Historical Analysis of Fan Distribution and Subtitling

We present an original history of the fan movement in the United States. This history has been compiled and verified over a series of personal interviews, fan artifacts, and other primary sources. We provide appropriate citations for the few items that document portions of this period.

Pre-Fan Period

Japanese animation was imported into before 1975, but with varying degrees of adaptation. The first documented films that saw non-local US distribution were Magic Boy (Shōnen Sarutoki Sasuke) starting March 15, 1961, [13] followed by Panda and the Magic Serpent (Hakujaden) on July 8, 1961 and Alacazam the Great (Saiyuki) on July 26, 1961. While American producers they had to stick fairly close to what was onscreen for the graphics, they changed much of the story to cater to perceived American children’s tastes. Fred Ladd, who did the American versions of Astro Boy (1963), Gigantor (1965), Kimba the White Lion (1965), and Speed Racer (1967), was notorious for changing names [14] and editing plotlines. Before Astro Boy, Ladd was involved with a Belgian production doing a modernization of Pinocchio called Pinocchio in Outer Space. When NBC bought the rights to Tetsuwan Atomu in 1963, they contacted Ladd due to Atomu’s “similarities” with Ladd’s work, that is, of a Pinocchio type character and science fiction. American production companies were used to completely Americanizing foreign products, removing un-American speech as well as all but the most scant of references to the original Japanese production teams.

These shows turned out to be enormously popular with Americans, however, and there is little doubt that Ladd contributed towards the short-lived success of Japanese animation in the 1960s. By the 1970s, however, pressure to sanitize children’s television in America paralleled dramatic advances in violence and sexual content in Japanese animation, largely due to the influence of Go Nagai’s Gatchaman (1971), Mazinger Z (1973), and Cutey Honey (1973). American pressure stemmed primarily from network decisions to move cartoon shows from weekday primetime (the former home of Astro Boy and Speed Racer, alongside the classic The Flintstones and The Jetsons) to Saturday mornings, at which point a variety of parent groups pressured the networks for an increased sanitization of animated programming. “You couldn’t give away a Japanese-made series here [by the early 1970s],” Ladd points out. [15]

A few Japanese cartoons did make it over to the US and are worth noting. Gatchaman (as Battle of the Planets, later G-Force) was brought over in 1978, the former of which was significantly sterilized, and both of which remained too unpopular to be sustained. Uchū Senkan Yamato (as Star Blazers), with minimal retooling, was more successful in 1978; its popularity, however, was confined to the East Coast, explaining the prevalence of East Coast Star Blazers fandom. Finally, Voltron [16] made significant inroads into the children’s market in America in 1984-1986; its sanitization could be described as halfway between Star Blazers and Battle of the Planets. In all these cases, however, shows’ Japanese origins were strictly eradicated. Japanese animation interest would surface again in the next decade, but its driving force was a very different market: the micro-market created by fans.

Technology Change; Cartoon/Fantasy Organization

Post-Astro Boy anime penetration spread through the United States within three months of the release of the first video cassette recorders in November 1975. By March 1976, Japanese community TV stations in the United States started running subtitled giant robot cartoons, such as Getter Robo. These stations had been running Japanese cartoons beforehand, but their previous broadcasts were aimed at very young children. Thanks to the availability of VCRs, science fiction and comics fans could record these new shows and show them to their friends.

Fred Patten, founder of the first anime club in the United States, described his experience in detail. Patten’s first exposure to anime occurred at the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society (LASFS). During one of the weekly Thursday meetings, Patten met up with another fan who was an early adopter of Sony’s Betamax technology. He said, “you’ve got to look at this recording I made of this Japanese science fiction animated cartoon,” and proceeded to it at one of the society’s meetings.

For about a year from 1976 through 1977, the fan brought a number of recorded Japanese giant robot cartoons with English subtitles to the science fiction club. Additionally, several other fans recorded shows off of Japanese community TV and showed them at various fan events. At the time, fans were amazed that the Japanese cartoons depicted so much more violence than cartoons in the United States. A standard plot device in the Japanese cartoons, for example, was that the hero’s father had been killed by the villain, that entire cities were blown up, and that the hero had to survive in the aftermath of a ruined world. [17] Whether or not these cartoons showed any graphic bloodshed, it was obvious that hundreds of thousands of people were supposed to have been killed. In American cartoons of during 1976-1980, no one was ever hurt in even in the so-called action-adventure, or superhero, cartoons. Villains in American cartoons could do little more than make a few ugly faces.

In 1977, a small group of fans, Patten included, decided that they liked the Japanese cartoons so much that they should found a separate club so that they could watch them on a regular basis, instead of watching them at odd hours at a general fan party. At these fan parties, it was common for a proponent of a Japanese cartoon to propose to watch it, but he—usually he at the time—would be voted down by the majority who preferred American fare. In May 1977, these fans started the Cartoon/Fantasy Organization (C/FO), meeting regularly on the third Saturday of each month.

In November 1977, fans from the C/FO in LA started corresponding with other Japanese animation fans around the country. They found out that while they were showing Japanese cartoons in other cities, they were not always the same cartoons. Los Angeles and New York City were getting different sets of cartoons: New York was getting Cyborg 009 [18] and Galaxy Express 999, [19] for example, which were not being shown in Los Angeles. Consequently, the fans started trading tapes back and forth.

At that time, many LASFS members maintained pen pal relationships with other science fiction fans around the world. Most of them were in English-speaking countries, but a few of them had correspondents in Japan. As a result, C/FO members began to trade videos with Japanese fans who wanted Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica. C/FO members were interested in the Japanese science fiction cartoons that were not being shown in Los Angeles television, and it was a fortunate coincidence for the fans that both the United States and Japan used the NTSC system for broadcast, so that video tapes could be played in both countries.

Of course, the tapes that the fans received from Japan were not subtitled at all: fans had to watch them in pure Japanese. By the late 1970s, the majority of Japanese cartoons plots remained simple enough so that the average viewer could discern the plot just from watching the visuals, such as in Space Battleship Yamato (1974) and Space Battleship Yamato 2 (1978). Because there was no other alternative, fans reported that they were happy enough to watch untranslated shows. By 1979, fans and clubs, who had recently established an independent identity from the science fiction movement, began using the term anime.

C/FO was not the only anime club in existence by this time. For instance, there were very big fan clubs in Boston, in New York, and in Philadelphia. There was a mobile fan club on the East Coast that called themselves the Gamelan Embassy, after the antagonists from Space Battleship Yamato. The Gamelans were devoted to showing Japanese animation at the science fiction and comic book conventions in the New England and Mid-Atlantic regions. Starting in 1980, and would show anime programs in one of their hotel rooms at science fiction conventions. The Gamelans put out fliers throughout these conventions, reading, “if you want to see Japanese animation come up to room XYZ,” and, “we’re going to be showing it all night long.”

