If you're of a certain age, do you remember the first time you saw AKIRA, or any of the Dirty Pair or original Macross cartoons? Coming from a steady diet of Hannah Barbera cartoons, it was like trading a transistor radio for a high-end stereo or seeing the grand canyon with my own eyes. The cinematic scope of the entire thing just blew me away, and my world was fundamentally changed.
The first time I saw AKIRA, I was 13 or 14, and it was on a fifth generation VHS bootleg, purchased for some ungodly sum at a con. My friends and I watched it over and over again, without the benefit of subtitles or dubbing, developing our own storyline that we would eventually learn had nothing at all in common with what was really going on.
It was a very different world back then if you were into anime or just about anything outside of mainstream culture. The Internet didn't exist at all like it does today (the closest we had were large closed networks like GEnie and Compuserve – this even pre-dates AOL) so we just didn't have tons of cartoons and communities at our fingertips like we do now. We relied on whatever we could find at cons – often at great expense – or what we heard though a grapevine that was nearly as reliable as the one in Johnny Dangerously.
So when I saw a post on Reddit titled "I saw AKIRA for the first time last night. Would someone explain WTF happened at the ending?" this morning, it was with great amusement that I left the following comment:
You damn kids today. When I saw AKIRIA for the first time, it was a fifth generation VHS bootleg, without dubbing or subtitles. We had to make up our own story to go along with the animation, and when we finally saw the movie with dialog we could understand, we discovered that everything we thought was wrong. And we liked it!
I'll tell you what happens at the end of the movie: Tetsuo gets off my goddamned lawn, and then I call Kaneda's parents.
For those of you looking for a serious and more insightful answer, Redditor themanwhowas has got you covered. I highly recommend checking it out.
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You do Crotchety Old Man pretty well, can you add those calls to your audition rounds?
It’s really a much much different world today. If you miss something, you just come back and get it later. Back in the day if you didn’t have a VCR, or if it didn’t come out on video, you MISSED it. Too bad. And then you ended up either buying or getting from a friend a 5th generation copy.
The experience enriched us, I think, because when we got to consume something, we enjoyed it. It was like marrow. We called all of our friends and got together and we watched it over and over. We didn’t care about the subtitles. It wasn’t the dialogue that made it work.. it was the experience itself.
You don’t often get that experience anymore.
I’ll admit that the big R was my first experience there, I think it comes from being a few years younger and having the benefit of a bit more penetration into the culture by the time we rolled around. However, I’m looking over onto my shelf right now at the metal box from that weird Akira re-release and the big box of remastered Macross from AnimeIgo… okay I’m a huge dork.
I still cherish my VHS copy of the Star Wars Christmas Special compete with period commercials. Bea Arthur never looked better.
Personally my introduction to Anime was NeonGenesis Evangelion. AKIRA came afterwards so my mind had already been blown.
I still haven’t found an Anime that works for me on all the levels that Evangelion did. I remember thinking AKIRA was awesome, but I’ve completely forgotten it now…time to go watch it again.
When I come across old video tapes (more often than not by people who have uploaded them to Google Video or YouTube) my favorite things are the period commercials, PSAs, and station IDs.
Ahhh good times. Akira was my intro to anime. I watched the Sci-Fi(and screw them for changing their name) channel’s Saturday Anime program religiously in the early 90s, and I remember watching Robotech at my friend’s house. It’s a pretty varied genre, but watching it un-dubbed/subbed is something that never occurred to me, I mean I still feel like I was able to appreciate the animation and the action, but maybe you’re onto something Wil. I think i’ll give it a try.
Also, I happened to notice you mis-spelled Akira in your reddit reply. -10 points.
Oh yes!
I remember the first time I saw Akira. My friend told me not to watch it because it sucked and he couldn’t believe he wasted his money on it.
I had never really watched anime before then but after I insisted on watching it anyway I was totally hooked.
I even took Japanese in college just so I wouldn’t have to wait for subtitled versions to come out. That totally paid off when Macross Plus first hit the states (through the anime club underground, not Bandai.) My huge library of bootleg anime. *sigh* So many VHS tapes. They took up so much room. 😛
The original Bastard!! where in the Japanese version all the names were based off of 80s rock bands. (“I am Bon Jovina of the Metallicana army!”) The American dubbers changed all that. 🙁
I have my 6yr old daughter hooked on Robotech. Every day she comes home from school and I let her watch another episode. 🙂 Gotta pass the torch on.
