Conventional Wisdom: the descent into anime, pt. 2

Last time, I talked about all the anime I unknowingly watched before I had any clue what anime was. Now we get to the part where I became a self-proclaimed “anime fan” …a time when, ironically, I watched very little anime at all. It seems like a lot of people get into anime as a whole after they’ve already become fans of individual works. They get really into two or three shows, gradually come to realize that they share a common art style & hail from the same industry, and eventually go looking for other shows with the same distinctive look as those first few they loved. For me, though, the process was reversed. I fell in love with the anime style first, well before I even had a chance to become a fan of any specific show.

If you don’t count all those afternoons of Nick Jr. shows, (which were more like subliminal conditioning) my first gateway into anime came via video games. I was hugely into Mega Man as a kid, and in a day when a lot of games were trying to emulate a Liefeld-ian XTREME version of the future, I really loved the stubby, big-eyed look of the characters. Heck, to this day, I can’t draw robots of any kind of future armor without huge, clunky, Mega Man-style feet. It’s just that deeply ingrained for me. So, I really latched on to the Mega Man art style, and that of similar-looking games, and gradually noticed that most of them seemed to hail from Japan.

A stead y diet of Electronic Gaming Monthly really helped in that regard. I don’t really keep up with gaming news anymore, but back in the day I read EGM religiously. And wouldn’t you know it, that provided a steady stream of JRPG coverage and import reviews and other things with that uniquely anime look to them. Even better were ads in the back for mail order import stores (because, back in the stone age, you couldn’t just hop online and get stuff from overseas on your own). Man, those pages were overflowing with strange, exotic stuff like Gundam kits and Evangelion action figures and wall scrolls for anime that, in retrospect, were WILDLY age inappropriate. That was probably where I first figured out that these character designs I was seeing for stuff like Lunar or Final Fantasy were attached to a larger comics & animation industry, and soon I considered myself a fan of that as well.

…which, in most people’s stories, would be the point where they start seeking out anime and manga and discover their first favorites. Buuuuuuuut I kind of hit a snag in that department. See, this back in the uncivilized barbarian times of the early 90s, and one couldn’t just fire up Cruchyroll or Viewster and have all the anime ever right at one’s fingertips. No, anime was hard to come by, not to the degree that it was back in, say, the 70s, but enough that it gave me all kinds of problems. For reasons I will soon expound upon at length, I spent much of my youth being a “fan” of anime more in theory than practice. Creepily spying in anime from across the street with binoculars but never actually walking over and introducing myself.

Again, younger readers need to keep in mind that the concept of streaming anime on demand was a mad fantasy in those days. If you wanted to watch something on your own time, you had to resort to these archaic slabs of black plastic called “VHS” that could fit, like, three episodes into an object the size of a modern day box set. Actually owning an entire series in those days could set you back hundreds, and that was just buying the extra selves you’d need to store so many clunky tapes. AND that was assuming you even lived near someplace that sold them. If you were lucky, your local Blockbuster might have a single “animation” shelf that they updated, like, once a decade. That, or maybe one of the record stores in down also sold movies and had an “Anime” section somewhere behind “Horror” that was disturbingly well populated by smut. And even if you DID have those, they weren’t much help if you were a dumb kid who didn’t know what to look for and couldn’t afford to just try everything. You had to resort to TV in those cases, and man, that was even more of a barren wasteland than the world of videos. I remember well the days when the only anime on TV at all were syndicated episodes of DBZ… at 5am. So, yeah, that kept my anime appreciation largely of the speculative variety.

Now, before you object, yeah, I know whole generations of American anime fans got their first taste through TV, either through Toonami or (if you were slightly older) Sci-Fi Channel Saturday morning. Alas, circumstances conspired against me in those departments. For one thing, we had the one cable provider in all of North Georgia that DIDN’T pick up Cartoon Network, and that was before we moved out to where we just didn’t get cable period. So, I largely missed out on that whole first wave of young anime fandom. That’s not to say I NEVER saw Toonami, but it was only the occasional afternoon at my grandparents. So while I might be able to take in enough Tenchi Universe or Outlaw Star or whatever to appreciate the artistic style, I never had any idea what was going on, so I could hardly become a “fan” of anything. The Sci-Fi Channel stuff was even more frustrating, since I missed out on those by choice. Remember, even though I knew I liked the anime style, I didn’t know diddly about any of the movies they used to show on that block. And this was back in the heyday of Saturday Morning Cartoons, there were a LOT of choices any only so much morning to watch during. So, when young me was asked to chose between The Bugs Bunny & Tweety Show and some unfamiliar thing called “Dominion Tank Police”, I went with the familiar choice (and yeah, a lot of those movies were a bit out of my age range anyway) Oh, and Samurai Pizza Cats was even worse! Fox Kids picked that up for a few months, but aired it on weekday afternoons, when my TV watching was strictly regulated. I could pick ONE show to watch… and these jerks scheduled Samurai Pizza Cats right before Animaniacs. Now, I’d choose Animaniacs all over again, but it was still a unique kind of torture to always catch these tantalizing hints of the show ending right before it. Stupid parents not wanting my brain to be rotted by excessive television…

Having mentioned the Sci-Fi Channel (back before that nonsense with the “Y”s), I do need to publicly thank them for that one weekend they did “Adventures in Japanese Animation.”  That was also a Saturday, but in the afternoon, so there was no overpowering lure of Loony Tunes to distract me. And man, it is no exaggeration in the slightest to say that was a life-changing afternoon for me. They showed three movies: Robot Carnival, Lenseman, and I think Vampire Hunter D. I didn’t see the last one, and while Lenseman was cool in an animated Star Wars kind of way, it wasn’t exactly mind-blowing. But Robot Carnival? Man, I cannot even BEGIN to express how deeply impressed I was by that movie. One of my favorite movies at the time was Fantasia, and here was basically Fantasia WITH ROBOTS! How cool is that? What’s more, no amount of Nick Jr. kid shows or illustrations for SNES games could have prepared me for animation of that intricacy and complexity. It would be years before I actually got a steady diet of Japanese Animation, but the memories of that one movie were more than enough to convince me that I WANTED to watch more… conditions permitting, of course.