Japanese Unsuccessfully Attempt to Enter Market; Aim too High; Give Up

Throughout this period, it was considered socially acceptable to show whatever Japanese animation anybody could get on videotape without trying to get permission from the Japanese companies, because almost none of the Japanese studios had offices in America. The few that did—Toei Animation, Tokyo Movie Shinsha (TMS, now TMS Entertainment), and Tatsunoko—automatically said no because their local representatives did not have the authority to permit those uses. Furthermore, they were not going to take the trouble to ask Tokyo if a group of American teenage fans could show one of their cartoons to other fans for free. The representatives in America knew what the answer from Tokyo was going to be: absolutely not.

At this time, Patten became officially involved with these animation studios. We describe Patten’s involvement in detail, and reveal that the Japanese were unsuccessful in gaining market access because their perceived barrier-to-entry was too high.

In 1978, Toei Animation established its first regular office in North Hollywood. Toei launched its office to try to promote its animation in the west, after nearly a decade of inactivity. Toei discovered the C/FO and asked if its members could help them do some marketing research. They provided Toei merchandise for test marketing at the San Diego Comic-Con, where Patten ran the first American fan convention dealer’s table, replete with anime merchandise. Toei provided a sample of what they considered their boys’ and their girls’ TV programming. Captain Harlock [20] dominated the boys’ material, and Candy Candy [21] dominated the girls’. The boys’ merchandise sold very well, but almost no one was interested in the girls’ materials. Mrs. Hozumi, a Toei representative, also brought 16mm reels of the untranslated pilot episodes of a number of their TV programs of that time: the first episode of Captain Harlock, the first episode of Captain Future, [22] the first episodes of their giant robot cartoons, and a few first episodes from their girls’ cartoons. Fans were fascinated with how different these cartoons were from American offerings. Hozumi took copious notes on everything that happened at the convention, which she sent back to Tokyo.

Back in Hollywood, Tatsunoko in 1979 told fans that, “we are aware that you American fans are having screenings of some of our cartoons without getting our permission, and we cannot really allow you to do this officially. By the way, though, we would like some of these cartoons to be shown to Hollywood executives. Could you show them your copies of these cartoons?” Japanese studios—at least Toei, TMS and Tatsunoko—were very obviously aware that fans were engaged in unauthorized distributions and screenings, but their feelings were very mixed. While they could not support the fan activity in principle, as evidenced by their unwillingness to license these rights, they knew that fans were not profiting off of their activities, and that the studios were getting free publicity out of it.

The next year, TMS provided a subtitled 35mm print of Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro for showing at the 1980 World Science Fiction Convention in Boston, Noreascon II. Patten, in concert with convention volunteers, created survey forms for the screening. The survey forms asked questions like “How did you like this movie?” and, “Do you think that this movie would be popular with the American public?” Patten urged viewers to fill a form before they left the screening; once completed, he sent them back to TMS.

By 1982, however, the Japanese studios finally realized that they were not going to get any big sales in America. There was one exception: in an incident quite unrelated to Toei/TMS/Tatsunoko, the endearing Sea Prince and Fire Child (Japanese Syrius no Densetsu, or The Legend of Syrius, 1981) by Sanrio Communications was licensed to RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video for an obscure—but memorable among its few American fans—direct-to-video release in 1982. [23] The last known commercial push came from Toei Animation when it was trying to sell its first Galaxy Express 999 theatrical feature to the major American movie studios. Toei again recruited C/FO members to help send out invitations to Hollywood studio representatives for a test screening in Burbank about two blocks from the Warner Bros. studio. However, no Hollywood executives attended the screening. By the end of the year, they sold Galaxy Express 999 to Roger Corman’s New World Pictures. New World Pictures was infamous as a low-budget exploitation company. [24] They significantly altered Galaxy Express 999, destroying its intricately woven story in place of a failure aimed at younger children. Toei was highly disappointed. They told the C/FO, “thank you for all the help you’ve given us. We’ve decided we do not want to follow this any further at the moment.” They closed their American office and returned to Japan.

For most of the 1980s there was no longer any real contact between the Japanese studios and the American fans, with a few minor exceptions. In 1987 a Japanese company called Gaga Communications, a large, Japanese theatrical and TV marketing company, [25] had promotional responsibilities for a number of Japanese movies. In 1987 they held promotional screenings at LA comic book conventions for a number of movies and original animated videos (OAVs) that they had. The Guyver and Wicked City were among them. In addition to showing these titles to fans, they had invited a number of Hollywood studio representatives to come to the screening. Their clear intention was to surround these representatives with fans whom they hoped would be very enthusiastic, so the representatives could see how popular these were with American teenagers. Again, the effort proved fruitless.

However, in 1988 Gaga was at least successful with selling Wicked City to Streamline Pictures, the first anime specialty company, started by Carl Macek and Jerry Beck. Macek and Beck were very aware of Gaga Communications and negotiated with them regularly. We will return to a discussion of Streamline, however, later in this analysis.

Fan Activity Increases

One year after the Japanese backed out of the American market in 1982, an American, Frederick L. Schodt, would publish is seminal work Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics, [26] documenting for the first time in English the vitality and ubiquity of manga in Japan. By this time Schodt was no foreigner to Japanese ways: he was one of the few non-military Americans studying Japanese in the 1970s, and through a series of twists and turns, managed to strike up a friendship with Osamu Tezuka after surprising the comic author with his flawless Japanese. [27] Dr. Tezuka had a few choice words for the foreword of Manga! Manga!, speaking on the topic of the slow acceptance of manga outside Japan:

“This is why Japanese animation—which is dubbed and doesn’t confuse the reader by ‘reading’ in one direction or another—has been able to open the door for Japanese comics overseas where printed materials have failed. Having solved the problem of language, animation, with its broad appeal, has in fact become Japan’s supreme goodwill ambassador, not just in the West but in the Middle East and Africa, in South America, in Southeast Asia, and even in China. The entry port is almost always TV. In France the children love watching Goldorak. Doraemon is a huge hit in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. Chinese youngsters all sing the theme to Astro Boy.” [28]

Dr. Tezuka’s words were very true from what he knew in 1983. As he would write these words, however, a very different “entry port” was emerging in the West: the networks of organized anime fandom.