*salute*
“Got a hankerin’ for a hunk ‘o cheese”.
*sigh*. Good times.
I did? DAMMIT! Fail.
This is fantastic. I’m emailing it to my friend who’s an English Professor here in Northern California, as he holds Akira in very high regard and I’m sure he’ll get a chuckle out of your “old man” routine. On a side note for the future not being entirely full of ungrateful, ignorant snotty kids: he’s teaching “Graphic Novels and Manga” as a serious English Lit analysis class… and the curriculum includes Volume 4 of Sandman: Season of Mists and Ghost in the Shell.
My first exposure to Akira was on the Sci-Fi Channel back when they showed anime on Saturday mornings.
And anyway, for those who hadn’t read the manga, just to let you know – the end of the film is the halfway point of the manga, and the manga has some significant differences.
(And being that it’s Wil’s blog, I’m not spoiling it without his permission).
We had actually discussed using Akira in class, but the number of volumes and thus the prohibitive cost precluded it, but it is DEFINITELY on the “suggested reading” list. If/when I can afford the phonebook anthologies, I’m checking it out!
Don’t forget to get her the novels when she gets older! Despite some subtle thematic differences, I think they’re fantastic light reading and remember them fondly.
Did you ever watch the movie version of the original Macross series? If so, how did it compare to the television, in your opinion?
My first contact with anime were kids’ tv series like Sinbad (Nippon Animation) and Captain Future (Toei Animation). The latter has a huge cult following in Germany (including its newly created soundtrack which was groovy funk instead of jpop) and it’s loosely based on Hamilton’s pulps.
Other than that, not much as I grew up in a rural area, with no cable or satellite TV.
I first saw Akira at a press/trade screening of the German dub (got the ticket from my local comics/games store) and it blew me away. Until then, I hadn’t seen animation that featured shadows and moving hair. The plot wasn’t really important, it was all about the visual experience.
I never really got into anime at all during my youth (being 24 now, I feel like “when I was a kid” makes me sound like some crotchety Walter Matthau wannabe). But then I saw Howl’s Moving Castle, and fell in love with Miazaki and Studio Ghibli. So I guess the lesson in all this is that I prefer Japanese animation to be more mystical fantasy and less Super Saiyan over 9000 hadouken, which is what most Anime was, at least in close proximety to me.
My first experience with Anime was Starblazers and Robotech. I was really into the space adventures. and both of those worked well for me.
Man, before I had CompuServe I had the real early version of Prodigy. The whole bottom third of the screen was an advertisement. I hated that thing but I liked being connected. Now if I can just get my DSL to go faster.
I almost don’t want to ever know what the real plot of Akira was. I like the mystery.
Meanwhile, I saw AKIRA for the first time as a high schooler in a 35 mm theater with several hundred other anime geeks at Otakon in Baltimore about 3-4 years ago, dubbed by people you may have worked with at some point.
So yeah, a bit different experience.
Yea, I might like Akira… a lot…
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2792/4330870339_f7ed689cd7.jpg
My earliest anime memories are of G-Force (that’s what I thought it was called) and StarBlazers, followed by Robotech. I think after my Shockwave tattoo, a Yamato tattoo is in order.
Yeah, I totally remember being a kid in the 80’s, having to scrounge around for information on cool things like Akira. I remember when I finally got a 2400 baud modem and logged into several local BBSes, and discovered what seemed like a treasure trove of information about anime, which was oh so obscure back then!
Man, those were good days.
Good days…
*blink*
What the…?
*BOOM!!!*
AAAUGH!!!
Hi, I’m Cal, and I’ve never seen Akira. Man I suck! I’ll remedy this immediately, (I love NetFlix! Don’t you?)