Over time, my “seen” list gradually got a little bit longer. Trips to the grandparents allowed for more and more doses of Toonami, giving me brief tastes of stuff like Sailor Moon or even a whole filler arc of DBZ over New Years. Oh, and then my cousin invited me along with him to an college anime club’s festival thing. Watching anime IN JAPANESE WITH SUBTITLES! Oh, I was clearly graduating to some next-level hardcore otaku knowledge, let me tell you buster. And by this point, I’d gotten over my “wait, I don’t know what this is” trepidation, so the fact that I’d never heard of the likes of Twin Signal or Birdy the Mighty was actually a selling point. “Yeah, it’s a pretty obscure anime, you probably haven’t even heard of it”. Oh yeah, I was such a cool kid. One Christmas I even managed to ascend to the god-like level of actually OWNING some anime of my very own! Yeah, I totally felt proud of myself and my VHS copy of Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie. An absolute classic of modern animation, no question. Oh, and I also got some “Princess Mononoke” movie that same Christmas, but whatever…

Still, you can only rewatch the same subpar Sonic OVA so many times, I needed a steady stream of new anime on a regular basis if these delusions of anime fandom were ever going to blossom into actual otakudom. And that’s when Pokemon happened. Yup, I’m probably on the older side of the whole “Pokemon got me into anime” demographic, but I’m still there. I’d heard about the games before they were even released over here, so I lept on to the show the second I heard a local station had picked it up. And I don’t mean Kid’s WB, either. I’m talking about when it was just airing at 5am in syndication. Waking up at an ungodly hour, keeping the volume down to a wisper so as not to wake up everyone, enduring the same five “Now That’s What I Call Music!” ads EVERY. FREAKING. TIME., it was a small price to pay to finally, FINALLY have an anime that I could watch on a regular basis and truly get into. So yeah, for one summer I was SUPER into Pokemon. I actually got my first Game Boy just so I could play the game. My first ever manga was a pack of four issues of The Electric Tale of Pikachu, which in retrospect was a really odd first purchase (I mean, manga that’s not complied into a graphic novel? WEIRD) My first embarrassing attempt at drawing a fan comic was an unfinished Pokemon manga. My first ever “cosplay” (which TOTALLY WASN’T THE SAME THING AS DRESSING UP FOR HALLOWEEN, GUYS, SHUT UP!) was James from Team Rocket. Basically, I was all over that junk.

…for a while, anyway. Around the time that I dragged the rest of my family to see The First Movie in theaters with me, though, I’d come realize that maybe, just maybe, Pokemon wasn’t really that good a show. I’d already begun to notice that, really, there’s only five or six episodes of Pokemon, they just change the specific monsters around to keep it “fresh”. Fortunately, by this point, Pokemon had blown up for Japanese Animation to be granted official Next big Thing status, and suddenly a lot more choices were available. Now, I didn’t exactly think shows like Mon Colle Knights or Flint the Time Detective were BETTER than Pokemon, but the point is they were new anime and I had access to them, which was awesome. And anyway, the Pokemon boom also got Card Captor Sakura and Escaflowne on TV, and even their edited forms, they WERE better than Pokemon. Better yet, that rush to cash in resulted in the crappy bookstores in rural North Carolina finally getting a Manga section, which enabled me to spend a summer ravenously devouring the works of Rumiko Takahashi. Heck, the B. Dalton even started carrying Animerica, meaning I could actually start LEARNING about this whole anime thing instead of just ACTING like I knew stuff.

But that’s not what you REALLY want me to talk about, is it? If you’ve ever read Conventional Wisdom, like, at ALL, then you wanna hear me gush about Digimon, right? This post-Pokemon dash to cash in was when Digimon first hit American TVs, so this must be when I’ll start geeking out about it. Right? Yeah… funny thing about that. This blog is already waaaay longer than I intended, and every time I try to go into detail on my deep, deep Digimon fandom, it gets even longer. So much so, I’ve decided to save most of it for a THIRD blog post later on (man, this thing just keeps getting longer). But yeah, while Pokemon may technically have been the first anime I was a fan of, Digimon is where I mark my true beginning as a serious, dedicated, in-up-to-my-neck ANIME FAN. That was the one I actually devoted meaningful thought to, got into arguments over, and generally took way too seriously. You know, real fan behavior. All thanks to Digimon. In fact, I’d even say it’s Digimon’s fault that I insist on drawing characters with heads two or three sizes too big even today. I mean, have you ever really LOOKED at how they drew those kids? BIG ol’ heads!

After that, well, there’s not much else to tell. Not unique stuff, at least. We moved to a place where getting cable was an option not long afterwards, so I was able to experience the later days of Toonami along with everybody else (Hey, remember that night when they showed a bunch of Gorillaz videos? That was highly inappropriate in retrospect) followed by discovering Cowboy Bebop on Adult Swim (did anyone else’s TV schedule list Adult Swim as one long show at first? That was weird). And by that time, DVDs and The Internet were common enough that even a broke kid like me could benefit from them. In fact, I think I’ve still got my stack of Newtype USA preview DVDs somewhere in my room. Basically, getting my hands on anime was no problem at all, the exact opposite of how things were in my childhood. Happy ending!

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