THE HISTORY OF ANIMANIA (New!)
- New Historical Information and thanks
- Many thanks to Michael D. Hayden, the contributer of the historical information that we have received about Animania. After you read through this history, you'll see why Animania is such a great club to be in!
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- When did 'Animania' start?
- The organization that became Animania began in the mid 1980s as a small club of non-students -- mostly A^2 townies plus some others from around Metro Detroit -- meeting at a local community center. Unfortunately, material was very difficult to obtain at that time (e.g. nth-generation VHS tapes, a handful of laser discs) and most U.S. fans' knowledge started and ended with "Robotech", so the group stayed small for a while.'
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- How did Animania's popularity gain more popularity and members?
- In 1989, interest in anime spiked with the art house-release of "AKIRA". The group started attracting more students from the University, but since the students lived on campus and rarely had cars, it was hard for them to get down to the community center. As such, the non-students -- who still made up the majority of the group -- agreed to move to the campus.
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- Who was in charge of Animania?
- At that time, the group was primarily run by Dave Laing, Pres Nevins, and occasionally Tim Eldred. (Yes, Tim Eldred the comic artist. And if you don't know who he is, I guess that just proves how long ago it was.) None of them were students but they had the connections to get new material, so it was their show. Also, Dave was extremely charismatic -- the kind of guy you would NEVER expect to be an anime nerd, much like the Fonz hanging out with the rest of the "Happy Days" gang -- so everyone was glad to have him MC the meetings.
Being non-students, however, they needed to have students officially in charge of the group in order to have access to meeting rooms on campus and MSA funding. The first official student staffers were Doug Jacobs (Class of '95, double major, Comp Sci and Japanese) and Jonathan Mayer (Class of '94, Engineering), and Animania officially formed as a UofM student group sometime around 1990. - Top
- How did Animania develop into a solid anime club with a core group of friends?
- Michael D. Hayden writes:
"I (Class of '95, English Lit) joined the club in Fall 1991. Tim had drifted away to concentrate on his career in comics, and Jon had taken a year off for an internship or something. The remaining staff consisted of Dave, Pres, Doug, and a couple of Doug's friends. The club met in the Kuenzel Room of the Michigan Union, and monthly attendance maxed out at 40 people. I was just another member of the audience for the first several months.
** Stuff we watched during that time: "Megazone 23", "Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water", "Record of Lodoss War", "Bubblegum Crisis", "Char's Counterattack", "Laputa: Castle in the Sky".
In Winter 1992, Doug announced that he would be studying abroad in Hikone, Japan for the 1992-93 school year and he needed some new student staffers to replace him. I volunteered to take over the club's newsletter and fliers, and after working with Doug on those for a few months, we became pretty good friends. When Jon returned in the summer of 1992, Doug turned the official responsibilities over to the two of us. Around the same time, Pres married a Japanese woman and moved with her to Japan, leaving just Dave from the original three.
U.S. interest in anime grew quickly, thanks to more releases from companies like Streamline and AnimEigo, and with it Animania grew as well. We outgrew the Kuenzel Room and moved to the Anderson Room. Dave continued to bring the material and MC the shows, Jon handled the official business with MSA and the Michigan Union, and I published the newsletters and fliers and represented the club on the University's BBS.
Through the 1992-93 school year we grew to a steady 100 people per month, with flood of newcomers who wanted to "get involved." Some brought material, some brought and set up the equipment, some posted fliers, some manned the Festifall booth, and so on. That was our first real staff, or as we called it at that time, our "Core Group." I honestly cannot remember most of them (hey, 17 years is 17 years) but I *would* like to make special mention of Bernard Yeh (Class of '94, Engineering), Anita Sengupta (Class of '94, don't remember her major but it was something LSA), and Gino Ruiz (dropped out). Gino in particular came to play a important role in the group, but more on that later.
By this time, both the audience and the staff consisted almost entirely of students, with fewer and fewer old guard townies, so Dave Laing began to step back from Animania. He was still the heart of the group and MCed the shows, but we handled everything else.
** Stuff we watched during that time: "Kimagure Orange Road" (a club favorite), "Kiki's Delivery Service", "Gundam 0080", "Bubblegum Crash", "Giant Robo", "Koko wa Greenwood", "Video Girl Ai".
As the Core Group really began to gel, we decided to flex our muscles. First, we organized our own subtitling and tape duplication group called "Operation: Secret Project," or "OSP" for short. (Sorry, an in-joke, ya had to be there.) This was when everything was still on VHS, and an Amiga with a GenLock card was the pinnacle of subtitling technology, so it was a bigger deal than it sounds now.
Also, I got enough submissions to turn the club newsletter into a full-fledged fanzine. I still have several copies of those, if you're interested, but we can discuss that another time." - Top
- What things did the "Core Group" do together?
