The Old School Otaku Lounge

Hi, my name is Laurine. This site recently showed up through random Googling. (Hi Dave M, Ken W, Doug O; someday I'll visit Canada again.) Allakazam the Great was the first anime I saw and loved, am still a big Monkey King fan. In the early 1970s Fred Patten ran a bookstore in Long Beach, where I mail ordered ninja manga. I still enjoy anime, mostly older shows, but don't watch it as frequently. Fave old anime includes Hokuto no Ken, Panzer World Galient, Video Warrior Laserion, Escaflowne, G Gundam, Rurouni Kenshin, Xabungle, to name a few. I still have the videotapes with lots of old Japanese shows, but don't know how good the video quality is.

1980 - San Francisco Japantown and L.A. Little Tokyo were big attractions for finding anime soundtracks and giant robot souvenirs. I still have a Shogun Warrior figure that I glued together back then. In 1977 I was at an L.A. science fiction convention, LosCon, watching giant robot anime with folks who officially started the C/FO a month later. Fred Patten persuaded me to join the C/FO at the 1980 Westercon. I started C/FO Sacramento in 1983 with some subtitled Captain Harlock episodes from a San Francisco Bay Area channel and raw anime episodes sent by my friend stationed in Okinawa. Anime Sacramento still meets a few times a year and is the oldest still existing anime club in North/Central California. The latest Anime Sacramento showing was in November 2012. Seven people came, from as far as San Jose. We watched Tiger & Bunny episodes and the recent Dragon Age animated feature.

In 1985 I started trading with a Tokyo penpal for raw anime episodes. Later a Hawaiian penpal sent subtitled Hokuto no Ken episodes off local tv there. I traded copies to fans for more anime episodes (raw and fan-subbed), OAVs, and movies, which I spread around to fans all over the country and a few people in Canada. In 1987 Osamu Tezuka came to town to give a talk at CSUS, and did a quick Kimba sketch for me. Also in 1987 I started the bi-monthly Anime Sacramento Newsletter, which went out via snail mail. Now it's an email-zine, with anime news but mostly news about upcoming Asian action films. (If I mention Aging Otaku Lounge enough times in the newsletter, maybe more of the aging otaku I know will join this forum.) In 1985 I got to visit Okinawa, picked up anime OST records and bought Dagger of Kamui on videotape. In 1988 I went on the Ladera anime tour to Kyoto and Tokyo, including Tatsunoko and Nippon Sunrise studios. That time I bought anime-theme CDs, while others on the tour stocked up on laser disks. I still listen to my CDs; do they still play their LDs?

In summer 1993 I got to meet in person some penpals at the two Bay Area anime conventions, Anime Expo (Oakland) and Anime America (San Jose). In 2007 I went to the World SF Convention in Yokohama, got to meet Japanese anime fans and buy their fanzines. Akira Kushida gave a concert at the convention. When he sang his tokusatsu and 1980s anime theme songs, the audience all sang along (me too). The San Diego Comic-Con in July 2012 included a San Diego C/FO reunion. James Long, Alec Orrock, B.D. Banzai were there. Even Mark Merlino put in an appearance. I enjoyed listening to their stories of Southern California anime fandom. Every year I get to FanimeCon in San Jose and at least one of the local Sac-Anime conventions.

Hi Laurine! Good to hear from you again, and welcome!

You are forever awesome to me for having a "Panda & the Magic Serpent" (Hakujaden) avatar!

Hi Laurine! Any idea (yet) what of the old KIKU stuff you still have? Most of the tapes I got from that period have aged badly and I'm trying to transfer them as quickly as I can before they are lost forever. A never ending battle. Been at it several years off and on but the pile hardly ever goes down. Ditto with my Dr. Who collection, all the convention footage I shot, early fansubs I was involved with, much old TV recordings for several sites, printed materials, etc. I really despair that it will just vanish with time. But I'm still at it. At least I have my own house now so no worries it will just get thrown out. That happened 2 years ago when I moved from the old place following the death of my mother. I lost 2/3rds of my stuff as there simply was no more room for it in the new place. That said, I managed to keep all the tapes (over 7,000 of them) for now.

I haven't been anywhere in 12 years. Last I saw you was at the Chicon in 2000. I was unable to attend the 2012 one, but I'd love to make a trip to California again. Perhaps next year.

Hope you are well.

Doug

whitesnake wrote:Hi, my name is Laurine. This site recently showed up through random Googling.

Hi Laurine. Welcome.

Your comment just made me remember something that had been on the back of my mind for a while. How DO people find their way to this site? It's sort of funny to think of a bunch of older anime fans just typing "aging anime fans" into google in a random moment of anime fan introspection.

llj wrote:

whitesnake wrote:Hi, my name is Laurine. This site recently showed up through random Googling.

Hi Laurine. Welcome.

Your comment just made me remember something that had been on the back of my mind for a while. How DO people find their way to this site? It's sort of funny to think of a bunch of older anime fans just typing "aging anime fans" into google in a random moment of anime fan introspection.

I sought out a place like this specifically, mainly because I'm friggin' 34 and it's depressing now that everyone and their dog likes anime, but they've never heard of the anime that I actually like.

Welcome to the forum Laurine! I found this forum by way of Google also! And I am a very big Monkey King fan as well~ :3

Welcome to the Lounge.

Wow, that is quite a history! Plus you got to meet Tezuka Osamu before he died. Welcome to the forum. I think I must have missed something, but what does C/FO stand for?

Hi again, I'm really happy to finally be here.

Since whitesnake is my user name on another forum, to be consistent here, I use the avatar picture from Panda and the Magic Serpent, which is the white snake story. I found it on dvd in a dollar store several years ago. But the anime feature is one I enjoyed watching over 30 years ago on videotape. Easy enough to find an image from the movie, cut out a piece and shrink it. Other forums I joined let the members use bigger avatar pictures.

Doug, I still have all my KIKU videos, just don't know how good a condition they're in. The printed materials (old pro- and fanzines, C/FO apazines) are all still in good condition, packed tightly in boxes or crammed onto a bookshelf. 7,000 tapes? wow! A lot more than I ever collected. I still go to a few conventions, San Diego and Chicago earlier this year. No more San Diego - too much trouble to get membership and too crowded. Next summer - San Antonio. Just let me know if/when you come to California. That last time, I was at work. Now I'm retired.

The random Googling must have been on the word "otaku". Always nice to meet another Monkey King fan. I have the 4-book translation of Journey to the West by Anthony Yu, a Chinese graphic novel, random tv episodes, movie versions from Japan, HK, Vietnam, and the 1970s Monkey Magic episodes from Japan, dubbed in pigeon English.

I think I used to know one or two people in Central Anime, way back when.

C/FO - the Cartoon Fantasy Organization, the first anime club in the U.S., formed in May 1977 in Los Angeles, and it sprouted chapters all over the U.S., before crashing back to a few clubs in 1987. (Fan politics, seems to happen to just about every group.) c_fo.tripod.com is the current website for the club, which continues to meet monthly.