After the Japanese companies backed out of the American market in 1982, there were no moral or legal forces to discourage fans from copying and distributing tapes amongst themselves. From the late 1970s the end of the 1980s, there were movements to establish national and international fan clubs with chapters in a number of cities. The Cartoon/Fantasy Organization the first of these. There was also the Earth Defense Force, which was mainly a Star Blazers (the American release of Space Battleship Yamato) club with some interest in other programs. These clubs all had chapters in a number of cities; the theory behind them was that they could promote anime a lot more efficiently, and get more anime for the chapters in different cities to watch, if they were united through a central organization.

The visual quality of tapes started deteriorating as more fans developed in America because people started making multi-generation copies of the videos. Visual quality remained high within the first year after C/FO members started getting tapes from people in Japan. By the early 1980s, however, some of the copies C/FO members reported were 15^th to 20^th generation copies, which were extremely poor. It became common for fans to compare video quality between their tapes. For example, one fan might bring his copy of the first Urusei Yatsura tape, somebody else would bring his copy of the same one, and they would compare them and see if one of them was of noticeably better video quality. The better quality tape would eventually be shown.

Many fans also experienced ideological conflicts as the fandom grew between the early 1980s through the early 1990s. Patten reports, for example:

“I got into some pretty bitter arguments with some fans in the early 80s [within the C/FO] that thought we should not try to promote Japanese anime, that we ought to keep it a small select group, you know—neat stuff that only we were aware of. I have always disputed it.”

In 1985, the Gamelan Assembly announced that they were dissolving because anime was now popular enough that conventions were scheduling their own official anime rooms. They had achieved their purpose, so they no longer had to do it themselves.

An overwhelming majority of fans, however, felt that the anime should expand to more segments of the American public, even if that meant a radical change in the constitution of the fandom. A few fans, for example, began to write translation booklets to accompany untranslated anime programming at clubs and conventions. A translation booklet would usually be 25-30 pages with the entire dialog for a full length movie or a batch of episodes. Translators would publish the booklet in fanzine format, which they would sell for $2 or $3 per copy to recoup their costs.

The first well-known translation booklet was of the text in Rumiko Takahashi’s Urusei Yatsura theatrical feature Only You, produced by Toren V. Smith in June 1985. [29] Anyone who was really interested could try to read the booklet and watch the movie at the same time. There were at least three or four other writers of translation booklets: one of whom was located near the Great Lakes, a couple on the East Coast, and one David Riddeck of LA. Toren Smith eventually moved from publishing these booklets to starting up Studio Proteus, a company that went on to do professional translations for American comic book companies. Along with other anime fans, David Riddeck started up US Renditions, a brief-lived anime specialty company.

Plot synopses booklets also existed: each booklet contained up to a full page synopsis of the action in an anime film (the most common) or the episodes in a TV series. These synopses booklets were more common at some of the science fiction conventions in the mid to late 80s that had regular anime rooms, largely because of an identical practice among science fiction fandom. A couple of conventions—Balticon, for example—would publish these booklets of plot synopses, some of which were close to a hundred pages. Some fans took the booklet format even further, publishing a comprehensive guide to Space Battleship Yamato, covering its original Japanese version along with its American Star Blazers counterpart.

Translators and compilers of these books considered their work the American equivalents of roman albums and other anime specialty books that were being published in Japan. Designated the same in Japanese, roman albums are compilations of production stills and information from various anime; they are highly prized among Japanese (and American) collectors. Authors of translation and plot synopses booklets were interested in more than the $3 per book: they wanted the prestige within the anime fan community of publishing something that all of the American fans would want. This booklet practice continued for at least five years, until fansubbed and commercial anime became more readily available.

Starting around 1986, a number of fans wanted to build up a professional anime magazine presence in the US that they hoped would be something like existed in Japan. For instance, Rob Fenelin of New Jersey was part of a group that wanted to publish the American equivalent of Animage, Newtype, and other monthly professional Japanese anime magazines. Fenelin published 3 or 4 issues of Animezine from New Jersey; a couple of fans on the West Coast named Trish Ledoux and Toshi Yoshida published Animag, which ran 12 or 13 issues. Protoculture Addicts began in Montreal. Most of these magazines appeared very professionally published, [30] and most of them contacted the Japanese studios to get professional-quality graphics along with permission to publish them. However, they were all such small scale activities that most of them could not afford to continue for more than a few issues, if they only were selling issues to the fans. Getting newsstand distribution was (and would still be) extremely difficult for a small fan group. With the exception of Protoculture Addicts, which grew very slowly over a number of years, most of these magazines only got out half a dozen to a dozen issues. It would be until Viz started up with Animerica (1992) with the Japanese mega-publisher Shogakukan behind it that a regular American anime magazine would be established. Toren Smith, David Riddeck, and others in the mid 80s wanted to do something like this, to take fan projects beyond the fan bases and turn them professional; Trish Ledoux and Toshi Yoshida ultimately did with Viz and Animerica. For the other two, publishing translation booklets turned out to be a good starting point.

Anime Importers Fail to Release Quality Material

Attempts by the fans to convince the 1980s video and movie industries to release Japanese animation were consistently turned down flat. The only exceptions were a small handful of B-grade movie companies that would buy Japanese cartoons with the express intent of carving them up into kiddy cartoon movies. When Roger Corman obtained the rights to Galaxy Express 999, for example, he did more than “camp it up.” In another instance, in the voice dubbing New World Pictures did for Captain Harlock, they gave Harlock a John Wayne accent.

Another tragedy of the 1980s was Celebrity Home Enter’s release of Revenge of the Ninja Warrior (1985, Japanese Kamui no Ken, better known as Dagger of Kamui), which was fortunately picked up and given a proper treatment by AnimEigo after its original license had expired. Kamui no Ken was a sort of samurai/ninja story set during the transition of the fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate and the re-establishment of Japan under the Emperor Meiji in 1868. Celebrity Home Entertainment tried to turn it into a science fiction adventure “set on a far away planet,” even though Jiro, the main character, eventually travels to America and meets Mark Twain in Virginia City, Nevada. Celebrity Home Entertainment made no attempt to be faithful to the Japanese original; they just rewrote the script however they wanted to.

