by Ryan Mathews

---

August 2000

For example, the movie X came to Cleveland recently. Some folks from my anime club went to see it. Thankfully, I wasn't one of them, because the hecklers were out in force, not caring one whit that others had paid for their tickets. But what can I say about hecklers that I haven't already? They just suck.

I could talk about Anime Expo! It was a cool con. But heck, I'm no news service, and all the good stuff has been reported already. I'd just end up talking about the way so many fans (including myself, to my shame) jumped to accuse Disney of interfering with the con when a dealer came close to bringing down the convention by violating laws regarding adult material and minors. On the positive side, the report that a group of congoers had beaten up Mickey also turned out to be nothing more than a rumor.

Or I could talk about the surprisingly swift way DVD is pushing subtitled VHS tapes off the market. AnimEigo is going DVD-only, and Bandai, CPM, and ADV all have forthcoming releases that will have no subbed VHS version, if any VHS version at all. But why should I bother when does a better job than I ever could? It's a great article. Read it, then run screaming to your local Best Buy to grab a DVD player.

Or perhaps I should talk about the friction that still seems to exist between those fans who only watch subbed anime and the growing number of fans of the new crop of dubs. Cowboy Bebop is yet another dub that some fans say is better than the Japanese. English-language voice actors are beginning to acquire some name recognition and get fans of their own. Although they won't come out and say it, my gut feeling is that this pisses some fans off. As the praise for dubs mounts, the anti-dub rhetoric from the other side seems to be mounting in intensity. Such a shame, when the DVD, the perfect peacemaker, exists. But no, I don't want to write more fan-bashing, even if I'm bashing those who can't understand that something made of cel and paint has no "real" voice.

Or maybe I could write about the growing threat of DVD piracy. Yes, just as I predicted in a previous column, thieves are already ripping anime programs from DVD discs and placing them on the Internet for download. This is according to Matt Greenfield, who said he shut down a server illegally distributing the content of the Ruin Explorers DVD only a day after it was released. Right now, the piracy is of the hard-to-find underground variety, but in the future, who knows? Look at Napster. There's an easy way for millions of people to pirate music. Who's to say that something similar won't someday be invented for video? As long as there exist greedy, spoiled fans that think that anime is a right whether they can afford it or not-- dang it, there I go again.

Instead, let me turn the light on myself for a bit. I'm 33 years old, and I've been an anime fan for nearly ten years. Not as long as some, but longer than most these days. I was there when the first commercial subtitled tape hit the market. (Was it MADOX-01: Metal Skin Panic from AnimEigo or Dangaio from USRenditions? I can never remember.) As the years have passed, I've found my outlook on fandom growing more and more negative. I had been dismissing my own attitude as nothing more than me becoming a grumpy old poop as my college years faded into the past, but I've since noticed the same attitude in other fans I remember from the early years. One friend of mine, who's been an anime fan almost twice as long as me, joked that the only reason he didn't kill an annoying fan at Anime Expo is because he couldn't think of a way to get away with it. Others have simply vanished from the scene, unable to take it or keep up with it anymore. I'm really hoping this exasperation with fandom isn't some kind of side effect of getting older. I want to be a anime fan when I'm old and gray!

But hey, I seem to remember this is supposed to be a web review column!
Let's do that!