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Star Blazers And The Start Of A Fannish Journey

Posted: Sun Feb 20, 2022 7:50 pm
by davemerrill
well, back in 1999 we were going to do a Star Blazers 20th anniversary zine. Walter Amos even wrote a great piece for it all about the experience of seeing Star Blazers for the first time, and how it changed his life. However, that zine never got published and Walter's article never saw the light of day. Until now! Only 23 years late, here's Life in the Before Time: Star Blazers and The Start of a Fannish Journey by Walter Amos!!

https://letsanime.blogspot.com/2022/02/ ... nnish.html

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Re: Star Blazers And The Start Of A Fannish Journey

Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2022 4:46 am
by mbanu
Fantastic stuff! The wait helps in one way, in that you can tell the person who would have read the zine in 1999 and thought anime fandom from 1979 was distant enough from them that it was hard to visualize without help that 1999 is just as far away for modern fans, and they need just as much help as Walter was providing in 1999. Context links all the fans together, old-school, middle-school, and elementary, trying to understand this anime fandom school system we've gone through. :D

Re: Star Blazers And The Start Of A Fannish Journey

Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2022 4:35 pm
by George W
Interesting! This was before I discovered anime (I was a Robotech convert myself) and once I figured out where to get some (Wyvern's web in Florida) and could afford it ($100 and up for a VHS import tape), I started buying.

This is before it hit the mainstream, and you could get it at hobby shops and comic book stores. Fun for me was watching the late Kimberly Yale live translate a movie (Vampire Hunter D) at WindyCon for the entire room. It was enthralling.

But it got better in 1988, when I went to the NASFIC in Phoenix, Arizona. They had the big screen version of Laputa, subtitled. We left the convention center to go across the street to an old movie theater to watch. It was simply incredible - it became the highlight of the entire trip.

Thanks for posting this.

Re: Star Blazers And The Start Of A Fannish Journey

Posted: Fri Feb 25, 2022 1:12 pm
by davemerrill
I do enjoy the stereo effect of looking back at 1999 looking back at 1979. Certainly if I'd published the zine as planned back in the day, it wouldn't have the same effect it does now. Space Battleship Yamato fandom has gone through some changes in the intervening decades, for sure - I definitely remember watching the Matsumoto anime that was coming out in that time period and being distinctly unimpressed, and not having a lot of hope that we'd ever see anything new from the franchise. Glad to be wrong on that count!