Perhaps the most notorious example of rewriting, however, is the revisionist Warriors of the Wind (April 1986), based upon Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984). New World Pictures cut a half hour out of it; they cut expenses wherever possible and changed character names all over the place. Both Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata were appalled. In 1992, Takahata said of the edited version:

“It is absolutely horrible! They did an enormous and aberrant censorship; they cut Hisaishi’s pieces of music, [not to mention] the changed dialogues. It was a great error of Studio Ghibli and we haven’t given broadcast rights to foreign countries since, and we’ll never again give such rights without an attentive examination of the conditions beforehand. For that matter, the international rights for Nausicaä given to the U.S.A. will be over in 2 or 3 years. All these movies are grounded strongly in Japanese culture and are not conceived with an eye towards exportation. Censoring them is worse than betraying them.” [31]

These edits, however grievous, were no worse than most of the non-Disney animation movies that Americans would get at that time. These animations were universally of poor quality, whether it was somebody else’s adaptation of a Japanese animated feature, an animated feature that was simply made cheaply in the first place, from Fritz the Cat to the French movie Fantastic Planet. Now Fantastic Planet had a sort of intellectual appeal, using a sort avant garde, futuristic animation style merely hid the fact that it was actually a very limited animation style. In general, however, if it was animation it was for children, so producers assumed that they needed to dumb down the plot, whether the subject of mutilation was Warriors of the Wind, Starchase of the Legend of Orin, the Felix the Cat theatrical feature, or something else. Even with the editing that New World Pictures did to Warriors of the Wind, it was probably superior to a lot of these others: it was only poor in comparison with the original Japanese version.

Despite New World Pictures’s poor handling of Nausicaä, fans were inspired by Miyazaki’s original, as was increasingly obvious by fan evidence from the period following 1984. Patten recounts that, because of Nausicaä’s seminal influence, fans organized the first anime fan tour to Tokyo in summer 1986 in order to see Miyazaki’s Laputa: Castle in the Sky, as well as the landmarks that they only glimpsed in anime. Copied videos of the original Nausicaä had come over to America, which was quickly disseminated throughout the fan base. When the American anime companies started up, the first thing that all the fans wanted were Miyazaki’s movies: evidence of this is provided throughout Usenet archives, and by Patten himself. He recounts, “I know that when I worked for Streamline in the beginning of 1991, we were constantly getting letters and even a few phone calls from fans saying ‘why aren’t you getting Miyazaki movies? This is what we really want to see.’”

The first theatrical distribution right that Streamline Pictures acquired was a one year license for Laputa. Streamline was constantly renting them out for college and art house screenings. At the end of the year Streamline wanted to renew the license, but Tokuma would not allow it. As with the previous decade, it was obvious that Tokuma let Streamline have Laputa in order to do some test marketing at Streamline’s expense. Tokuma, like its predecessor anime companies in the 1980s, was not interested in dealing with small companies: Tokuma wanted to make a deal with one of the big American studios, which they finally did with Disney in 1996. Whether ultimately fortuitous or not, one thing is clear: Tokuma, like all previous Japanese studios, was unwilling to invest substantially in the American market without a guaranteed payout.

But there was one good foray into the commercial sector

In spite of the aforementioned, botched efforts, there was at least one faithful—and markedly successful—foray of anime into the commercial sector in the mid 1980s. We now discuss the motivations of Carl Macek, the producer of Robotech. In 1981, Macek ran a comic book and movie memorabilia specialty shop in Orange, California. Macek also did marketing and promotion for the movie Heavy Metal during this period, which led him to research animation that was not oriented towards the children’s market. At the same time, there was an anime club starting up in Orange: the Orange County branch of the Cartoon/Fantasy Organization. They needed a new meeting place, and Macek agreed to let them meet once a month in his shop. Many of them were regular comic book customers of his. As he also sold animation cels from American movies, he was always interested in being friendly with the fans as a good way to get extra customers in. This was what introduced him to Japanese animation: after awhile, he started importing some Japanese cels from Tatsunoko to sell in his shop.

All of this led to Macek becoming as much of a Japanese animation specialist in America as existed at that time, which developed into a connection with the Harmony Gold to help create Robotech. Harmony Gold representatives contacted Macek, informing him that they had worldwide rights outside Japan to a number of Japanese cartoon TV series. They had bought the rights mainly to sell in Europe and Latin American, dubbed into Italian, French and Spanish. They wanted to try and capitalize on their investment in America, but they were not sure how to go about it. This was the period when He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was extremely popular with its 130 episodes. [32] All of the syndicated TV stations in America were clamoring for more, saying, “we want something like He-Man that has at least 65 episodes and probably more.” Unfortunately, most of the Japanese series at the time were too short.

Macek pointed out that Harmony Gold already had the rights to Macross, which was an association with Tatsunoko Productions and that Tatsunoko had other science fiction programs that were similar in nature and that had been done in a similar art style. Harmony Gold then asserted that if Macek took three of these and edited them together, he could make a single series out of it. This led to his association with Harmony Gold and with Robotech, which made him even more of an anime expert. He began promoting Robotech by attending a number of science fiction conventions, talking to the fans and finding out what the fans wanted. This made him aware that there was a growing cult interest in anime among the adolescent and young adult public, which was simply being ignored by the entertainment establishment. The entertainment executives at the time held the mistaken inference that if a product was a cartoon, then it must be for young kids in order to sell well; since Japanese cartoons were much too violent and mature for young kids, it would not sell well. Based on his experience with anime fandom, Macek edited Macross, Orguss, and Southern Cross into Robotech, which turned out to be a resounding commercial success.

Macek quickly gained notoriety in the fan community for the serious re-editing required of the Robotech saga, although he has asserted that the decision to combine the three series was Harmony Gold’s (ultimately, based on the market at the time). [33] Nevertheless, we argue that Robotech was markedly more faithful to its original anime series than other commercial attempts during this period: it kept in, for example, the pivotal love triangle between Hikaru Ichijo (Rick Hunter), Lynn Minmay (Lynn Minmei), and Misa Hayase (Lisa Hayes), the first love triangle on both Japanese and American animated television. Furthermore, we note the profound connection between Robotech and Macek’s involvement with early American fandom: the creator of the next pivotal “wave” of anime fans was none other than a fan himself, who relied extensively on the fan network that developed at that time.

C/FO at Its Height; C/FO in Japan

We return to a discussion of the Cartoon/Fantasy Organization during the height of its activity between 1985-1989. By this time, the C/FO had over three dozen chapters throughout America; it even maintained a chapter called C/FO Rising Sun near an air force base in Japan. At this point, the C/FO had established a massive official system for the distribution of untranslated tapes between its member chapters. In 1985, many of the C/FO’s videos not acquired through pen pal relationships or Japanese family members were acquired through Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, Nipponmachi in San Francisco, the Japanese district of New York, and in other places that sold Japanese import goods. These locations would have little “Mom and Pop” video stores that sold or rented original Japanese videos. In addition, some store owners would request their relatives in Japan to record Japanese TV and send it over, at which point they would put the tapes up for rent. Fans would purchase or rent these tapes, copy them, and circulate them in the anime fan community. Many of these tapes would have all of the Japanese commercials and station break parts intact between segments of anime programming. Despite the well-developed network, in the mid-1980s there emerged a societal dichotomy among the small anime fandom, where there were “haves” and there were “have-nots.” Access to anime became a matter of who you knew in order to get access: once you knew the right people, however, it was trivial to access any anime available (quality issues aside).

