did you, would you, could you, anime club?

[davemerrill]

There was a discussion on the Twitter last week about anime clubs, ranging from goofy stories of the goofiest things that happened back in the 80s and 90s when we were doing the anime club thing, and there was also some halfway wistful discussion of missing the social aspects of the anime club experience, the difficulties of carving out time and space in our adult lives that such a thing would require, and other matters.

For myself, a big reason we started our anime club in the 80s was that evangelical fervor of making Japanese animation available to anyone who wanted to watch it, of taking this rare thing and making it accessible. I made a lot of lifelong friends through that anime club and the subsequent conventions and fandoms that came out of it.

Of course today, anime is much easier to obtain and after a decade or so of Akira, Sailor Moon, Pokemon, and assorted pop culture breakthroughs it's no longer a weird foreign thing you have to be in a club to get. But is "anime club", in terms of a social group that gathers to enjoy Japanese cartoons, is that a thing we miss? Is it something we'd do if we could?

For my part, I think it would be kinda cool to have somewhere to gather on a semi-regular basis with a decent AV system and decent seating to watch cartoons and socialize. Screen a movie, have coffee and donuts, that kind of thing. But at the same time, I ran an anime club and I'm never doing THAT again. My experience was that all the work had to be done by one or two people. It was a monthly obligation towards a room full of largely silent fans who'd never give the club officers feedback, except to complain.

And then of course, the fact is, I wouldn't be interested in watching most of what would be shown at a modern "anime club" meeting. Factor in that I, or others my age, would likely be the oldest person present in a room full of teenagers, which is always kinda creepy. I certainly no longer have the need to proselytize, and these days I kind of want to be able to have some control over who I'm socializing with. And I don't have a weekend a month to throw at sitting around watching cartoons, as fun as that would be.

Do you miss the anime clubs? Would you go to an anime club nowadays? Would you start an anime club? Or are you fine watching anime at home, where you can control who shows up and how many of your cookies they eat?

[DKop]

The last anime club I went too was set up at this local university down the road where I lived. They only meet on Sunday afternoons and I went to a few meetings before my work schedule had me work on Sunday afternoons. Needless to say, once my schedule changed a couple of months later, I really didn't go back to it. Long story short, the club feel apart about a year or so later from what I gather.

The only time I watch anime with other people than myself is with either my girlfriend when she comes over to my apartment or when I bring stuff to a buddies house every so often and say "Ok, here's what I got, time to get drunk and watch anime." The only time I felt that I was in some setting where the crowed was larger than 2 people that I liked at the time was back in high school, where someone would record the last couple of episodes of G Gundam from Toonami and watch it at the school AV tower, or someone would bring a Excel Saga DVD and watch it on a laptop at the time. Actually I did that back in the Fall of 2014, when a friend of mine at school would meet up with me and we went through Evangelion from September to about Thanksgiving, then I found a way to stream End of Eva to complete her Eva series experience.

So for me to be in an official anime club like your experience Dave is something I probably won't experience in my lifetime the way the things are now, and to me thats kinda sad. In a way Dave, I wouldn't mind experiencing what you went through. But since I won't get that chance physically, reading about it on your blog tells that experience very well. I think it was Dawn that mentioned something about us getting together online and having some kind of club style meeting that way, which in our cases would be the best option. It's not gonna have the physical human element of us stinking up a room after a 6 hour marathon of an anime show, but at least with us communicating and giving some kind of commentary would still bring in that human element. The only thing I would like to be good at is bringing stuff to the table, but I think everyone can do that part. Dave if you wanna bring Harlock or Yamato movies to the meeting im game.

[davemerrill]

it's weird and futuristic, I guess, but it does feel like these days, meeting and socializing online is way more likely to happen than any sort of anime 'club'. Which is fine; the times I've been involved in group watch/stream/chats have been really fun and positive.

Myself, I haven't been to an anime club meeting in at least ten years. The Atlanta club I was involved with was called 'Anime X' - that's the one that succeeded the C/FO Atlanta club - and around 1999-2000 the founders turned it over to new people, because of the increasing availability of anime videos via the internet, and because we all had stuff we needed to do Saturdays, like AWA, and because I was getting telephone calls at my work from the library to complain about the club members who were hanging out in the library parking lot for hours after the meeting was supposed to be over.

The new club officers kept it going for a year or so but eventually it just stopped happening. I think most of the people involved just started meeting at each other's homes to play video games. When we moved up to Toronto there was an anime club meeting at University Of Toronto that some friends of mine were involved with, but not being a UofT student or alumni, I'd feel pretty weird just showing up, and anyways, they really weren't screening anything I was interested in watching.

These days I have two friends who come over to our place fairly regularly to watch movies, sometimes anime (we watched all of Yamato 2199 over the course of a year or so). But that's pretty much the extent of my presentation of anime to people in a non-convention setting. My dream would be to have some kind of space like the old Toronto Underground Cinema used to have, and set up a projector and screen crazy 60s cartoon features every three months or so to whoever felt like showing up. There's a guy in Toronto named Reg Hart who shows 16mm films in his living room, so it's not like there isn't a precedent. That, to me, would be more satisfying than a regular club.

