this
column originally ran in 2003 at Mike Toole’s “Anime Jump”
website, and has been amended with minor corrections, slight
alterations, and additional annoyances. Names have been changed to
protect the innocent and guilty.
Back
in the pre-DVD. pre-streaming era, when you had to swap stuff with
strangers through the mail to get any kind of decent Japanese
cartoons, brave nerd pioneers would find ourselves having to get too
close for comfort to certain specimens of the genus “anime-fannus
North Americanus.” These are but a few of the many tales that make
up the warp and woof of the rich tapestry that is your anime nerd
heritage, and they should serve both as amusing anecdotes and
cautionary examples.
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actual anime VHS tapes received via the US Mail
|
Oh
so many. The person who created his own home-made flyers for our
anime convention and posted them around town. The guy who spent weeks
arguing on BBS message boards about how Masamune Shirow invented
manga as we know it and then tried to track us down at Project A-Kon
to argue about it with us some more but got thrown out of the con due
to the weed and bong he brought to the staff room he was crashing in.
The letters about 60s cartoons that segued quickly into being letters
about sex acts. But let’s focus on a few.
1.
Back
when I was copying tapes for people through the Anime Hasshin tape
traders list, a California fan got in touch with me with an aim to
getting copies. He sent his list, I sent my list back, he replied
with a large letter back commenting (negatively) on the contents of
my tape list and asking why I didn’t make copies in 6-hour EP mode.
I replied that (1) EP sucks in terms of video quality, and anyway,
(2) they’re my VCRs and I’ll do with ‘em what I want.
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lists of anime tapes in the collections of anime fans circa 1990
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His
reply letter more or less agreed with me, or at least admitted that
we all have our own preferences. I figured I’d never hear from him
again, Well, a week later a tape arrived in the mail from him, along
with return postage and a request list that was almost exactly six
hours long. A movie, two OVAs, some TV episodes, just cram it all on
there, please.
I’m
like, whatever. The tape goes on the pile of tapes to be copied. You
see, at the time I was copying a lot of tapes from people both
through the mail and right at home. I’d come home from the local
anime club with a stack of blanks and a list of requests, and I spent
a lot of time violating copyright law so Bob McBobbob and his pals
could watch Project A-Ko or “Dirty Pair Does Dishes” at their
leisure.
One
week later, I get a long, pissed-off letter from the guy, asking
where the hell his tape is, how dare I treat anime fans in this way,
where do I get off behaving in such an obnoxious fashion, HE always
makes sure HE gets HIS tapes done quickly, etc etc.
So
this gets my full attention. What I do is I dig out my oldest,
funkiest, top-loading 2-head VCR that only records in black and
white. It was a Panasonic that suffered a drop onto a concrete
landing after I tripped on some stairs while carrying it to a
Saturday night let’s-copy-anime-and-eat-pizza gathering at a now
demolished apartment complex at Lindbergh and Piedmont in Atlanta. I used
this Panasonic as the recording deck. Every so often as I passed the
machine I gave it a mighty smash with my hand or other suitable blunt
instrument. Talk about hashtag VHS Artifacts! They got all six hours
of anime, though. Was it watchable? I don’t know. I never heard
from them again.
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meet you at Zesto's on Piedmont
|
2.
A
few years later we were fan-subtitling Captain Harlock though the
auspices of Corn Pone Flicks. A VHS, a SASE, and a request for
episodes arrived, as per our guidelines. We put the Harlock episodes
on the tape, which was placed into its already-stamped return
envelope, and mailed back.
A month later the emails started – that
tape never arrived. Which is a thing that happens sometimes. Mail
gets lost. It’s a thing. What made this email special was the
demand we replace and mail this person their replacement tape on our
own dime. Because, as the email stated, we were running a business
and as such had a responsibility to our customers. Since we were most
definitely NOT running a business, we actually had NO such
responsibility. By that time we’d learned just ignoring the kooks
was the best plan of action, which is what we did to the increasingly
angry emails that continued to arrive, eventually accusing Corn Pone
Flicks of running an elaborate swindle, stealing blank VHS tapes from
an unsuspecting public. The perfect crime!
3.