Out in Japan, however, another fan network was forming led by James Renault [34] and the fans at C/FO Rising Sun. Renault first became involved with anime growing up overseas. His father was a military man: throughout the 1960s-1970s he was stationed at Tachikawa airbase, and later Misawa airbase, in northern Japan. Renault ended up being taken care of by a Japanese nanny most of the time in his youth, during which he watched a lot of Japanese television. He developed Japanese pen pals, whom he would send tapes of American programming once his family became one of the first families to have a Betamax on the airbase.

Renault recounts that, in the late 1970s, he traded tapes frequently with pen pals back in America. Even if there were tapes that he did not intend to watch, his family was able to trade them away to other military personnel, or to Japanese contacts. For example, followers of Dallas [35] had no way of following that series while on Misawa; Renault was able to get the most recent tapes of “Who Shot JR?” to others on the base, giving them a connection to mainland U.S. that they otherwise would not have.

Renault returned to America to finish high school and college. While in America, he met people like Patten, Lori Eason, and the Hanisons in San Francisco: both were big archivists by the early 1980s. During the early 1980s, Renault watched the C/FO grow and expand. He had little to do with American fandom at this time; his main source of anime was through his pen pals in Japan, who would periodically send him interesting tapes. He would occasionally “sit down and binge watch for hours at a time,” but would not watch every day, nor would he watch every tape he had.

As it turned out, Renault had a lot of Japanese pen pals. In fact, the majority of his pen pals wound up going into the industry itself. They were considered odd by Japanese standards: they wanted to do animation, they wanted to do art, they wanted to do television, they wanted to direct, and they wanted to do movies, so they did. His pen pals included artists like Kenichi Sonoda, Monkey Punch (who was a good friend of Renault’s father, as both are avid jazz collectors), and Go Nagai. Through them, Renault met a lot of other people who studied underneath them, or otherwise were involved with them in their studios. That is how he got a lot of his anime, directly from the source.

Renault joined the military in 1986, and wound up having the great fortune of being sent back to the Misawa base at which he was raised. He resumed a lot of his old contacts and penpals, and started sending more tapes, since he was in the city and went shopping daily. He reentered organized fandom. Later that year, he met a gentleman by the name of Joshua Smith [36] who was the president and chief operator of C/FO Rising Sun. It was basically a group of about six or seven die-hard fans who were also all military people. This group included Renault, Smith, Hillary Hutchinson, [37] Ronald Davidson, [38] and a few others. Hutchinson served as the primary contact with C/FO San Antonio, which had large following at the time. Davidson would later be a key player in several anime conventions throughout America.

Renault would drive from Misawa to Tokyo every weekend to shop, to drop goodies off on people in studios, to build up relationships and find out what was going on in the industry, and to follow up on things he was reading in Japanese animation magazines. For instance, he discovered a lot of production data as the original Bubblegum Crisis series was being developed. He learned how anime were put together, which he would later transcribe in his C/FO newsletter columns. That was how news of what was being developed would get back to the United States before most of the anime magazines were being published at all, in any form. As with the aforementioned translation booklets, C/FO newsletters were perhaps the most insightful publications that were being put out before the anime magazines, because fans would get the synopses of all of the latest shows, would get colorful art, and would get other information about fan gatherings, sci-fi shows, and conventions where anime was being screened.

C/FO Fan Distribution

Many of the people in the early part of the fan network who were copying and sending—outside of the few Japanese family members and Mom and Pop stores—were affiliated with the armed forces. If it came from Japan, and it wasn’t from a Japanese national, that person was probably in the military. The few nonmilitary American nationals in Japan were usually on business; with a few notable exceptions (e.g., the translator and author Fred Schodt), they did not come to Japan because of its popular culture.

Tapes sent by military personnel were never really sent via international mail: everything sent to Americans was postmarked “San Francisco, CA, APO.” Many C/FO members thought that members in the Rising Sun chapter were living in San Francisco, because they would send something back to California that would get there in one day. Instead of being sent from California, however, tapes were being put on a cargo plane leaving that day for Travis Air Force Base, at which point the tapes would be transferred to the bulk mail center.

Led by Renault, C/FO Rising Sun applied American military distribution techniques to their fan distribution operations. Smith worked in file line and Renault worked part-time in supply, so they knew how logistics were supposed to work. Renault applied much of his know-how in order to produce tapes on request, which is how he could copy over forty tapes per week without eating up all of his time. When Renault became involved with the fansubbing group Teiboku Fansubs, [39] he applied his logistics knowledge once again to Teiboku’s distribution method. He passed that information onto other fansubbing and distribution groups, so that they would be able to process the most tapes in the least amount of time.

To confirm the accuracy and distribution of Renault’s allegations, we searched for remnants of fan materials that they may have distributed. A variety of tapes, including Dirty Pair TV Episodes 1-13, 14-26, and OVAs 1-10, were uncovered: based on Renault’s information, we were able to positively identify the source (an air force base in southern Japan with ties to C/FO Rising Sun) and approximate date (1985-1986) of the TV recordings, given that Dirty Pair TV would not air again on Japanese TV or be available on video until well after 1990. The chain of distribution would have included the anime club at University of Texas at Austin, which had direct distribution ties to C/FO Rising Sun, and of which the MIT Anime Club founder is an alumnus, and possibly C/FO San Antonio, which held formal ties to C/FO Rising Sun and purely informal ties to UT Austin’s anime club. Ultimately, these data, coupled with numerous other incidents, provide substantial evidence that C/FO’s materials saw wide distribution throughout the fan network affiliated with C/FO.

C/FO’s materials, however, remained in untranslated Japanese, which was basically the only anime available with the limited exception of anime broadcast by Japanese community television in America. Reported Renault:

“People were desperate for whatever they could get, and part of what I would do, and part of my job when I was working as the chapter director for C/FO Rising Sun was to provide synopses for all the shows we sent back. So, you had an idea of what was happening with the specific show. Even if it wasn’t a translation, it was just quick synopsis so that people knew what the storyline was when they picked it up and started watching it. It was actually very useful. Every now and again we’d be able to dupe one of our Japanese hanger-ons to actually translate an episode, but that usually took a lot of doing, usually a lot of bribery of alcohol or something a long those lines!”

Another fan described C/FO’s motivation for the mass copying of tapes. He explained that, back in the 1970s and 1980s, there were no legal ramifications because no one ever really thought about them. At that time, there was no [American] anime industry. “Every now and again, somebody would pick up a license and bring a show to America which they would dub over and change and so on. Well, we weren’t all that particularly interested in watching that particular show, but we wanted to see what the original looked like. That was our motivation. Back then, the motivation was just to get anime to the masses, and to that end, we spent a lot of money and postage!”

