This rough looking flyer mysteriously appeared in local comic book shops in early 2001. Discounting the Canberra Anime Society, this was the first (and only) official anime club that the University of Canberra ever had (UCU = University of Canberra Union). I think I met the club's president, Isaac, at a ANU Anime Society (ANUAS) screening sometime after that as I have his email address scrawled on another flyer. Anyway the goals of the club were to screen anime and do other stuff related to J-Pop music such as karaoke and god knows what else. The flyer opens up to about 200 words gushing about how great the club is going to be. I went to a couple of early screenings and they were a bit of a shambolic affair. Isaac invited me along and wanted to use me as a tape and DVD library, which I declined from doing. Apart from loaning out CD-Rs of J-Pop music, that was about it in terms of the J-Pop side of things. I think they just stuck to anime after the first year.
Along with the Magical Girl Club (which I will talk about next), they collaborated with ANUAS for Anime.au.04 (a convention I previously discussed in the previous part of this series). I did a fair bit of work on the booklet/program guide which included write ups of the three clubs participating. Late in the day the very angry president of the UCU club (a young woman, Isaac had left in late 2003), came up to us and said my write up of their club was "not in the spirit". We were all baffled as to what hell she was on about. All I had done, like in the descriptions of the other two clubs, was give the basic details of who they were, where they met, the URL of their website and when they had screenings. Everybody was flummoxed as to what they actual problem was with what I had wrote. Later in their online forums they continued to complain at the terrible treatment they received by ANUAS without ever articulating what we actually did.
It looks like the club changed it's name sometime after 2004 to the UCU Anime Club and eventually ceased operations in 2007. Their website still exists here. Now on to a fantastically odd offshoot of ANUAS, the Magical Girl Club;
The club started in 2002, and from what you can see from the flyers, they screened a bunch of magical girl anime every week (and ate Pocky, something which I don't recall happening at all). It was run by Alana who was an absolute Sailor Moon nut and especially loved the live action musicals. At one point they had over 70 members which is pretty amazing for such a niche club. During the O-Week market, people would always ask her if you had to be a girl to join the club, which I think equally amused and infuriated her. I'm not 100% sure, but I think the club finished around the time Alana graduated, maybe 2006 or so.
Just to finish up, here's a few more flyers I found;
Not sure when this was, 1999 to 2001 or so. As you can see it's a screening to help out one of the clubs to send students to preform a kabuki in Japan.
I think the above event happened in 1998 or so. Both titles had been available on video for a number of years, so I really don't know why you'd want to watch scratchy old dubbed 35mm prints of the same thing at the national gallery.
This a flyer for the 5th Japanese Film Festival in 2001. This was the first time the festival toured Canberra. Of note was the unbelievably obscure 1997 anime film "Home of Acorns". Based upon a manga which follows the life of a disabled young girl who opens up a home for children with disabilities when she becomes an adult. As far as I'm aware this film never got a home video release anywhere, even in Japan. The closest I've come across a copy of the film is on one Japanese site which is bootlegging a DVD of it for 5,000 yen. I didn't go to this screening, and I have always regretted it since.
I did go to Japanime 02 which was hosted by the now defunct Electric Shadows cinema for three days in November 2002. It was a pretty damn good line up; a remastered "Akira", "WXIII Patlabor the movie 3", "Millennium Actress" (some people actually cried at the end of the film), "Cowboy Bebop: Knocking on Heaven's Door"etc. Pretty amazing line up. They also had "Princess Arte", however the print was too damaged to screen, so they showed a dubbed print of "Roujin Z" which was utterly lame as it had been on video for nearly a decade here! This very short lived festival (this was the second and final one) began in 2000 in Sydney as part of the Olympic Arts Festival. After Japanime failed to show up in 2004, Madman Entertainment did their own little festivals called Reel Anime from time to time. Eventually those festivals stopped and they now do one off screenings of various anime films. In the years leading up to Japanime 02, Electric Shadows did screen some anime films such a s dubbed print of "Perfect Blue" and a subtitled print of "Princess Mononoke".
Finally, some fandom stupidity. I know the above flyer appeared everywhere around Australia in 1998, but surprisingly appeared in Impact Records as well. Supposedly all you had to do was write to SBS TV and they'd play every single episode of the show if they got enough people writing. Of course it was utterly absurd. I have no idea who thought up this daft campaign up (I mean you can clearly see it was the Australian branch of SOS - Save our Sailors, a rather vocal and nutty fan collective who wanted to get the show back on US broadcast TV) but what in hell gave them that idea? I heard that someone in SBS programming was sacked over this incident, as they told someone at Save Our Sailors this would work. However I have absolutely no evidence this happened. I often wonder how many letters SBS received because of this campaign and if they had any idea what the hell it was all about. It was a really weird time to be a fan during the 1990's. Those Sailor Moon fans were really rabid and strange at times.
I was going to also do a write up of anime shops in the area in the late 1990's, but I think I'll save that for another time. There is so little information floating about in regards to early anime fandom in my region and I really think that's a shame. A lot of websites have disappeared and haven't been archived by the internet archive. Pretty much everyone I knew in the local anime community has moved on from the hobby, except one or two people. Nobody is keeping an archive of this stuff which I find disappointing, but probably to be expected. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed looking through these tattered and yellowing flyers of a fandom long gone.
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