The Old School Otaku Lounge

So one of the things I've been doing lately is digging through old sites on the Wayback Machine at archive.org to see how much of what I remember from the 90's still exists. The best resource for this, in terms of urls, is the old anipike.com site in my experience. However, there were a ton of classic pages that never were linked by Anipike, and I thought that a nifty feature going forward might be to list urls for archive.org by series, A to Z, in the way that the old Anipike was organized. Just an idea, I don't know if anyone else would be interested in something like this.

Onto my question: I got out of anime/manga fandom a bit in the early 2000's, not in terms of watching/reading, but more in participating online. Most of the old boards I posted on disappeared, Usenet slowly was dying outside of binaries, and the people I had gotten to know through fansubs gradually fell away too (college, marriage, kids whatever). What that brings me to is this question: What happened with the Anime Web Turnpike? For me, in the late 90's, that was THE hub of activity for new sites, the forum, news, etc. outside of Usenet. And then *poof* it was like a graveyard, and now it appears to be offline altogether. I'm guessing the webmaster (drawing a blank on his name at the moment) lost interest, but even those forums were really hopping. Did it all just get absorbed by ANN, Anime on DVD etc.?

Most of my anime-fan internet time in the 90s was split between anime con message boards, mailing lists like the Psychommu Slamfest or the ACML, and Anime Jump where I wrote the occasional review or column.

There are still some mailing lists working, and I know cons still have message boards and forums, but Anime Jump is long gone. Mike Toole, who ran Anime Jump and who is on this board, now writes a regular feature for ANN.

I never spent that much time digging through the Anipike, but it was a valuable resource in the days before Google was all-encompassing. My gut feeling is that social media like Livejournal and Facebook came into vogue and made online fandom a lot easier and more connected - why make your own website about Sailor Moon when you can join any one of several Sailor Moon fan groups that already exist and are already thriving?

The ANN forums seem to be where the teeming millions of barely literate, furious keyboard warriors wage their fandom battles these days.

davemerrill wrote:Most of my anime-fan internet time in the 90s was split between anime con message boards, mailing lists like the Psychommu Slamfest or the ACML, and Anime Jump where I wrote the occasional review or column.

There are still some mailing lists working, and I know cons still have message boards and forums, but Anime Jump is long gone. Mike Toole, who ran Anime Jump and who is on this board, now writes a regular feature for ANN.

I never spent that much time digging through the Anipike, but it was a valuable resource in the days before Google was all-encompassing. My gut feeling is that social media like Livejournal and Facebook came into vogue and made online fandom a lot easier and more connected - why make your own website about Sailor Moon when you can join any one of several Sailor Moon fan groups that already exist and are already thriving?

The ANN forums seem to be where the teeming millions of barely literate, furious keyboard warriors wage their fandom battles these days.

Thanks for the response! One of the things I've enjoyed about this forum (and the site itself of course), is realizing just how diverse anime/manga fandom was in those days compared to today. It seems like now you have a few huge hubs of activity, whereas it was more of a patchwork quilt back in the 90's. I did read Anime Jump, I just can't remember a heck of a lot about it. For whatever reason, I tended to gravitate more toward bulletin boards, series specific mailing lists and Usenet groups (mainly because of the combo of discussion and binaries). Looking back now, I wish I had gotten more involved in the cons and their respective boards/mailing lists, but ces la vie.

Also, while we're talking about mailing lists, I also wish I hadn't lost a back up I made of posts to the BAMML mailing list, that was dedicated to Bastard!! and Hagiwara, there are almost no good resources dedicated to that series or his other work in English.

davemerrill wrote:I never spent that much time digging through the Anipike, but it was a valuable resource in the days before Google was all-encompassing. My gut feeling is that social media like Livejournal and Facebook came into vogue and made online fandom a lot easier and more connected - why make your own website about Sailor Moon when you can join any one of several Sailor Moon fan groups that already exist and are already thriving?

The ANN forums seem to be where the teeming millions of barely literate, furious keyboard warriors wage their fandom battles these days.

Yeah, and with imageboard websites like Fourchan, Zerochan, Minitokyo, and even Tumblr, the notion of making a web gallery out of your scanned images is long gone, too. Now people just go to one of those places and poke around for images they like, and just repost them ad nauseam. There ARE a few people out there who have domains they've bought for the specific purpose of making a fansite coupled with a message board--http://www.ohtori.nu for Utena is the first that comes to mind, along with http://escaflowne.net for Escaflowne. The late 90s was a boom for people to buy .coms or .nets or whatever that were anime-related, but that seems to be a dying trend as well.

Ben, I would say that it is too much work to do. I read your post a couple of days ago and I tried to find my old anime shrines and all I got was broken geocites and anglefire web page links. I am sure you could really dig threw the archives and find everything. Yet, I think it is unnecessary. As Usamimi has mentioned people copy other peoples work. So it is a better idea is let someone else do the work for you.

