Anecdotes of an anime fan #2

This is the second installment of a post I wrote back in 2011 where I recounted several interesting, weird, funny, and/or endearing anime-related things that have happened to me during my years as a fan. I’ve been wanting to return to this idea for a while but other posts have always taken precedence…until today that is! So here’s another batch of anecdotes during my now 15 years as a fan…

Anime Plus: In 2000-2001 when I was just getting into anime beyond Pokemon, I discovered this great shop in my neighborhood called Anime Plus, which specialized in just anime merchandise. They had everything from CDs and DVDs (well, VHS back in the day) to plushies, wall scrolls, figures, keychains, manga, magazines, and anything else you could think of. I remember the very first things I bought from them – they had a bunch of marked-down CDs for only $5 and I bought two: the Japanese soundtrack for the second Pokemon movie, and some general anime CD that had OPs and EDs from various series. It was also thanks to Anime Plus that I discovered the Japanese version of Cardcaptor Sakura after never watching anime in Japanese before and noticing the uncut version being sold there on VHS. I have lots of other memories associated with the store too: a friend and I both getting a wall scroll there back in 2003, her getting a CCS one and I got a Fushigi Yuugi one, which still hangs in my room to this day, buying the first season of Slayers on VHS there and having a problem with the tapes and having to return them, getting to watch all the latest Inuyasha anime episodes and movies thanks to them selling bootleg DVDs for dirt cheap (I didn’t know about bootlegs back then), getting discounts at the store because of my high school anime club card, and eagerly awaiting Bandai’s releases of the Haruhi DVDs so I could stop by Anime Plus and buy them right away! Back in high school for my economics class, I even interviewed the owner of Anime Plus for a project I was doing, asking him questions about how he got started with and runs his business. Then, one day in 2011, as I was randomly driving by the store, I noticed that it was totally empty and closed down, with a “For lease” sign in the window. It hadn’t even been 6 months since I was last at the store and everything seemed fine. I was sad…and since then I’ve pretty much only been making my anime purchases online or at conventions.

The lengths we go to for anime goods: If you’re into collecting anime merchandise, I’m sure you’ve had at least one time where you had to jump through hurdles to get a certain rare anime item. One such experience I recall was when I just got into Weiss Schwarz back in late 2012 and was trying to track down a booster box for the Haruhi cards. It’s one of the harder sets to find because it’s one of the oldest ones. I literally checked every source I could think of that would sell Weiss Schwarz cards to the US and couldn’t find a Haruhi booster box anywhere. All I could find were some individual cards or the smaller, extra booster set (different cards). None of the sites even had the booster box listed among their inventory except one called Plamoya – they had it listed but it was sold out. But they did have a feature where you could enter your email address and they’d contact you when they have the item back in stock. So I decided to do that and just buy the Haruhi trial deck, which they had in stock and was also hard to find. And then, three days after I ordered the trial deck, I got an email from them saying that the booster box was back in stock! I didn’t want to spend that much money by buying both, so I emailed them and asked if I could possibly cancel the order for the trial deck and get the booster box instead. Unfortunately I never got a reply from them and they shipped out the trial deck the next day. Even though I could afford to get the booster box too, I decided to wait until my next paycheck…which was a bad idea because when I returned to the site to buy it just a week or so later, it was sold out again. So I put in another request and just waited…for 8 months! I really thought I missed out on the last Haruhi booster box ever and would never be able to get one. But much to my surprise, 8 months later they told me they had it back in stock and I wasted no time buying it. I saw that right after I did it was marked as “sold out” again, which means they only got one in stock. The lesson I learned was that if you really want something, you should go for it right away if you can, or else you may miss out forever!

Binders full of anime pics: One thing I liked to do in my early fandom years was print out anime pictures I liked and put them in binders. It started when I got my first computer with Internet and a printer in 2001, and the idea of being able to print any picture I want to decorate my room or other things was really awesome to my then-15-year old self. I had two big binders full of printed out anime pictures, one just for Pokemon and one for other anime. I organized all the pictures by series and even wrote down the name of each one in marker on the first picture for that series. And rather than punch holes in the papers themselves, I put each picture in a plastic binder sleeve. At one point I put a few favorites in my high school binder and they were noticed by one of the guest speakers we had for my sign language class who happened to like anime too. I don’t even want to think about all the ink and paper I spent on those XD

Eventually I lost interest in it and stuck the binders under my desk since I had no room anywhere else. And there they’ve been for years until just a few days ago, when I finally decided to take them all out of the sleeves and put them in the recycling bin. It was so nostalgic looking through them all: I had pictures from a lot of oldies like Tenchi Muyo!, Digimon, Sailor Moon, Slayers, Jubei-chan, Mon Colle Knights, Cardcaptor Sakura, Magic Knight Rayearth and even Samurai Pizza Cats! Even pictures from old series you’ve never heard of like Flint the Time Detective and Voogie’s Angel. Some of them had time stamps on them that said they were printed in 2001 or 2002. Some really old ones were printed from the actual web page they were on, complete with background color and advertisements in the upper margins because I was computer illiterate at that time and didn’t even know how to save pictures to my own computer XD There was at least 200 pages and it was a bit sad throwing them away. But I do still have one much smaller binder where I keep newer anime pictures, but only one or two per series and I only add new ones once in a long while =P

High school anime club: I’ve mentioned my high school anime club several times on the blog but I don’t think I’ve described how we actually conducted each meeting…well, I’d hardly call them “meetings” as opposed to just a bunch of loud high schoolers cramming into a classroom during lunch break and watching a part of an anime episode for about 15-20 minutes. Basically we’d all shuffle into the classroom of whatever unfortunate teacher was hosting our club that year, then we’d see what anime people brought to watch, we’d vote on which one to watch, and then start playing it. By then it was usually about 10 minutes into the 30 minute lunch break, so we vary rarely finished a whole episode. Then there was the question of whether the president or someone else would bring a PS2 or a DVD player so we could actually watch anime DVDs, since the school TV we were provided with only had a VCR. Sometimes we wouldn’t have any means to watch DVDs so we’d have to watch whatever we had on VHS, which limited our options. Despite being disorganized it was still fun. One of the funniest things about it that I remember was that, during my last two years of high school, we had this one teacher hosting the club who was really into cowboy and John Wayne kind of movies, and every time we’d mention Cowboy Bebop (which was a lot because we watched it a lot) he would perk up and be like “Oh, you’re watching something with cowboys?”

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Next post will either be another editorial or my first impressions of the fall anime if I’ve watched enough by then – so far I’ve only watched the first episodes of Fate/Stay, Amagi Brilliant Park, Parasyte, and Bahamut. I’m still open to recommendations for a few more. I’m also planning a Halloween-ish post for the end of the month if I can get it out in time (midterms coming up ~_~) so we’ll see. Until next time~