We note that quality was a major drawback to this distribution system. Viewers of anime in the mid-to-late 1980s had to suffer through Japanese commercials, shaky video, and the ever-present language barrier. Consequently, there was little economic advantage to watching these tapes, save the significant benefit of exposure. Interestingly, bootlegging—that is, the mass copying of anime tapes for profit—was virtually nonexistent in America at this time: there were some people that tried, but they were immediately extinguished out because there were plenty of groups like the C/FO who were more than happy to send the untranslated Japanese materials for free: all one had to do was write a letter. Bootleggers could not match the C/FO in terms of quality or price. C/FO chapters could get pretty much any show that anybody wanted, and they could get it for free: all that was necessary was postage.

Ultimately, fan distribution through C/FO’s efforts, particularly C/FO Rising Sun, upheld the mantra of “keep it free, but keep it controlled within the C/FO organization.” C/FO chapters would only send material to people who really wanted anime and would share it with other people. That was their belief from the sending end, as well as their belief when they engineered their arrangements between clubs. Show it to all of your friends in order to promote Japanese animation. Assuming that a fan had access to the network, he could access as many anime and related goods as were available.

Fan Networks as Proselytization Commons

In terms of the theorist Yochai Benkler, [40] the physical layer (the postal system) operated as a commons for many types of media, but both U.S. law and the logical layer (the C/FO organization) restricted access to the physical layer’s contents. The logical layer (the C/FO organization) operated under control, and the content layer (anime) operated as a commons directed towards a particular cause: to get more anime to the masses. We dub the anime network that existed during the 1980s a closed proselytization commons. Like the innovation commons so espoused by Lawrence Lessig, [41] the proselytization commons offered a world of creativity—a world of difference—to those who had access. This commons, however, existed several years before the widespread adoption of the Internet. In succeeding years, many would build their fortunes on this proselytization commons. In practice, however, the commons was closed: it did not embrace the principles of end-to-end. This proved to be its downfall, leaving the next generation to the construction of a new, open proselytization commons.

Birth of Fansubbing; Collapse of C/FO

The very first known fansub was documented at C/FO Rising Sun, sent to them by the late Roy Black of C/FO Virginia in Blacksburg. Black sent C/FO Rising Sun a third-generation copy of a 4^th or 5^th generation copy of a Lupin III episode that someone had genlocked with a Commodore Amiga and had basically subtitled, scene by scene, so that they could translate the entire episode. It was very choppy, it was very grainy, and the video quality had been bled out of the tape. Nevertheless, it was definitely different: for the first time, a fan could watch an episode and fully understand what was going on.

The Lupin III fansub turned out to be an anomaly. The technology to fansub was extremely expensive (on the order of $4000 in 1986), and the time commitment would stretch for over one hundred hours per episode. C/FO members did not expect to see more fansubs come out in the near future after 1986, and to their credit, they never did. Nevertheless, they reported being “blown away at somebody having that level of patience. It was kind of like giving the caveman fire. It was just, now that we have it, we have to figure out how we’re going to put it to use.”

Quite unrelated to the fansubbing incident, however, C/FO began to show signs of stress by the late 1980s. In late 1988, established chapters refused to trade or communicate with one another due to a great deal of politicking: if a group had a mightier number or had something of value, they would withhold it from another group to get what they wanted. After awhile, many of the chapters fell into a prisoner’s dilemma: a “well, we’re not going to talk to those guys since they have nothing of value to us” stalemate, in the words of one fan.

There was a power struggle at the very top of the C/FO. Fred Patten had basically done everything that he could do as the leader of the C/FO: he led the group for an incredibly long time, and he was tired as would anybody be in his position. He felt that, for the organization and for anime to move to the next level, he should step down. During this time many accused Patten of disloyalty because he was concentrating on writing articles for general magazines, rather than for the perpetually behind-schedule C/FO fanzine. He reasoned, however, that if the purpose of his fan involvement was to proselytize anime and make it better known in America, it was certainly better to have it published in a popular culture magazine over a club zine where everyone already knew about anime.

Patten stepped down, but he did not have a clear line of succession set up. Furthermore, communication difficulties were compounded by the reliance on postal mail, since electronic means were still out of reach of most C/FO members. Much infighting resulted, and in that infighting a couple other people came to power that wanted to change things to fit their own image. When that happened, a lot of people balked, starting a high volume of mudslinging and name-calling.

The C/FO promised unfettered access to anime within its organization, but it was still very closed. To again access, a group had to be a member organization (excepting the UT Austin case), and the group had to go through C/FO’s central command, which originally was in Los Angeles, but later moved to San Antonio. The C/FO would bring in new charter members, but then after awhile, Central Command stopped sending tapes to those charter members on request, which caused a lot of strife. Many members complained, “well, I joined your organization, I paid the annual dues, and I’m not getting the things were promised me, so why should I pay the annual dues?”

It became a rough time for fandom because it became harder to get material from these the established groups, particularly from C/FO San Antonio, C/FO Denver (C/Food), and C/FO Sacramento. At that point, most of the chapters seceded from the C/FO, which ceased to exist as a conglomerate organization in July 1989. [42] In 1990, it would be referred to as “the Collapsing Fan Organization” in infamy of its tortuous demise. [43]

New Clubs, New Fans, New Fansubbing

Right after the C/FO cratered, technology changed and fansubbing became reasonably accessible to the public. The rise of fansubbing has little relation to the C/FO’s demise: indeed we concur with Julie Davis at Animerica, who once pointed that it was really the technological innovation of the ability to make subtitled videos cheaply and easily around the end of the 1980s that permitted both the growth of fansubbing and the practicality of starting up professional anime companies. Had AnimEigo, U.S. Renditions, and others tried to start before 1986 or 87, it would have been too expensive to make subtitled video tapes. Our evidence bears this assertion out: fansubs and anime companies started at about the same time. We reveal a critical dependency, however: companies were equally dependent on the fan base as they were on the rapidly declining price of technology.