Speaking
of copying tapes, it was the custom of the time for anime nerds such
as myself to have lists of their available anime titles photocopied
and available to send out, because it’s difficult to ask for tapes
you don’t know exist. If you were a member of an anime club or two,
you might have access to the anime lists of five, ten, twenty anime
tape traders. You might not consider these lists themselves a
valuable commodity, but a Pacific Northwest outfit known as Kinosei
Anime thought otherwise! For a small fee of six dollars, they would
send you the tape lists of fans and clubs who were willing to copy
anime for strangers! I found out about Kinosei when I started getting
letters from people who had acquired my name and address from them.
And no, Kinosei Anime never asked permission to send anyone’s name,
address, and list of tapes out to the world as part of their
low-stakes unethical behavior game. I mean, it’s not a big deal –
I’m sure this scheme netted them, what, thirty, forty bucks, max –
but ask first, people.
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"Dear Dave, I have sold your name and address to strangers. Do you have any Kimba The White Lion. Thanks, Jeff"
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4.
So
back in, like, 1989-1990, our phone rang. It was the operator, asking
if I would accept the charges on a collect call from a person whom I
didn’t know. I figured it had to be an emergency, or at least
really important, so I said “yes”. BIG MISTAKE. The mystery
caller is a guy who fished my name out of the C/FO Directory. He
figured he’d call me collect and ask lots of questions about
Japanese TV shows in general and the live-action superhero show
Spectreman in particular. No emergency, no crisis, not even a very
interesting conversation. Definitely not worth my dime or my time.
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a mystery with a name
|
He
wanted to know this. He wanted to know that. He wanted me to mail him
tapes. He wanted me to mail him fanzines. He wanted everything as
free gifts from the goodness of my heart and the bottomlessness of my
bank account, the extent of both having been greatly exaggerated
somewhere down the line. I gathered from his rambling conversation
that his caregivers wouldn’t let him call people unless it was
collect, and they also wouldn’t give him any money for fanzines or
tapes. So obviously, collect-calling to panhandle from strangers was
his only option. I finally got off the phone without agreeing to send
him anything. Sure, I should have just hung up on the guy, but I was
raised to be polite.
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the 1988 C/FO Membership Directory - personal information redacted
|
He
called right back the next day. I refused the charges. He called back
several times over the weekend. We refused the charges. About a year
later he called AGAIN. I heard the operator ask if I’d accept the
charges from this guy’s name, and I threw the phone across the room
while hollering “NOOOOOO!!” in slow motion, just like the movies.
Found
out later I wasn’t the only person to get the collect treatment. A
pal of mine in South Carolina also got nailed, and at least one
former C/FO generalissimo was on the receiving end of who became
known as “The Collect Call Bandit.” My guess is that the guy was
in some sort of managed care or group home situation and whenever he
got a chance, he leaped to the nearest telephone and started
collect-calling people like a maniac until the white coats could pry
him loose and get that straitjacket back on him.
Anyway
the moral of the story is never, ever accept collect calls from
strangers. Those 1-800-Collect people are LYING TO YOU. Oh, and
also, never let anyone print your home phone number anywhere.
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don't do it
|
Of
course, these days we’re deluged by scam calls and robocalls from
duct cleaning services and extended warranty salesmen and important
messages threatening imminent arrest from the IRS, Immigration or the
Social Security Administration. Compared to all this, simply being
desperate for Spectreman sounds downright wholesome.
5.
The
hands down most annoying guy I ever swapped tapes with was a person
I’m
going to call
named “Bert
Ernieson.”
He’s another someone
I got in touch with via anime
club trader
lists.
Where
do I begin? His video lists were handwritten in
barely legible pencil
on three-hole lined notebook paper.
These
letters were typically five
or six
double
sided pages
filled
with scores
of trivial questions. Tape
requests from
Bert would
be
for odd,
hard-to-dig-out titles
– in the VHS days this meant fast forwarding to the middle of a
tape to find the exact requested
episode of Urusei Yatsura or whatever. Let
me tell you after
four or five tapes, all this cueing time adds up.
His
mail
would include various right-wing pamphlets, for
instance
the famed,
completely
bogus urban
legend alert about how a
cabal of atheists,
led by Madalyn
Murray O'Hair
herself,
were going to get all religious programming banned from TV. This
right-wing Christian material seemed at odds with some of the
selections on Bert’s own tape list, which, to
be fair, featured a lot of obscure anime titles, but also
included hard-core triple-X
American
adult films.
But
all that
was
just mildly annoying. Bert,
however, took it to the next level. For
one thing, he shipped EVERYTHING Media Mail® (Book Rate), the
cheapest, slowest, most error-prone way to mail anything.