Now concerning where did everybody go? It is my opinion they are still out there. With this horrible divorce rate most of them are likely single and the passion never left them. I thought that the passion for anime would leave after a while, but it never does. I think that the old group is out there and you will see them online somewhere in a forum years later. Something inside them will urge them to start looking and you will find them in a comic book store, a convention, or in a forum online somewhere. It is only a matter or time.

davemerrill wrote:I never spent that much time digging through the Anipike, but it was a valuable resource in the days before Google was all-encompassing. My gut feeling is that social media like Livejournal and Facebook came into vogue and made online fandom a lot easier and more connected - why make your own website about Sailor Moon when you can join any one of several Sailor Moon fan groups that already exist and are already thriving?

I spent a ton of time (probably way more than I should have) on Anipike and I'll echo one of the sentiments that while search engines of the time would give you all sorts of results, Anipike was one of THE best places to get started. I kind of regret now that I didn't spend a lot of time on the old BBS around back then. Kind of.

More to Dave's exact point - not only is it easy to join an existing group within a network you're already involved in, there's a much lower barrier to entry if you want to create your own fan page/group. I know that I learned the basics of HTML and cut my teeth with web design making an abundance of [crappy] anime pages/sites. With a lot of the WYSIWYG elements removed now, you can get up and much more quickly than back 15 years ago.

Ben wrote:What happened with the Anime Web Turnpike?

I remember using it even until the early 2000s but at one time or another, I was away from it and came back to a new redesign. It tried to incorporate a lot of features to attempt to stay relevent in a SEO world but I don't think I was interested in them at all. It probably had also grown to a size that was unmanageable in one person's free time and didn't generate the revenue to convince someone to leave a full-time gig and may not have had structure or organization to bring on multiple people to keep it in someone's free time.

As the web gets more insular - more groups spring up on LJ, Facebook and Tumblr - the need for a new Anipike decreases exponentially.

As far as the feature goes, utilizing wayback searches of older fansites, I think putting something together like this would be neat and possibly a good component to this site itself. Wonder what AnimeSennin thinks?

The Anipike was a great and useful tool, but I can't remember the last time I ever looked at it. I remember it having a forum. I miss having anime-specific homepages. Stuff like Webrings were fairly annoying, as so many of those university, Tripod, and Geocities-hosted fan pages would disappear as often as they were put up. I couldn't care less that all of those fluffy anime shrines with no substance have disappeared. Once upon a time, those fan pages looked like this. Yes, some still exist. Wikipedia has also killed a lot of these homepages too, but heck, I still like the charm of old anime-specific pages like this. I never disposed of my BGC Linna shrine. It's a testament to an old bygone era, so I'm not going to take it down. You want information on a series or character? Well, here is page X, and it lists all sorts of information you want and gives you a table of contents. With blogs or image sites, you have to search for hashtags or slowly go through blog posts month by month and whatnot. There's nothing concice in that at all.

So, what I don't like is how blurry blogs have made the fandom. I much prefer a go-to site to find a wealth of information, such as The Mecha Anime Headquarters for tons of information on series, mecha, and models. I can't find it at the moment, but there's a great Fire Emblem fan page that has all sorts of great information on that game series. But while the wikis have centralized a lot of series and made the fandom more focused, it seems to e that blogs have just blurred fandom and made it more elusive.

As for replicating something like the Anipike on this page, that would take way too much time and effort for just one individual to maintain. Broken links, updating links, discovering new series and such... That must have factored into the Anipike's demise.

I get where you're coming from Greg, I just wanted to pick up on one thing: I didn't mean a NEW Anime Web turnpike, I meant a guide to using the Wayback Machine that functioned the same way. And not one person maintaining it, but more in a wiki form that forum users could edit. So in other words, let's say it had a cap saying "This wiki is solely for dead sites made no later than 1999 that are available at archive.org's Wayback Machine". Then I'm playing around, find a bunch of useful old links, and edit the wiki for Gundam or whatever.

Interesting idea. I'm always open to comments/suggestions/criticisms, so keep them coming!


There is currently no wiki-like functionality on the website, but in any case why not start out this idea by creating a thread in the forum? Then anyone could reply to the thread to add sites. Whoever started the thread could keep a running list in the first post of all the sites gathered so far as well, if they wanted to.

AnimeSennin wrote:Interesting idea. I'm always open to comments/suggestions/criticisms, so keep them coming!


There is currently no wiki-like functionality on the website, but in any case why not start out this idea by creating a thread in the forum? Then anyone could reply to the thread to add sites. Whoever started the thread could keep a running list in the first post of all the sites gathered so far as well, if they wanted to.

I will get going on this, I think that's a great idea. I'm going to make an ODF document with some, too, so I don't lose any again. Also, one thing I've noticed revisiting those old sites, is that in the 90's people who had DBZ sites seemed just as interested in reviewing other people's pages as working on their own. Finding Dr. Gero's Laboratory jogged my memory a bit, there was another site called Minnaro's World (I think) I'm looking for now.