Oh and Wil, “Tetsuo gets off my goddamned lawn” made me waste precious beer. Lesson learned, don’t be drinking Ruination while reading Wil’s blog.
o yes i remember the first time i saw Akira with the Japanese voices and english subtitles i think. My boyfriend told me it was his friends and his favorite movie and didn’t make me watch it. He just had it on and i was wandering in and out of the living room doing other stuff like straightening up as usual till I noticed I wanted to see the end of this movie as it had me hooked! It was unlike anything I had ever seen before.
First anime… does Battle of the Planets count? Probably not, but the art was anime-ish, and it did seem slightly askew from North American culture. First saw Akira later in my teens, but it’s eclipsed in my mind by Ghost in the Shell.
Compuserve… pfft. UUCP, Usenet, and FTP by email! Nothing like accessing the Internet via store-and-forward technology.
Battle for the Planets!! Man, that was the BEST. I got up early on school days to watch that in the morning. I think it was on at 6am or something like that.
Usenet, Telnet, FTP, MUCKs and MUDDs. Oh, those were the days *laughs*
My first introduction to anime was actually a very old movie called “The Water Child and the Fire Princess”. Found by my dad at the local video store. The next was “The Last Unicorn” in French. Later found it (and bought it) in English. They might not be ‘traditional’ anime, but they were different by far than any NA cartoon I’d seen.
Then…Sailor Moon *hides* First the US version on TV, then later, the real one with subtitles and no missing eps.
Eva…ah yes…the anime that hurt my brain, and yet I went back for more.
Robotech, Starblazers, Voltron and all those old ones as well.
I’m still into anime these days, leaning towards the occult/fantasy stuff. Witch Hunter Robin would have been even better if it hadn’t been cut short. Blood was great. Devil May Cry anime, great fun for those that like the games.
What I hate are these animes that go on forever and are just a repeating cycle of ‘get beat, level up, beat up person who beat you, get beat, level up, beat up person that beat you, etc.’ Okay, Kenshin was kind of like that too, but at least the movies (not Samurai X) made up for it by being heart-wrenchingly sad.
Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex, the first time I had to pause to read all the subtitles. Oh man, that series is dialogue heavy…but goooood.
Anyhoo…I could go on…basically I understand how you feel, and kinda miss the days when knowing this stuff seemed to make you more an ‘elite geek/nerd’ instead of just a normal one. LOL
Yes! I lived in Redmond, WA. at the time, so I was in the same time zone. I struggled to wake up in time, but when I could it was so worth it.
Battle of the Planets was my first, too. Then I saw Akira the first time at the Tower Theater, Salt Lake City. I must have been in about 7th grade. God, it was cool. Damn it was so cool. It wouldn’t be for several more years that I was able to find it on VHS at The Bookshelf (the tape now tragically long since lost after loaning it to a friend), and a year or so after that that I took a girl on a first date back to the Tower to see Legend of the Overfiend.
That was an awkward first date, man.
Thanks for the grumpy old man trip down memory lane, Wil.
Man, this takes me back.
My first anime personally was DragonBall Z, watching it on Toonami. I’m only 20 years old, so I was around when the internet started making finding anime and TV shows on VHS irrelevant. But we went without the internet for a long time when I grew up and I recorded pretty much EVERYTHING on VHS. I must have like…a thousand recorded tapes in storage now that has everything from old recorded episodes of the Simpsons, old saturday morning cartoon shows forgotten by pretty much everyone except me, tons of period commercials intact, and so on, including old episodes of anime on Toonami and the early days of Adult Swim. So all these comments about VHS tapes and finding second hand copies of videos sort of gets me a little nostalgic. I was just a kid at the time so I never really had the opportunity to get VHS tapes of recorded anime at cons (although I did once find a VHS copy of several episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion at one point from Goodwill or something when I was about 10, which blew my mind at the time).
I’m sort of glad Youtube is around now, since it gives a ton more people the opportunity to look at old shows, commercials, and videos that would only have been seen by people who were trading VHS tapes or something in the nineties. Still, even though pretty much everything I recorded on VHS is now available on DVD or easily accessed through the internet, this post makes me wish I still had a VHS player so I could pop in some of those old, unlabeled blank tapes (since I had a horrible habit of never labeling anything as a kid) to see what kind of old crap is on there…
Also, in regards to anime, like I said before the first anime I ever watched was Dragon Ball Z and, after that, I got really into Tenchi Muyo, Ruroni Kenshen, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and of course the movie Akira. I still enjoy anime a lot and I owe it all to just catching DragonBall Z one day on Toonami after school when they were running a marathon, expecting to see an episode of Reboot (which isn’t anime, but a show which is criminally underrated). Good times.
