Ours, and No One Else's

Have you ever met Animé fans? Have you ever seen how rabid some of them are? Some of them will go to extremities to defend their entertainment. They are so vocal about Animé, that they would deafen NRA conventions. And yet, even though they are adamant about the quality of Japanese imports, there’s a certain kind of territorialism that they have over Animé, as if you need to belong to an honorary Geek Club in order so that you might earn the right to be regarded as an honorary “Otaku”.

Is Animé ours? (Meaning, the select group of people that like Animé--you can count me as one of them.) If so, how did we come to have ownership of the genre? We sure didn’t buy it--most Otakus don’t have any money to speak of, besides that which they bring to the conventions and the festivals.

Actually, middle-aged Americans were the first to fall in love with Animé. The two Freds, Fred Patten and Fred Ladd, were instrumental in getting Animé shown here in the U.S. The latter, Fred Ladd, is widely known for introducing young Americans to “Astro Boy”, a creation of Osamu Tezuka’s that was subsequently sliced and diced by NBC. Then, he brought “Speed Racer” over to us, and the Animé fandom began thereafter.

In the ‘80s, the fan population exploded. In the ‘90s, Animé festival attendance increased exponentially--another explosion, induced by Animé imports such as “Ghost in the Shell”, “Project A-Ko”, and the extremely successful “Akira” (not necessarily in that order, so I apologize for being a little bit anachronistic). Younger audiences, seething from realizing that these animated treasures were being “Americanized” (cut to pieces and horribly dubbed), took the initiative and began to demand better treatment of these releases. They got it too, but not before fighting hard for it.

So, now that they have fought hard for their cause (and were victorious--sort of), some of them feel that the entire genre belongs to them, because it cannot be trusted in other hands. But they are just fans of a genre that, by default, is not theirs. It belongs to the ones who created it.

(Thanks to http://www.anime-tourist.com/article.php... and http://www.animejin.org.uk/arc_7e.htm for information on the first Animé distributors in America.)

Go To Page: 1