LA in 1987 to catch the premiere of "Star Quest" (the English dub of "Wings Of Honneamise') and he managed to catch a C/FO meeting out there. As he tells it, fully half of the meeting was taken up with a vote on whether or not to have a vote on what kind of cake to get for their upcoming anniversary meeting. That's right, a vote on having a vote. At a stupid Japanese cartoon club meeting!

This is why, when the C/FO collapsed and the chapters just turned into local clubs, that our new Atlanta club was determined to not have any "bylaws" or any of that nonsense. We're running a club, our meetings are once a month, it costs $5 a year, show of hands as to what we're gonna watch this month, if you don't like it, start your own.
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