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Friday, 18-Dec-2009 06:13:17 CST
Global
History of Anime
Introduction
It's truly amazing how many people into Anime
today seem to think that it all started about a year before they
got involved in the hobby. Many will, however, tell almost identical
stories about dim childhood memories of (depending on how old they
are) Astro Boy, Speed Racer, Marine Boy, Gigantor, Robotech, or
Star Blazers. Others wandered into a comic shop and discovered to
their utter amazement that there was an Akira MOVIE to go along
with their comics. Still others fell in love with Ken Ichi Sonoda's
manga (Japanese for comics) style, and had their eyes pulled out
of their sockets by the animated Bubblegum Crisis. There are even
people now who discovered the medium when someone they knew told
them about the Ranma f dubs, or accidentally tuned in the Science
Fiction Channel one Saturday morning ... something that was unthinkable
only a few years ago.
The real history of the medium is frequently chaotic and bizarre
(as is the medium itself), and to cover it in depth would take hundreds
of pages (I've been threatening for years to write such a book),
but that's not the function of this primer. My goal is merely to
give you, the reader, an idea of what happened and when. Significant
events have been left out of this (I'm not even going to think about
documenting the politics of early US fandom or the recent Evangelion
debacle), and portions of the text presented here are based on rumor
and conjecture. The event sequence is bunched up around the middle,
and there are times when so many things are happening at once that
it became difficult to limit the narrative to a half dozen threads
or so. I feel that this does, however, give a reasonable account
of the tumultuous history of this medium.
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