- Michael D. Hayden writes:
"The Core Group decided to attend Anime Expo 1993 in force. We each got there on our own -- for example, Gino and I flew to Denver to meet Bernard, and then we road-tripped from there to San Francisco -- but once there, we were a pretty respectable presence. As part of the effort, we helped to bankroll the AX opening animation produced by RIAP (see the link in my previous email) in exchange for a mention in the credits and a semi-original character design for our club T-shirt. (I say "semi-original" because, at that time, we were all in love with Madoka from "Kimagure Orange Road". But to actually put Madoka on a T-shirt would violate AnimEigo's U.S. copyright on the series, so the RIAP crew fudged it for us. In the opening animation, look for the blue fighter with the fuselage art.) Anyhow, you can see several people wearing the T-shirt in that audience photo on the front page of umichanime.com. A couple dozen of us wore it all around AX, and at a time when there weren't many large fan organizations in the U.S. and AX itself drew only a few thousand attendees, we stood out." - Top
- Why did monthly screenings become SO BIG?
- Still feeling the buzz from AX, the Core Group decided really grow Animania during the 1993-94 school year. We distributed fliers to every comics, gaming, and indie video shop in southeastern Michigan, and we also set up a huge booth at that year's Festifall. The result was that our October show -- still in the Anderson Room at the Union -- was standing room only with 150-200 people. I know that doesn't sound like much, but anime was still relatively fringe at the time. Doug Jacobs had also just returned from his year in Japan, so the Core Group had a good laugh about the SRO crowd being his "welcome home" present.
** Stuff we watched during that time: "Gundam 0083", "Porco Rosso", "Gunbuster", "Otaku no Video", and... I cannot remember what else because I was busy with Core Group stuff and rarely watched the actual shows. With attendance like that, we obviously couldn't stay in the Anderson Room, so the next month we moved to Angell Auditorium A. And the club just kept growing, so very soon we moved the shows to MLB3 and held our staff meetings at Angell. Ha!
This was when Gino Ruiz stepped up and saved our butts. Unlike Angell Auditorium A, MLB3 had lousy A/V equipment, so Gino went ahead and bought an LCD projector, mostly for his own use but also to loan to Animania for the monthly shows. (At the risk of repeating myself, this is another case of it being a bigger deal back then than it is now. Such projectors *started* at $5,000, plus $400-600 for each replacement bulb.) We would never have been able to do our shows at MLB without Gino's help, so it's nice to see that he's been somewhat enshrined on the current Web site: in the same audience photo where you can see our AX'93 T-shirts, Gino is the guy with the red-tinted glasses sitting alone in the taped-off area and that's his projector a few rows up behind him.
Throughout the spring and summer of 1994, we had a monthly attendance of 300-400 people in MLB3. This made us one of if not *the* largest anime club in the U.S. Our only real competitors were some of the older clubs in California, like Cal Animage at U.C. Berkeley. - Top
- How did "Con Ja Nai" get its title?
- In 1994, the staff of U-Con approached us to run an anime track at that autumn's convention, but the room they offered us would hold only a fraction of our regular monthly attendance. We laughed in their faces. However, we also knew that if the previous autumn's show in the Anderson Room was any indication, then we had to do *something* for our first post-Festifall show of the 1994-95 school year. SRO in MLB3 would be a logistical nightmare and a huge embarrassment.
Thus, Con Ja Nai was born. You have your own experiences organizing and running Con Ja Nai, so there's not much more I can tell you about that. It wasn't a proper convention because the University wouldn't let us have dealers in MLB, but an all-day event that took up the entire first floor of MLB deserved a special name, so... not a con... con ja nai! Final attendance was 1000-1200 people over the course of the day, with people coming in from all over the Midwest. In essence, it *was* a regional convention, regardless of the name.
Following that first Con Ja Nai in Fall 1994, the management of the club shifted to the next generation. Dave Laing, our glorious leader, finally outgrew the whole anime thing. He and Gino had become motorcycle buddies so he frequently came out from Metro Detroit to visit us -- Gino and I were housemates in Ypsi that year -- but he didn't go to any more shows. Jonathan Mayer and Bernard Yeh had already graduated and were looking for jobs, and Doug Jacobs and I had to get serious about graduating ourselves. Gino still went every month, since it was still his projector, but beyond that he wasn't involved much. He had dropped out of school and could no longer be an official staff member.
After a bit of internal shuffling, the next club president after us was Mike Ho. (If you google his name with "animania," or with his email nickname "motoslave," you'll find some of his old Usenet posts.) He ran things until about 1997, when he was succeeded by his girlfriend. I'm sorry that I cannot remember her name -- she was one of the horde of tertiary staffers that we had during my last year in the club -- but she was a legend in her own right by the time she left in 1998 or 1999. If you still have some old guard townies in the club, they might remember her. - Top
