A Half-Arsed History of Anime Fandom in Canberra 1995 - 2006, Part 1

I'm taking a bit of a break from doing reviews and will probably only do some occasional articles such as this one. I'll be back in full swing in April. Back in 2011, I wrote about my history with the Canberra Anime Society (CAS) and how I ran it (and ran it into the ground) with my friend Nathan for about a year and a half. You can read it here. I thought it might be interesting to scan some of the flyers I had collected over the years from various events around the region. I soon discovered that this would be a two-parter (or three). So first up I’m going to briefly look at the Canberra Anime Society. The history of CAS is pretty much covered in my previous post. Here’s some of the flyers that they put out while it was David, Bruce and Peter running the screenings (click for larger versions of all the images in this post);

Peter soon left and David and Bruce struggled on until May 1998 when they gave up. Before that though they did a screening for Japanfest which was a University of Canberra festival set up by the languages division;

Flyer is really beat up, but they played “Whisper of the Heart”, “Fushigi Yuugi”, “Grave of the Fireflies”, “Escaflowne”, “Patlabor” TV episodes, “Nadesico”, “Combustible Campus Guardress” and a Japanese film called “Family Secret”. Myself and Nathan took over in June 1998, but I think by the end of the year, he’d had enough. I struggled on through 1999;

I said before that we were the first club in Australia to play “The End of Evangelion”. Here’s a flyer we made up in our last screening of 1998;

I found a lot of flyers or temp flyers I had made for screenings which didn’t happen at all from late 1998 through the end of 1999;

Interestingly I have a few completed and made up flyers for the 10 July 1999 screening, but can’t remember what the hell happened or why I cancelled it. While CAS usually ran once every three weeks from 1995 to the end of 1998, in 1999 I did a grand total of five screenings. Look at this flyer I printed out towards the end of 1999;

You can clearly see by this time I really had a gutful of the University of Canberra Union screwing me around. And below two more screenings which never happened at all;

I had quit by the end of 1999 (last screening was 6 November 1999, where I played "Spriggan" and got a small mention in BMA) and decided to help the ANU Anime Society (ANUAS) during 2000 and used the CAS website as promotional tool for anime events in the region (it was kind of piss poor though). However I noticed that people were still coming to my website and asking me when the next CAS screening was on. So I did a joint screening with ANUAS in November 2000 in order to get some of those people to join ANUAS;

You’ll note that the “Escaflowne” film wasn’t released on VHS and DVD in Japan until April 2001. This was very early internet film piracy; someone at Sunrise had upped a pretty high quality digital transfer of the film onto the web (not some camcorder crap, a proper transfer) and US fans had already subbed it and put it up for people to download. I always find it really surprising that so little was made about this by fans. You’ll note that flyer is in full colour which one of the members at ANUAS did on a colour photocopier. And yes as I said before in my 2011 post on CAS, never even went to the screening for this one; I went home to see my parents that weekend. It was kind of interesting making up the flyers. I really enjoyed setting everything out, writing up little synopses etc. But it was a bit of a battle to get them printed and distributed to the two comic book shops in town (Phantom Zone and Dee's Comic Book Shop) and the now sadly defunct independent record shop Impact Records (which had incorporated a comic book shop into the store). In the end I had a lot of difficulty printing them off. I could no longer do it at work and local photocopy shops would either do a really shit job or charge absurd amounts.

Next time I’ll be looking at other clubs in the region plus a few notable events.