Nothing could
induce him to ship things first class, not even sending him the extra
postage. Invariably he would use and
re-use and re-re-re-use
cheap,
fiber-particle filled padded
mailing
envelopes.
Items
shipped thusly would wind up
covered with tiny bits of paper and fiber. This
might be OK for books. However, trying to play VHS tapes covered with
tiny bits of paper and fiber will result in a VCR mechanism coated
with tiny bits of paper and fiber. This is, shall we say,
contraindicated
by the operating manual.
And
then we have the VHS tapes themselves. The tape trading custom of the
time was that you’d buy brand new tapes and copy trade requests
onto the brand new tapes. But Bert had another plan. He’d copy YOUR
requests onto whatever tapes he happened to have lying around. Brand
new from the store, or used over and over again, didn’t matter to
Bert. Quality brands like Sony, TDK, Fuji or Maxell? Awful
house-brand K-mart tapes or clearance bin rejects? It’s all
videotape to Bert. He explained his method was to re-copy every
incoming video onto 6-hour tapes, apparently to save space in his
closet or dungeon or whereever. In practical terms, this meant every
single movie or TV show you requested from him had already been
transferred to one of his grab-bag mystery-brand video tapes, at a
recording speed ensuring the worst possible audio and video quality.
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Avoid these brands
|
This
tape-recycling meant leftovers at the end of tapes, just in case you
enjoy being surprised by, say,13th-generation English dubs of partial
Cream Lemon episodes at the end of the super robot cartoon you were
showing friends while parents were in the room. Try it, it’s
embarrassing and fun! Or when you agree to swap three tapes, and he
sends you four, the extra one full of unasked-for junk, just so he
can say “hey, I sent you four tapes, now you owe me four tapes
instead of the three we agreed on.”
And yet, I
continued to swap tapes with him (there were a LOT of obscure titles
in his Crawlspace Of Questions), until one day he tried to pull a
fast one on a friend, let’s call this friend Lisa Black. He
couldn’t or wouldn’t follow Lisa’s simple requests for “new
tapes” and “no fiber mailers,” so she refused to copy any more
tapes for him. In order to get around her embargo, he started to
send her blanks under a different name, utilizing the concept of
“sock puppets” before the internet was really even a thing.
I
dunno. Maybe it WAS his cousin, like he said. I don’t care. Anyway,
she saw through the ruse, because Bert wasn’t smart enough to
change his distinctive ordering habits, or his distinctive
handwriting. Around this time I happened to mention Lisa in a letter
to Bert and his reply was that he was disappointed “I was still
dealing with that Nazi, Lisa Black.” Well, I replied that I’d
been trading with Lisa for 10 years, that she was, to the best of my
knowledge, not an adherent of National Socialism, that she was one of
the few truly decent people in a hobby full of obnoxious jerks, and
that Bert and I were done swapping tapes. Goodbye to shitty copies of
obscure robot anime, to ripped fiberpack mailers, to 4th class book
rate, to letters full of questions and demands. Somehow, the anime
fan world survived without these things.
Life
moves on. A fandom of tape-swapping nerds evolves into a fandom of
convention-going nerds. Anime became something we watched in
theaters, bought at Best Buy, and eventually streamed on computers.
Of course, annoying fans still exist, but their annoyances are new
and exciting, in ways we could only have dreamed of back in the day.
And let’s be honest, the truth is that for every jerk there were
and are ten or twenty non-jerks; reasonable, friendly, generous anime
fans ready to show up, help out, and bring snacks, fans who send
surprises in the mail and bring gifts back from their Japan trips,
fans who build friendships that survive decades. Without fandom, my
life would have be considerably lonelier, be much less exciting, and
would certainly be bereft of many Japanese cartoons and their related
paraphernalia and accoutrements.
Yes,
there are a few times when I’m exceptionally maudlin or temporarily
addled, when I reminisce about the “good old days” of swapping
tapes through the mail. Who doesn’t love to get packages in the
mail? Those were exciting times, learning about a whole new art form
and sharing that knowledge with anyone who’d sit still long enough.
Certainly those tape-trading networks proved their worth, educating a
continent and forging powerful bonds And yet, if the harsh modern
world of the 21st century means I’ll never again get bitched out by
total strangers over copies of Japanese cartoons, then I’m all for
progress.
-Dave
Merrill
