The Old School Otaku Lounge

Just finished a new Let's Anime post detailing the twilight world of Japanese-language television programming blocks on UHF TV stations in California, Illinois, and NYC, and the cartoons they broadcast to an America that may have just found what it was looking for, even if it didn't know it was looking for it. It's all happening at Let's Anime!

That was all very interesting. Wonder how many tapes survive? Still lots of stuff I never watched but retained, including some from this article. Others have more I assume. Will it ever get converted over? Who knows at this point...

I agree - ever since I heard of anime being broadcast on UHF stations, I've always wanted to learn more about it but it seemed the information was so scattered, it was hard to get. Especially for someone who was young enough for UHF to still be part of 'regular TV' and not anything special in itself. Great write up as usual!

Very nice article! This is certainly something I've always been interested in, but, as Drew stated, the information wasn't easy to find.

Although I never personally saw subtitled anime on UHF stations, I did occasionally see older dubbed anime titles.

Tried converting some of the old Mpeg 2 caps. Slow going and much larger file sizes as MP4s over the Xvid avis I originally did some years ago. Just dug out a bunch more that I'm tempted to recap since I have much better equipment. Just where to get the time...

I love reading articles about these weird pre-internet programing oddities. I know I've brought up seeing some when I lived in Alaska as a little kid before (in this thread: http://forum.animepast.net/viewtopic.ph ... 017&#p3017 ) but it sounds like the lower 48 got a lot better stuff than what I ended up seeing randomly.

Kame-Sen'nin wrote:Very nice article! This is certainly something I've always been interested in, but, as Drew stated, the information wasn't easy to find.

Although I never personally saw subtitled anime on UHF stations, I did occasionally see older dubbed anime titles.

Yeah. I remember that getting into Dragonball way-back-when, recordings of the KIKU broadcasts were considered some of the best options for subtitled Dragonball. Unfortunately, KIKU didn't have much in the way of subtitled Dragonball Z, causing a lot of people to try and get raws from the International Channel on cable.

_D_, you live[d] in Quebec, right? Didn't CBC (I'M SORRY - RADIO-CANADA) get a number of French dubs of the late 70s/early 80s variety (ALBATOR) from France and broadcast them to fracophone communities? Drew - why would you ask this in a UHF thread?

I ask because of a question more related to the technical question of the UHF band and what qualified UHF stations. I spent a deal of my youth growing up near Pontiac and Detroit, Michigan. There, we were able to get CBC from Windsor, ON, Canada and watch Canadian programming as an alternative to US Americans choice between Big 3/4 networks. But since Windsor was solidly anglophone, I don't remember much in the way of anime that wasn't already available on American TV. Also, CBC Windsor was something like Channel 9, which firmly sat in what I remember as being the standard 13 channels before reaching a UHF band.

Would there have been, due to geographical proximity, French-dubbed anime, broadcast via CBC/Radio-Canada, in border states such as (upstate) New York, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine? Now, those broadcasts wouldn't have been translated (I don't think) or subtitled but it makes me wonder what sort of influence that sort of programming it might have had on a populace that might have eventually stumbled upon Japanese origins of some goofy French cartoon they might have watched after school.

I'm reasonably sure there was some French-Canadian anime broadcasts leaking over the border. I recall, way back in the day, some folk being pretty hepped up on Albator. I wish I could remember which Mediawest*con I was at where someone had the Popy DX Leopardon and a couple episodes of Albator. I think it had to be either 1981, or *maybe* 1979, but no, that would be really pushing it. It can't have been 1980 as the con was in New York and I vividly recall the Albator episodes running in one of the 'usual' rooms at the Lansing Hilton.

Oh God have mercy on me, it's still going on!

http://www.mediawestcon.org/34/mwc34.htm

Oh lord, nothing seems to have changed in all these years.


And I remember those days... http://www.mediawestcon.org/mwchist2.htm

My sister swears that she saw the 1978 Captain Harlock TV series as recently as a few years back on the french CBC. This was about...2007-ish. I'd already moved away from home and was catching up with my studies, though, so I could never verify personally. Even though I was dying to see it (which, of course, finally came true after Discotek got it).

I watched most of The Mysterious Cities of Gold on the french CBC back when I was a teenager.

I can't say I've ever seen subtitled anime broadcast on TV though.

I never saw Albator on the French CBC (aka "Radio Canada"), but I did catch French-language episodes of the 1980 Astro Boy ("Astro, Le Petit Robot") series in the 2006-2007 time frame, on that channel.

APTN was screening episodes of some what-I-assume-was-French cartoon series about what I can only describe as dawn-of-Man tribal caveman adventure, at one point in '04-'05. Had a very "bande dessinee" look to it.