/crankyoldmanWil.
That was fucking funny.
I was lucky enough to get into anime in the late 90s (and our bootlegs had fan subs, thankfully, in addition to awesome Japanese commercials) so it was at least possible to discuss the stuff we were watching with other fans, even if it was frustrating not being able to find all the other cool shows people were talking about.
I got a book from Amazon called Textual Poachers, and it discusses fan culture and fan fiction in the 80s and very early 90s. I was in middle school when the internet began growing significantly in popularity, so it’s kinda fun to read about how fans interacted back in the day (when dinosaurs roamed the earth…). Like, some people actually PRINTED things and put them in real mail boxes. And the people on the receiving end did the same thing when they wanted to respond. Crazy.
And sometimes, we'd take those printed things, cut them up, paste them together with other printed things, make copies of the result, and pass out ZINES. To actual people, who actually paid a dollar for them.
…but you tell that to the kids today, and they won't believe you.
Well, on the bright side, the phonebook anthologies are coming out of print, thanks to Kodansha USA who is publishing them for the company’s 150th anniversary (Kodansha in general, not the US Branch), so hopefully the price will go down.
To my knowledge, Do You Remember Love never got a legit US release.
Hell, until relatively recently, if we wanted Macross we were stuck with season 1 of Robotech. The fact that the rights for SDF Macross in Japan were (and still are) tied up in more knots than (insert analogy here) doesn’t help anything any.
That’s also why we’ll never get licensed versions of Macross Zero, Macross Seven, and Macross Frontier.
Oh, and one more thing, my first anime in general wasn’t Akira, it was Demon City Shinjuku – or rather the first 10 minutes of it (I had to turn it off as my parent’s frowned on me watching that sort of violence).
To my 10 year old brain it was mind-blowing, as I hadn’t checked the TV schedule, so it looked like I was coming at the climax of the film, and it looked like the good guy lost! Then I realized that there was more to the film, and it was just the beginning.
I didn’t get to finally watch the whole thing until last year, and I wasn’t too disappointed.
My first anime – Starblazers. It used to come on right before school started and we’d always end up hauling ass to class late, because we stayed to watch the end of the episode. Then Akira, Robotech / Macross, Mobile Suit Gundam, Captain Harlock. When attending college in the late eighties at Cal State Northridge, I’d hang out at the Golden Apple where I started my collection of Robotech transformable mecha / toys. Still have several tubs full. SDF-1 Battle Fortress, Veritech and Alpha Fighters. Even tried getting that Rick Hunter hair cut. Some things
just don’t translate into the real world. And if anybody is wondering, it is not advisable to try and impress college girls in your dorm with your anime toys. Well, it didn’t work well in the 80’s. Maybe today’s college geeks are having better luck with their Macfarlane action figures.
My first introduction Anime was G-Force (the english adaptation of “Science Ninja Team Gatchaman”)and it took decades for me to even realize it was Anime, let alone actually remember what it was about. Canadian TV without cable, your choices were rather limited… also watched Voltron but could only stomach DBZ fansubs when I found them on the net in later years. Why do American companies think they can practically rewrite everything and have the quality remain?
You nailed it, WW. I did this with Akira, Tonari No Totoro, Vampire Hunter D, Bavi Stock, Macross (at least two versions), Patlabor 2 and I’m sure a few others. Thing was, I don’t think I was considered otaku. But now my children get to enjoy TnT and Kiki’s Delivery Service. I’ll show them Dirty Pair and Akira MUCH later!
My hubby is a big Gatchaman fan. Battle was the really Americanized version. Added characters and other such. He’s even turned our 5 yo son into a fan. 🙂
I’m a mite older than you whipper-snappers. My first anime was (keep in mind I live in the midwest) the Galaxy Rangers and G-Force. I was amazed at the level of animation in the Rangers, especially. Heat shimmers! Reflections in bodies of water! (Not to mention the characters were cool, esp. the Clint Eastwood-inspired Gooseman.)