It is very difficult to determine whether the first widely available anime was a fansub or commercial release: that determination rests on the definition of “widely available.” There were a few poorly documented ventures in to the foray among fans: an unconfirmed report of Nausicaä shown subtitled at the Indianapolis Comic Book Show (August 1989), [44] the debut of Bubblegum Crisis 6, subtitled, shown January 20, 1990, [45] and a subtitled version of My Neighbor Totoro shown January 23, 1990, [46] followed in the upcoming months with Project A-ko and Etranger. AnimEigo debuted a sneak preview of MADOX-01 at the 1989 WorldCon on September 1-2, [47] but it would be until April 4, 1990 that MADOX-01 actually reached video distribution. [48] It is known that Robert Woodhead and Roe Adams of AnimEigo subtitled Vampire Princess Miyu OVA 1 in late 1988, [49] but this “fansub” never saw distribution, at least not until a commercial release in 1992. Furthermore, US Renditions beat AnimEigo by three months with their January 1990 releases of Gunbuster Vol. 1 and Dangaio Part 1, both professionally subtitled. [50]

After reviewing the evidence, we conclude that the earliest release that actually saw sizeable distribution was the first two episodes of Ranma ½, fansubbed under the Ranma Project which started at Baycon in San Jose, CA in May 1989. [51] Although Usenet and interview sources concede that other subtitling projects existed, the Ranma Project is the first coordinated subtitling effort that successfully had its tapes distributed throughout the country, as well as shown at AnimeCon ’91 (at least over the video system). [52] All references to previous fansubs strongly imply that they saw little, if any, distribution (which they could not have in any case until the re-establishment of a fan distribution network following the demise of the C/FO). Members of the project would buy Japanese laserdiscs and subtitle off of them, so that the result would be a clear, pristine copy. Significantly, we find additional evidence of Japanese inaction in the Ranma Project’s charter post, as well as a kernel of thought developed throughout the fansubbing movement:

“> Also, are the subtitled episodes mentioned available anywhere???

“No. This is where the problems [come] in.

“Since we do not have the official rights to do any of these, we really cannot 'sell' these on the open market. I have given a number of copies away, with my blessing to the [recipients] to copy the hell out of it, but this is a VERY grey area. I fully expect to either be told to stop by Kitty Films (which I would) or be sued the s$!t out of, which would only make potential audiences over here [very] mad […]

“The reality just may be that they just don't care, period. A well known comic book writer who's spent a lot of time in Japan (come on...you should know who this is....) said that when he met with some executives in a couple of studios and let them know the 'piracy' situation [that’s] going on here, they said they didn't care what went on over here. Was this because of the yen-dollar exchange wouldn't make it profitable for anything to be released here, or they just think of us as a bunch of [weird] Americans.” [53]

What was even more remarkable was the speed of the Project’s subtitling and distribution: within weeks of the LDs being released, the episodes were subtitled. While the Ranma Project was active, it managed to subtitle the first two seasons of Ranma ½, some Maison Ikkoku, and a smattering of other titles. The project lasted through January 1992. [54]

The rise of fansubbing and the rise of the anime industry also paralleled the rise of use of the Internet, particularly Usenet (as suggested by the increasing number of Usenet references in this analysis), among anime fans. This shift also accompanied the shift in the constitution of the fandom to a large college-age base, with new college anime clubs to support their anime interest: UT Anime in 1986, Cornell Japanese Animation Society (CJAS, once CJS) in variously September 1988 or late 1989, [55] Cal-Animage in January 1989, Purdue Animation in 1990, and the MIT Anime Club in September 1990, to mention just a few. We urge the reader to keep in mind that this period paralleled post-Cold War globalization. Russia was already destabilizing. The Cold War was starting to end. Soldiers who were stuck overseas started to come home. The telecommunications industry started to pick up. There were many world events happening all at one time, and few realized exactly what was going on in the world, let along what was going on with this: the pull of culture into a dominant America, “reverse imperialism,” in the absence of mature animated programming. Just as subtitling technology began to be readily affordable among fans, so too did frequent business trips to Japan become affordable and convenient for anime industry leaders. John O’Donnell, Robert Woodhead, and John Ledford—again to name a few—were able to go to Japan and back much more freely because the threat of an actual Soviet invasion was lifted, coupled with Japan’s much longer promotion as one of America’s active trade partners.

For the first anime fansubbers, however, these macro concerns were irrelevant: all they wanted to do was to spread anime as far and wide as it could go. These groups were usually run at the whim of the translator: the translator would usually run the group, and the shows that were subtitled were usually the ones that the translator was willing to, or liked to, watch. Otherwise, the fansub would simply not get done. To that end, that is why a lot of the earlier fans complained, “well, why did somebody do Saint Seiya, or why did somebody do this?” The answer is simply because the translator liked that show, not because the market demanded it. Indeed, the Ranma Project started on the premise that Ranma ½ was really worth showing to fans, but that it would probably never see a commercial release.

As subtitling groups became more organized, fansubbers began to talk to one another: many of them were in college, so many of them had access to the Internet. By 1993, fansubbers (the first known reference to the videos as “fansubs” was made in March 1993) [56] made concerted efforts to avoid the case where two different sets of subtitles would go out for one show; this cooperation provided the additional benefit of keeping tabs on other fansub groups. Anime fandom went from zero groups to about four between the foundation of the Ranma Project and AnimeCon ’91, then to eight groups in the following span of about 6 months. Numbers increased to fifteen following Anime Expo ’92, where it remained for about two years. A couple of groups folded, but then a couple of other groups took their place, and then they multiplied again, ever-increasing through the mid-90s.

In the earliest days, fansubbers served as their own distributors: they copied tapes individually to anyone who requested them. This model was quickly replaced with a tiered distribution system, however, enabling a much wider spread of fansubs. In a few cases, the fansubbing group would establish a subcommittee (usually a single person) to manage distribution. More likely, other groups allied with fansubbers, either other fan clubs, college-based fan clubs, or other groups that would then go out and distribute the fansubs to other clubs. There is documentation, for example, that the Ranma Project and others were closely affiliated with college anime clubs. Whether or not these groups were parts of official college anime club structures, they performed a service that provided college students with first-exposure to anime.

One fansubber recounts that if he could do twelve tapes a week, he would be fine. When distribution started to really ramp up, i.e., when fans started getting Internet access in increasing numbers and started becoming aware that additional titles were available, distribution demands “exploded.”

William Chow of the Vancouver Japanese Animation Society, Canada was the first big distributor. His Arctic Animation outfit was sending out copies of subtitled anime as early as November 1990, [57] and continued to do well into the mid 1990s. Chow’s edge was his connections to fansubbing groups, which he made a lot sooner than other distribution groups. He actively went out and pursued these groups, getting them involved in a larger network of distribution. Chow gained a degree of notoriety in the fan community because of his insistence at charging for tapes instead of using the SASE (self-addressed, stamped envelope) method, placing him in the eyes of some as a bootlegger. Evidence suggests, however, that Chow and other Arctic Animation associates made little if any money off of their subtitling operations, and that they provided a highly beneficial in-between service for fansubbers and fans (that is, until Arctic itself was backlogged by over a year’s worth of requests by 1994). Chow also distributed to college anime clubs since Arctic’s first days, suggesting that he too had a hand in “first-exposures” of the new audience to anime. [58]

Conventions

The rise of clubs, industry, and fansubbing gave rise to anime conventions: gatherings where fans and newcomers alike could revel in Japanese animation and its related offerings. We consider the effects of these earliest conventions, particularly as they relate to the availability of fansubbed and licensed materials.

