The Old School Otaku Lounge

Hi everyone. My name’s Hector from Chicago and I have been an anime fan going on approximately 20 years now.

I was first exposed to anime in the 80’s with original Dragonball when it ran on one of the Hispanic TV stations in Spanish and then a little later on with titles such as Voltron and Robotech. I was too young to know these titles were from Japan much less really care however I do recall realizing there was something different about them that I couldn’t put my finger on at the time.

I truly became aware of anime in the early 90’s. I was at a friend’s house late one night watching TV channel surfing when suddenly we came across Fist of the North Star on a public access channel of all places. The experience I had watching it was almost religious. It turned out this channel was showing anime movies every Friday around midnight from what I eventually found out was the Streamline catalog. In fact they used to run their promo which, to my nostalgic delight, you have posted on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3fQv395RgM

Every Friday I would be glued to the set watching censored anime movies such as Vampire Hunter D, Crying Freeman, 3X3 Eyes, Lupin, and a few others. Of course all things must come to an end and one day they stopped running it.
I didn’t come across anime again for another 4-5 years around my senior year of high school when I became a member at our local Blockbuster store and they had a small anime section which mostly had the same Streamline titles and a few other goodies like Iczer One , Project Ako, Ghost in the Shell, etc.

Around this time I was drawing a lot and started to draw a lot of anime style characters. Sometime after I graduated high school I enrolled in an art school which is where I really became entrenched into anime. I would go to the local media outlet and stare at their huge anime VHS collection (being in school I couldn’t afford to buy much) and our school library had back issues of Animerica. Also it’s where I discovered the Anime Central convention which I first attended in 1998.

Sadly I went alone that first time as I had no other friends who were into anime and actually ended up volunteering at the con which was a great experience. Soon after once I had access to the magical world of the Internet (Anipike anybody?) I linked up with an anime club and went to the following year’s convention with plenty of other anime loving people. ^_^
A lot’s happened in the 12 years since then but still love me some anime.

Ahh, yes. Drawing cartoons in the anime style. I think that's a rite of passage for almost every anime fan.

I've shaken out most of the anime influence when I draw now, but some of the design philosophies still apply, especially when it comes to compositions. One thing the Japanese are great at, is composing a picture. This probably goes back centuries, as ukiyo-e displays many of the same design philosophies as you see today even in anime. Some Japanese film buff once said that during the heyday of Japanese film (around 50s-60s), even the worst Japanese films were at the very least impeccably shot and composed.

When I first enrolled into art school the instructors there shook it out of us early - I guess they didn't want everyone's work looking like crappy Akira Toriyama fanart.

Blockbuster pretty much pushed out all of the smaller video rental stores in Phoenix, Arizona where I am from. There was a small place on the corner that had a cool spot on the wall just for anime, and that's where I started renting shows like Bubblegum Crisis and Area 88. Eventually, Blockbuster started their own anime section, but at least at the ones where I lived, the stupid-ass management decided to integrate all of the anime along with regular movies and such in the late '90s. Thus, Patlabor was sitting next to Patriot Games and such. They also got rid of their science fiction selection, and integrated it with either action or horror. Such a facepalm experience. I have no idea what they were thinking when they did that. It made it far more difficult to find what I wanted to look for, because before then, I was able to just go straight to the anime selection and look for the stuff there. I guess they eventually fixed that problem, because for the past decade, the Blockbusters in Phoenix have had their own anime section.

Anyhow, welcome aboard!

Welcome to the Lounge.

Ender424 wrote:Soon after once I had access to the magical world of the Internet (Anipike anybody?)

Woot, I almost miss things like the Anime Turnpike here in the google era. I love that an aggregator site not only had their own cute mascot, but actually tried to nuture the community with things like their AWESOME trivia contest. (seriously, that thing was incredible and I wish I had placed higher)

Hey Hector, welcome aboard!

Well, the Anime Turnpike is still around, although it is certainly different-looking these days. I'm rather fond of the old-style HTML pages for nostalgic reasons, and that's why I've kept my own pages trapped in a '90s style, for the most part.

greg wrote:Well, the Anime Turnpike is still around

Yeah, I meant more "conceptually" than literally. In its own way it's impressive that it's still around at all (I wish EX the online magazine was still around) but it's pretty much irrelevant nowadays.

Yeah! EX was great! It's strange how it's still up and running. Somebody must've paid for a solid 10 years of domain name registration and hosting fees or something, because it's still online.