[AVHodgson]

Would I attend a meeting of an anime club at all? Fat chance, really. My tastes and the tastes of most anime clubs are so different it'd never work.

I've had better success showing classic anime to friends, which has, admittedly, been limited to showing people Ringing Bell and The Brave Frog to shock them. I've been thinking of getting someone to watch the Toei Little Mermaid as well, and maybe even finding a copy of Jack and the Witch to see what that'll do...

[usamimi]

I was prez of an Anime Club in my high school days & it was....a mixed bag. I'd try to show universally well-liked stuff (Ghibli films that hadn't been released here yet, movies & short oavs, ect) and I'd still have most people choosing to socialise or goof off rather than watch stuff or help out. A story I often tell is how, in my last year there, I got a fansub vhs of the first Pokemon film, and figured I'd do a showing of it for laughs....it was the ONLY TIME everyone shut up & paid their full attention. I was amused & kinda shocked it took POKEMON to make these high schoolers happy.

As for an anime club now? Well, if it was something like a circle of friends or people I knew & we weren't too differing in ages...maybe?? It might be a fun way to see stuff I might not have heard of, but at the same time I know there's plenty of stuff I wouldn't wanna sit through, so I guess it would all boil down to who was involved. I dunno if I'd ever want to be in charge of one again, either.it's a lot of work with not much to show for it if the people there don't help or complain constantly.

[Akage]

When I was in my senior year of high school, we got some new art teacher who really wanted to create an anime club. And, of course, being very opportunistic and feeling that creating and being the president of the club by default would be the icing on my already stellar college resume, I went for it.

The club really didn't go anywhere. The male art teacher was very attractive, so the only people who joined the club were female students who spent their entire time throwing themselves at him. He didn't know what to do, had no idea as to how to run a club, and the club sort of imploded on its own. Not that that bothered me; I had already sent off my transcripts by then.

I had a similar experience with Pokémon, though. I had just began college when the show was being aired, so during breaks, I would watch it on the communal TV as I did not have one in my room. One by one, other students would drop by, wonder what I was watching, and become addicted to it. When the first Pokémon movie was released in the US, a large group of us made sure we were there for the first showing.

As for anime clubs now, occasionally I show up for some activity I find on Meetup, but my work schedule and the convention season keep me busy. I'm usually working every weekend, so that makes getting together with others a lot harder.

[davemerrill]

One of the common experiences mentioned by everybody who ran an anime club was how unresponsive the club members were. I can remember myself standing in front of the room with two tapes, asking the crowd which one they wanted to see next, and getting absolutely nothing in response, just blank stares.

A friend of mine who ran a club in Ohio told this story; in the late 90s the officers decided they were going to step down, and they wrote a notice in the club newsletter for a few months running about how they were stepping down and that if the membership wanted the club to continue, somebody in the membership needed to step up and take over the operations of the club. The final meeting came and nobody had come forward. So the officers got up and said "well, this is the last meeting, we're done." It's at that point that the members suddenly came to life. "What do you mean, this is it?"

I understand that with an anime club there were a lot of members who didn't know Project A-Ko from Devilman or whatever, and trusted the club officers to curate the programming, and that there are members who can't haul TVs or arrange meeting spaces or handle tape libraries. But the kind of blank-eyed nobody-home looks I'd get were absolutely demoralizing.

With the Anime X club (1990-1999), the group of people playing video games in the back of the room went from one person to three people to ten or twelve people huddled around the table in the back of the meeting room, playing PSX and Sega games. They'd bring their own TVs and backpacks full of systems and games. At some points the video games were louder than the anime. I realize now what we should have done from the start was to prohibit video games entirely. But we didn't want to be 'the bad guys'.

And seriously, it smelled REALLY BAD in that room. I'd be in there to open the room up and set up the TV and it wasn't bad, and then after an hour or so of crowded fanboys crowding in the room, I'd go out for a drink of water, and then I'd come back in and the stench was pummelling, especially in the summer. Prospective new members would walk into the room, take two breaths, and turn around and leave, and I don't blame them.

Towards the end of the club, another club at Emory University got in touch with us to talk about combining our two clubs. Emory has a great meeting hall with a theater style screening room that the Dr. Who club used in the 80s, and we were kind of excited about maybe getting to meet in such a great space. We had one 'combined' meeting, and during the course of the meeting it turned out that the Emory club thought that our anime club and AWA were the same organization (they were not) and that proceeding from that false premise, that we could help them pay for the use of their meeting space and that we could help get them Japanese anime guests for their own events. Neither of those things happened.

FUN DR WHO CLUB STORY: the Dr Who club met at Emory for years. Years and years. Years after all the Emory students in the club had graduated and after their Faculty advisors had retired. The club just... kept on meeting in the same space, month after month, and the University just assumed they had permission. One day somebody at Emory decided to check up on who was sponsoring this Dr. Who club, and that's when their Emory meetings stopped. The end.

