Gunso's intro
Posted: Fri Aug 24, 2012 7:33 pm
Hi, Gunso here. I just stumbled across this board looking for other old anime information and thought it looked like an interesting place to hang out. I have been full on otaku for close to two decades now, but wish I had sooner.
Going back as far as I can recall, I remember thinking there was something different about some of the "cartoons" I liked more than others like _Mysterious Cities of Gold_ and _Noozles_. I don’t recall any other such instances of American TV releases, so I now leave the 80s behind and jump into the 90s. In 1993, I was in high school and wandered into a computer lab to find one of my friends playing with a device on one of them that did something amazing -- it could actually take input from a VCR and do things such as take snapshots or very small, choppy video clips. Anyway, ignoring my geeky instincts to drool over the amazing technology, I was more curious as to what the video was - a girl animated in a very intriguing way. I asked about it and learned about this anime thing for the first time. After he finished taking snapshots of this girl, he let me borrow the tape of Project A-ko, which I watched in amazement.
I returned the tape to him, after making a copy, so he gave me some more to try out. The next ones were Bubblegum Crisis, Akira, and Wicked City. BGC was my favorite then and remains my most re-watched of all time. I still have my original copies of his tapes somewhere (themselves copies of those he rented), my own legit VHS releases, and the DVDs.
Around this time I made the leap from text-only Internet with email, telnet, gopher and archie into a full dialup connection and a web browser... So first thing I did was go to Yahoo (when it was really an index site - there weren’t search engines as we know them today) and search for "anime".. Hundreds of hours and megabytes were consumed with downloading pictures and any possible information.
This is before the dot-com boom, so the way I obtained some of my first real purchased tapes was by emailing AnimEigo (they were still operating from a CompuServe email address at the time) and requesting their price list. What a world that was, no web-based catalogs.
I should mention that I had been living my whole life in a small coastal town in Oregon. The only retail locations with anime were a good 5-hour drive away until an On Cue music/video chain store opened there around '98 or '99.
I also got on the ANIME echo on FidoNet and proceeded to read every single one of those 300+ messages a day that came through it; absorbing anime knowledge by osmosis. FidoNet was still very active at the time, even with the rising popularity of the Internet - though the two had yet to meld into one. FidoNet was also easier to find people to trade fansub tapes.
Sailor Moon was then in its first run on American network TV, so I set my VCR to record it every morning. I did get up to watch while recording the first handful of episodes, but in the end my sleepiness overcame my otakuness (my friends know me more for sleeping than anything else) and I just started setting the timer to watch later. So, there I was, my afterschool routine was to start my FidoNet point mailer, rewind Sailor Moon, watch it, then go read the day’s ramblings from the rest of the world’s English-speaking otaku.
Continuing on into college, we setup the first anime club at our community college. We did the things such clubs always do, sit around watching and/or talking about anime, recruiting (unsuccessfully) at club day, etc. It was basically the same small group of us that had been together since high school.
I ended up joining the military (Air Force) at the tail end of 1999. I, naturally, put down all the bases in Japan for where I’d like to be stationed. We call it a "dream sheet" because that’s all it is - they try to accommodate, if possible, but no guarantees at all. So, during my time stationed in Virginia, I spent loads of money on anime DVDs, going to conventions, etc. Ah, good ol’ DVDs, some good and some bad came from those things - first to come to mind, though, is the end of overpricing the subtitled releases, since sub and dub were now in one retail unit.
Long story short (why do people always say that after the story has gone on for a long while?) I am still in the Air Force, just starting my second tour in Japan (also been stationed in Korea twice, Texas once, and deployed to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Iraq twice) with my partner joining me in a couple months, who I met on my previous tour here - another otaku with whom I can complain about what the kids these days watch and how they shouldn’t complain about their fansubs being a couple days "late" when we used to have to wait YEARS for them.
So that's my story and how I ended up living in Misawa, Japan, home to almost nothing anime-related. That's why Genshiken's Ogiue moved to Tokyo from here.
Going back as far as I can recall, I remember thinking there was something different about some of the "cartoons" I liked more than others like _Mysterious Cities of Gold_ and _Noozles_. I don’t recall any other such instances of American TV releases, so I now leave the 80s behind and jump into the 90s. In 1993, I was in high school and wandered into a computer lab to find one of my friends playing with a device on one of them that did something amazing -- it could actually take input from a VCR and do things such as take snapshots or very small, choppy video clips. Anyway, ignoring my geeky instincts to drool over the amazing technology, I was more curious as to what the video was - a girl animated in a very intriguing way. I asked about it and learned about this anime thing for the first time. After he finished taking snapshots of this girl, he let me borrow the tape of Project A-ko, which I watched in amazement.
I returned the tape to him, after making a copy, so he gave me some more to try out. The next ones were Bubblegum Crisis, Akira, and Wicked City. BGC was my favorite then and remains my most re-watched of all time. I still have my original copies of his tapes somewhere (themselves copies of those he rented), my own legit VHS releases, and the DVDs.
Around this time I made the leap from text-only Internet with email, telnet, gopher and archie into a full dialup connection and a web browser... So first thing I did was go to Yahoo (when it was really an index site - there weren’t search engines as we know them today) and search for "anime".. Hundreds of hours and megabytes were consumed with downloading pictures and any possible information.
This is before the dot-com boom, so the way I obtained some of my first real purchased tapes was by emailing AnimEigo (they were still operating from a CompuServe email address at the time) and requesting their price list. What a world that was, no web-based catalogs.
I should mention that I had been living my whole life in a small coastal town in Oregon. The only retail locations with anime were a good 5-hour drive away until an On Cue music/video chain store opened there around '98 or '99.
I also got on the ANIME echo on FidoNet and proceeded to read every single one of those 300+ messages a day that came through it; absorbing anime knowledge by osmosis. FidoNet was still very active at the time, even with the rising popularity of the Internet - though the two had yet to meld into one. FidoNet was also easier to find people to trade fansub tapes.
Sailor Moon was then in its first run on American network TV, so I set my VCR to record it every morning. I did get up to watch while recording the first handful of episodes, but in the end my sleepiness overcame my otakuness (my friends know me more for sleeping than anything else) and I just started setting the timer to watch later. So, there I was, my afterschool routine was to start my FidoNet point mailer, rewind Sailor Moon, watch it, then go read the day’s ramblings from the rest of the world’s English-speaking otaku.
Continuing on into college, we setup the first anime club at our community college. We did the things such clubs always do, sit around watching and/or talking about anime, recruiting (unsuccessfully) at club day, etc. It was basically the same small group of us that had been together since high school.
I ended up joining the military (Air Force) at the tail end of 1999. I, naturally, put down all the bases in Japan for where I’d like to be stationed. We call it a "dream sheet" because that’s all it is - they try to accommodate, if possible, but no guarantees at all. So, during my time stationed in Virginia, I spent loads of money on anime DVDs, going to conventions, etc. Ah, good ol’ DVDs, some good and some bad came from those things - first to come to mind, though, is the end of overpricing the subtitled releases, since sub and dub were now in one retail unit.
Long story short (why do people always say that after the story has gone on for a long while?) I am still in the Air Force, just starting my second tour in Japan (also been stationed in Korea twice, Texas once, and deployed to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Iraq twice) with my partner joining me in a couple months, who I met on my previous tour here - another otaku with whom I can complain about what the kids these days watch and how they shouldn’t complain about their fansubs being a couple days "late" when we used to have to wait YEARS for them.
So that's my story and how I ended up living in Misawa, Japan, home to almost nothing anime-related. That's why Genshiken's Ogiue moved to Tokyo from here.