Hey Wil,
The anime of “Akira” came out in 1988, so your memory may be a bit off regarding first seeing it when you were 13 or 14. Unless you were referring to the manga.
Anyways, like many others here, my first exposure to anime was “Starblazers” in the mid ’80s. Didn’t see “Akira” until maybe 92 or 93, when a roommate of mine brought home a handful of anime that one of the local video stores started carrying. This was a very small rural college town in Mississippi, so I’m still stunned they carried anything at all. Regardless, the version of “Akira” we saw was English dubbed, and we had a ball making fun of some of the dialog.
We ended up watching “Akira”, “Fist of the North Star”, “Project A-Ko”, “Venus Wars”, “Vampire Hunter D” and quite a bit of other stuff as well. We decided to cut back a bit after we started dreaming with a J-Pop soundtrack.
Oh, I guess I was 15, then. It's weird how the years from 13-16 sort of flatten out and get compressed in my memory.
Your description of the VHS copy of Akira makes me imagine an alternative Wall-e subsisting on the one taped musical in his VCR. Wouldn’t an Akira-watching Wall-e be a different fellow? WilW-e? Ha!
One other point, somewhat off-topic, except to correlate that, indeed, my only option to reach a favorite TV celebrity or TV producer in pre-Internet and pre-social media would be to write to him via a mailed letter to a TV network, studio or talent agency…Wondering if you would support / suggest to others, like BBT cast, Chuck Lorre to aid the Pasadena Playhouse? I’m encouraged by the grassroots drive to reverse their fortunes. http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/02/pasadena-playhouse-says-it-is-receiving-pledge-money-but-is-it-enough.html#comments
I saw Akira in Brisvegas once (cant remember if it was the first time) at a now long gone Cinema called the Classic with The Doug Anthony All Stars a few rows in front of me.
And what I remember most is how we all laughed when the protestor, coming out of the Tear Gas cloud, gets shot by a cop waith a Tear Gas gun, saying “Scumbag!” as he does it.
Lovely, lol
Ah, back in the days when it was called ‘Japanimation’. Yeah, “Akira” was my first intro to anime as well, and that WTF aspect is what I pretty much expect after following it up with “Perfect Blue”. I had it dubbed, but still can somewhat relate as the DVD version dub pronounces “Akira” different – with a short A and “Ak” being the emphasized syllable, versus “kir” being the empasized one that I knew and loved.
<pedantobear>Hanna-Barbera, hyphen, no -h.</pedantobear>
My first exposure to anime was Speed Racer, when I was in kindergarten. Its main competition from the West at that time was Space Angel, with the creepy filmed real-person lips in the middle of the animated face (shudder). No competition.
In fourth grade, along came Star Blazers and totally blew me away. I also liked Battle of the Planets, but it wasn’t as coherent – which I later learned was due to the hacking and slashing of the folks who were supposed to be translating it.
I missed out on the whole Macross/Robotech thing. I had friends who were way into it, but it didn’t suck me in.
Akira was incredible, but vaguely 2001-esque, in that I suspect I would have enjoyed the ending more if I had ingested some intoxicating substances beforehand..
Since then, I’ve discovered that my taste in anime mostly runs squarely along Hayao Miyazaki’s filmography. Castle of Cagliostro is my all-time favorite, I think, but you can’t really compare it directly to the more artistic movies like Nausicaa and Princess Mononoke..
I’m with Bryan Fullerton, Ghost in the Shell absolutely blows Akira out of the water. I have the DVD, ripped copies on both home and work computers, and even a ripped copy on my iPhone. Plus, rumor still has it that Spielberg is planning on making a live-action version of GITS. Which, if true, would rock my world to the point I’d need a towel for cleanup.
I think my first experience with anime was watching G-Force on some UHF channel. Then when I was in middle school I saw Robotech. And they killed a main character! Roy Folker. That never happened in cartoons. I was blown away. After that I had moved to San Diego and was going to Morse high. They had an anime club. During lunch all us geeks would rush to get our lunch and watch anime in a teachers room.