[DKop]

Yea, the part of video games I would ban from the start as rule numero uno "if" I ever ran a club. I can understand that to be a way to get people to come since anime fans are gamers, but when your name states your an anime club, you need to stick to that.

I have had the idea of doing an anime club at the university I got to (Anderson University), but the thing is I know some of the "nerds" at that school, and frankly I kinda don't want to be around them or in the same space. Since I have that kind of mindset, that means I don't have it in me to run a club since I want certain people to join, and that isn't right. If someone else is going to run it, I would put in titles for people to watch along whatever they had lined up, just to see how they would react to it.

I guess making this forum as an online anime club wouldn't be a bad idea to try out. Hey if after one online meeting it doesn't work out, better it be that than it to go on and eventually destroy our communication on the forums. I have seen that sorta happen before.

[davemerrill]

I know there were other anime fans at my university when I was there, but the tiny bit of awareness I had of them, mostly out of the corner of my eye during Japanese class, was enough to confirm my suspicions that I didn't want to be in an anime club with them at my school. Of course when I went to GSU it was a commuter college without dorms or housing, so there wasn't a lot of after-class activity on campus. At a more traditional university things might have been different.

When kids are away from home at college, sometimes they join the anime club, and outside of the normal environment of home, they completely immerse themselves in otaku/weeb culture and become completely insufferable. Some of the more memorable problems we had with AWA attendees were with a group of UGA students who had gone "full weebaoo" and were consequently quite full of themselves.

[Drew_Sutton]

I ran a high school and University club. The biggest lesson I learned was "don't rely on the nerds if you want anything done".

High school club I practically walked backwards into - it was previously run by some Senior band nerds, who only advertised it to band nerds. They had a friend who was a sophmore I shared a class with; word got around, we got introduced and got handed a club. I did revolutionary things like tell people about the club and encouraged people come watch cool-ass cartoons with us and membership skyrocketed. Where the previous guys could barely get 20 people together, I broke 100 at peak and about 50 on average. I ran that from sophmore to Senior year with a rotating cast of characters as my officer proteges, hilarious attempts to bring academic merit to our fine organization, a ridiculous nickname and other hijinks.

When I got to University and was trying to expand horizons, I also started hanging out with The Nerd Club because I still wanted to find friends I would be automatically comfortable with. The Nerd Club started as a table-top RPG club and like-minds and all that, there were LARPers and video gamers there, and several of us who were into anime, etc. A few of us anime people wanted to create a separate organization and the University said "1 nerd group is enough." We did LAN parties, goofed off and hung out between (and sometimes instead of going to) classes. I was probably one person in the club who was not only super-into anime, I had been into it for quite some time, so arranging anime viewings for the club usually fell to me in one form or fashion. I ran the club for a few semesters until I started working a professional job and couldn't devote the time I felt I should.

The reasons I say that I learned to not rely on nerds - ask people to help out and they'll forget tapes frequently, never follow up on what they volunteer for and constantly bitch about everything/anything. Agree on a time to meet to plan, they'll forget and get pissed when you call them when they're a half hour late.

The thought of making a community meet-up, older-folks anime club crossed mine and a few compadres minds but when confronted with actual work, in true nerd fashion, we said fuck it and drank instead. Then it turned into a convention.

Other notable club tales include:
* Angsty drama fueling the creation of an openly rival club.
* Hilarious outbursts like "I'm trying to watch the fucking cartoon here!" or other things one shouldn't say in a public school environment.
* Who's Using All The Bandwidth?
* The Five People Who Like Anime Here Don't Like The Same Anime.
* I want to start a ~CON~.

Some of the more memorable problems we had with AWA attendees were with a group of UGA students who had gone "full weebaoo" and were consequently quite full of themselves.

Aw, yeah. I remember walking past some of their "room parties" and a few other encounters. Funny you should mention - at the most recent SeishunCon last month, I walked past a hotel room on Friday with goofy notes and a wall scroll draped over their door - totally reminded me of the UGAnime crowd. I remember telling people around the show that when I wanted a Con that captured early anime con spirit and that memory came back, I knew then it was the show I didn't know I wanted.

A story I often tell is how, in my last year there, I got a fansub vhs of the first Pokemon film, and figured I'd do a showing of it for laughs....it was the ONLY TIME everyone shut up & paid their full attention. I was amused & kinda shocked it took POKEMON to make these high schoolers happy.

Oh, holy crap, yes. We're about the same age and I remember doing the same thing. I liked to think that we were pretty diverse in trying to put a bunch of different things on our viewing schedule (shounen, shoujo, mecha, etc.) but for some reason Pokemon was something that everyone was just enthralled with.

When we moved up to Toronto there was an anime club meeting at University Of Toronto that some friends of mine were involved with, but not being a UofT student or alumni, I'd feel pretty weird just showing up

When I was up at Kennesaw State, we had all sorts of folks show up for Nerd Club meetings, usually on the flimsiest of association. Sure, most of our club were actively enrolled students but when I first started, there were a few who were "returning to academic programming" and "just auditing" classes or were "taking time off" and eventually got to "oh, my wife's enrolled in a grad program" and "academic status? shrug.".