AnimeCon ’91 (San Jose) was well-attended by a lot of fans old and new who were interested in anime, but many of them went in expecting something that they did not get out of it. They were really excited about having an anime convention, but many of them came out none the wiser because they could not understand what they were watching: most of the screening material was raw Japanese. This is the reason why the Society for the Promotion of Japanese Animation (SPJA) wound up going the route they went in ’92. When they did Anime Expo ’92 (Los Angeles), they knew that they had to have a way for the fan to better understand what he or she was watching.

An out-of-print edition of Ä-ni-mé: The Berkeley Journal of Japanese Animation sheds light on the motivation of at least one fan, Mike Tatsugawa: the founder of Cal-Animage and the chairman for AnimeCon ’91. In Ä-ni-mé Vol. 1 Issue II, Tatsugawa’s “Editor’s Note” contains:

“Japanese animation, which used to be shown in small back rooms of science fiction/fantasy conventions now has its own convention where the fans can watch their favorite movies and videos in 16mm or 35mm. […]

“What fandom is witnessing is truly a rare sight and one that we should all stop and appreciate—the transformation of a medium. […] No longer do we have to settle for fifth generation tapes as our source of entertainment, or word-of-mouth synopses of videos. […] If Ä-ni-mé had been done two or three years earlier, we wouldn’t have even thought about asking the Japanese right holders for permission to print scripts to their movies. […] Our job several years ago was to expand the Japanese animation fandom base through any means possible Now, our task has changed. There is still a need to get more fans involved in anime, but there are more ways to do it now than at any other point in our short history. Subbing videos was great a few years ago, and in my opinion is still great today, but now we must work with the companies willing to expand into the American market […]. It’s time for animation fans to leave the cradle and start pushing harder than ever before to bring anime into the mainstream. The anime explosion is about to happen. The only question is whether we are willing to accept the results.” [59]

The vast majority of shows at AnimeCon ’91 were licensed from Japanese licensors, but were screened without subtitles. Consider Wings of Honneamise, shown at AnimeCon ’91. Honneamise is a classic animation with many talking heads; without a thorough understanding of Japanese, viewers would be totally lost. If viewers made up the story as they went along, they could concoct a whole bunch of different translations based on the actions that happen right afterwards, and of course those interpretations would be completely wrong. To that end, reported convention executives, they discovered why subtitling was necessary at conventions: so that newcomers could better understand and get into anime.

There were subtitled exceptions at AnimeCon ’91, however: the Ranma ½ and Maison Ikkoku fansubs, as well as the few industry releases available, were shown. Furthermore, there is evidence that Gainax brought a film print of second episode of Gunbuster, subtitled. [60] While attendance data is unavailable, evidence again suggests that fans were rabid for the fansubbed material: a few of whom began reporting that their first “real” anime exposure was to Ranma ½. We also note the continuing reluctance of Japanese companies to support American industry and fandom. Although Gainax made an official appearance both at AnimeCon ’91 certain previous conventions, it was an exception rather than the rule, probably owing a lot to the pro-fan orientation of its staff.

Another unfortunate incident of AnimeCon ’91 was the U.S. Manga Corps. screening of I Give My All (Japanese Minna Agechau), which was quickly pulled from American distribution in a snafu with the Japanese licensor, Sony. Fox TV news and the LA Times besieged the event in their desire to know about the new wave of “Japanese Pornography,” perpetuating the stereotype of anime as characterized by pornographic content. Incensing fans and industry alike, the incident motivated more than a few fan groups to combat this characterization by releasing more non-pornographic anime through the fansub network.

Consequently, Anime Expo ’92 expended significant effort getting permissions from Japanese and American companies to screen their materials subtitled. For untranslated Japanese materials, this also meant permissions were secured to create and screen subtitles. Harvey Jackson [61] reports this was the case during his involvement with the execution of Anime Expo ’92, Anime America ’93 (San Francisco), and Anime Expo ’93 (Los Angeles). When Jackson ran programming for Anime America, he would go out of his way to contact all of the companies, get their permissions to screen, and explicitly ask them if the convention could actually have permission to screen it subtitled. Japanese companies began to comply more readily, and several American companies [i.e., all of them] knew they were not going to have a finished product by the time the convention rolled around, so this would be a great way to pre-sell or pre-market them. They would give the convention permission to subtitle, so long as the American companies approved the script that convention would actually use. As companies became bigger and were making their deadlines a lot better, they did not want to run the risk of a faulty script being used or become victims of the comparison bug—that is, the comparison that some fans make when they see a sub at a convention that appears to be better than the sub that a company releases. After 1993, they started cracking down, limiting conventions to the raw Japanese version if they wanted to screen anything at all.

Anime Expo ’92, however, had to subtitle all of the programming that they were going to have. Cal-Animage founder and AX Convention Chair Mike Tatsugawa, in his wisdom, realized that that English subtitling was going to be the one way to get the majority of people really interested in anime. When the convention rolled around, just about everything the convention showed was in Japanese, but it was subtitled by fans. When convention attendees discovered that local fansub groups had translated many of the convention materials, they all wanted copies. Anime Expo, of course, was not in a position to offer copies, but the various fansub groups made it known that they would be more than happy to provide copies to members of anime clubs. This prompted the overabundant formation of clubs in the San Francisco area: many people formed clubs just to get access.

To understand what kind of impact fansubbing had, for Anime Expo ’93 Kiotsukete Studios [62] subtitled all six episodes of Tenchi Muyo!, all three at the time existing episodes of Ah! My Goddess (also Oh My Goddess!), Ranma ½ Movie 2, two of the Gundam movies, Koko wa Greenwood, and All-Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku. Many of these titles were picked up soon after Anime Expo ’93: every single showing was well-attended, and people wanted to see them professionally. Some of these titles were already in discussion, but there were other shows that no one in the industry had any interest in whatsoever that got picked up later.

Whether or not these fansubs actually prompted American companies to license these titles is a matter of hot debate. However, the plain facts are that anime companies at the time licensed titles circulating in the fansub community with far greater frequency than non-fansubbed titles. If a causation link exists, it owes either to the show’s dual popularity in Japan and predicted dual-popularity with the American public, or to existing populari

Abstract

Table of Contents

Citation Format

Introduction

Anime and Its Fandom: A Primer for Non-Fans

Anime

Fan Distribution

Fansub