by Ryan Mathews

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October 1997

It's "PO'ed Columnist Month" on Last Exit Before Toll! Can your intrepid reporter write a column when he'd really like to punch somebody? Anybody? Read on and find out!

I got a letter from a representative of a certain unnamed anime club. It seems this individual was actually offended that I liked his club's name enough to include it in the "Goofy Acronyms" section last month with all the other clever names. Apparently this austere group of individuals take their anime much too seriously to have anything about them referred to as "goofy". If any of them are reading, I have a helpful hint. Pocky sticks are a lot more fun when you stick them in your mouth. The other way can give you a bad attitude.

Of course, I was already in a bad mood thanks to my browser situation. It's time for me to face facts: Netscape 4.0 is a piece of crap. Well, at least the Windows 3.1 version. I keep forgetting that only people with 100 MHz Pentiums, 24 Meg RAM, and a 1.5 Gig hard drive are allowed to browse the Web these days. I've been assured that if I junk my computer for the latest expensive bleeding-edge model, Netscape will work. After all, they actually support the Windows 95 version.

In the meantime, though, doing the research for this column takes forever. Browsing non-anime sites rarely causes any problems, but once I start clicking on sites from the 'Pike, it's GPF, GPF, GPF. Sites with heavy graphic content, especially with JPEG images, are one of the culprits. Embedded MIDI files are another problem. Combine them with frames, and it's a near-certainty I'll have to restart Netscape. And restarting Netscape takes forever on my 62 MHz Pentium OverDrive machine.

You might expect me to call for anime web designers to stop putting so many bells and whistles on their pages, but I can't blame them. I didn't have this problem when I was running Netscape 3.01. That's why I'm going to try to reinstall the old version.

Last but not least, in doing this month's research, I spoiled myself horribly on one of my favorite shows. More on that in just a bit.

But while I'm in a griping mood, and having been given this soapbox, I have a question to ask of the fan community. At what point did the American anime companies become the enemy?

I came into anime fandom just as AnimEigo began business. I remember fans being thrilled that someone was going to release Bubblegum Crisis . At that time, the only active anime distributor in the U.S. was Streamline, whom everyone hated due to their awful dubbing and total disregard for the original plots of their titles. To have a company release our favorite anime subtitled was wonderful. It released us from fansubs, which at that time tended to be poorly done and hard to find except in fuzzy nth-generation copies.

Five years later, things have changed. Fansubs are much more plentiful, and of much higher quality. It's easier to get a first generation copy, and not at old-fashioned bootlegger prices, either. And suddenly, some fans aren't exactly thrilled when an American company announced they have the rights to an anime.

You see, anime fans have long held to a "code of honor" which states that you do not distribute fansubs of titles that are or will be commercially available in the United States. To most fansubbers, that means pulling a title from their list the moment a company announces the rights. This policy was originally put in place to protect the companies, whom we wanted to help. We wanted as many commercially available titles as possible. The code is still in force, but these days I feel the reason for it is more legal butt-covering than any love for the companies.

When a company announces they've acquired the rights to something, some fans feel robbed, since this means they can no longer get the fansub, which they may consider superior and which is certainly cheaper. Because of this, you often hear suggestions for relaxing the "fansubber's code". Instead of pulling fansubs when the titles are announced, why not when they're actually released? And if they don't release it subbed, let's keep distributing until they do. Hell, why not keep distributing if we don't like the sub? Of course, the logical end to this argument is to never stop distributing.

Now I'm not like some web-columnists who believe companies never do anything wrong. (For example, I still can't figure out why Viz's Key the Metal Idol comes out on time dubbed and late subbed, when the sub takes less effort to produce.) But I can't help but see some complaints as nit-picking by fans who, at heart, are really just upset that they have to pay $25-$30 to get a copy.

Alright, enough of this! Let's get on to the reviews, where I'll explain how I learned much more about my favorite series than I wanted to know.