The Mike Toole Show

The Club

Last week, I did something I hadn't done for a good five years - I attended an anime club meeting. See, the whole phenomenon of organized anime fandom has only been a big factor for about three decades, and in that lengthy period before ing and streaming anime became something obvious and easy, clubs helped facilitate anime fandom in those long, cold periods between conventions. (Anime cons used to happen a lot less frequently than basically every single weekend, but that's a story for another column.) 

But as anime got easier and easier to acquire, first in the DVD-era avalanche of releases to brick and mortar stores, and slightly later online, the most obvious raison d'etre that anime clubs had-- acquiring and watching anime-- started to fade. Why spend hours of your time trooping to some location, be it a local library or a university meeting room or the community room at your pal's apartment complex, to crowd together with a pack of other weirdos and watch stuff that could, after all, be obtained with a few clicks of a mouse? Why, indeed. I had to know. That's how I found myself sitting in the back row of MIT Anime's weekly meeting, bunched up with about thirty folks, most of them at least ten years younger than me. 

But before I get into that, I'll give a little background on how anime clubs started in North America. Most folks consider the Cartoon/Fantasy Organization to be the very first club devoted to screening Japanese animation; it was formed in 1977 by Mark Merlino and noted anime historian Kimba the White Lion, and even non-anime animated fare like Gay Purr-ee.

Clubs similar to the C/FO started to dot the landscape as the 80s progressed-- in fact, a kid named Streamline Pictures. What was interesting about these clubs is that, including the C/FO, they would almost invariably organize very quickly and effectively - attendees would rapidly become club officers and start corresponding with other organizations, acquiring new anime, and contributing to the newsletter (of course there was a newsletter!). 

Eventually, C/FO branches would open in numerous cities - while this opened the clubs up to some rather onerous micromanagement from afar by C/FO officers who worried way too much about their clubs, it also spread anime far and wide and allowed new clubs to survive and thrive. My friend and occasional collaborator Dave Merill helped create a C/FO branch in Atlanta in 1985 with Scott Weikert and Bill Spurlock. Dave has a lot to say about anime clubs during this period.  "Once we put the word out through the various Atlanta fandom organizations that we were starting an anime club, anime fans kind of came out of the woodwork," he re. "We had most of our meetings at the Highland branch of the Atlanta Public Library."

One aspect of old clubs that Dave re well has long since vanished from the anime club landscape. "Pretty much every club meeting involved chains of VCRs and people making copies of movies and TV shows. If we visited anime fan friends in other cities, or if they visited us, out would come the latest acquisitions and the VCRs would start humming. We'd set up in hotel rooms at conventions and get entire series copied over the weekend. We would spend entire weekends in somebody's apartment copying tapes, eating pizza, playing RPGs, generally LIVING LIFE TO ITS FULLEST." Dave and his fellows spent these days watching and trading the likes of Bubblegum Crisis, and a lot of other stuff that was once highly sought after and is now easily available on DVD. These old meetings, according to Dave, would draw anywhere from 15 to 35 people.

I still my first anime club meeting at UMass Amherst's UMJAMS organization. I was spending one Monday morning before classes at the university's science fiction library sifting through the Robotech novels (yes, I read the Robotech novels. I'm sorry.) and the guy clerking the desk noticed this. This shaggy, bespectacled gent languidly explained that UMass had an anime club (I would later learn that it was less than a year old) with a meeting tonight, and I should go. Boy, this excited the hell out of me! I somehow managed to make it to my classes (which was disappointingly rare for me) and hit the meeting.

It turns out that the scruffy dude was Lawrence Amshey, the club's president and co-founder. Along with him, about a dozen other folks had crowded into a small conference room with a 26-inch television and VCR. Out came the tapes - I would soon discover that the club rarely had strict schedules, and would decide what to watch based on what stuff attendees had brought with them. At my first club meeting, we ended up watching the short OVA series Here Is Greenwood and the first Ranma 1/2 movie, both of which are decent enough titles for new fans. I was hooked, and would spend the rest of my time at UMass returning to these meetings over and over again. In fact, the Monday night meetings weren't enough for me - I'd frequently drag several club up Orchard Hill to my dorm, where there was another VCR, and viewings would continue until 1am or later, which had a remarkable (read: remarkably negative) effect on my grades. 

I made numerous friends at UMJAMS, some of whom I still maintain ties with. I watched entire series, like Kimagure Orange Road and C. Watson, would stay involved with UMJAMS for years. He recalls: "It was in 2000, I believe, that we changed to classroom auditoriums, which had projectors... Because we were in auditoriums instead of function rooms, the meetings, while likely larger, grew a bit less social because the were spread out, and had less opportunity or incentive to chat with everyone else."