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American Anime in the Beginning

Anime and manga were barely known in the America during the 1990s and those who did know of them were often misunderstood by their peers. The anime often found at the time were aired as early morning cartoons. Examples of these would be Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics, Noozles and The Littl' Bits on Nickelodeon in the late 80s and early 90s. I never even knew those were anime until much later in life. Later examples would be Dragon Ball, Sailor Moon and Samurai Pizza Cats on syndication. Yes, syndication. Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon aired long before USA and Cartoon Network around the early to mid-90s. The Sci-Fi Channel would air a few movies in the ungodly hours of the morning. Examples would be Vampire Hunter D, Robot Carnival and Casshan: Robot Hunter. They got better about their air-times later on in the game, though.

Anyway, basically, anime was either not known to be Japanese animation or it was considered perverted Japanese animation for adults. Because of this many people steered clear of it and those who liked it were seen as losers, geeks or perverts. Isn't that lovely?

Despite these drawbacks, it was a pretty fun time, though. Anime and manga were treasures to be obtained. Fans really struggled to bring anime to America and a comradeship was formed. To get the real deal you had to import anime VHS tapes and untranslated manga over. Most couldn't read, much less speak Japanese, however. That is where dedicated fans came in.

Manga translations and scanlations began popping up very slowly. There would be subtitling groups who would make VHS tapes with subtitles for other fans. This was not the pirating system you have about today, though. There were moral codes to be followed.

With manga translations and scanlations, the group would stop the project if it ever was picked up by a professional translating company. If a group was doing a project on a manga, other groups could not pick the title up as a project unless it was abandoned by the first group.

With subtitles, this etiquette was not so strongly enforced because translations based on audio could be tricky. Still, there was a code in distribution. Those who translated the dialogue, applied to to the tapes and made copies were not to expect money for their services. This didn't mean you got the tapes for absolutely free, however. There was payment for the materials used and the shipping required.

No matter what, though (whether it was translations, scanlations or subtitled tapes) those who provided these things did not make money off of them in any way. The motto was, "For fans, by fans."

Now that the USA has discovered the great gold mine anime and manga are, however, many of these morals have been forgotten. Now accessing anime and manga is a snap. Manga database sites will post any translated manga they can get their hands on be it official or fan-produced and make money for every click they get from people entering their websites. You can easily obtain torrent downloads of entire anime series or manga.

While it is great anime and manga are now so widely accepted these days. Unlike the 1990s, both are easy to access due to the fact that companies are now taking up the task to bring translated content to us. Books stores and web-stores now carry these medias. There are websites that will import the raw material for you.

Despite this, many don't appreciate these facts. Instead, they look for any means to obtain all the manga and anime they can freely and manga sharing sites take full advantage of this. It isn't a victim less crime however.

All the manga these people are reading and all these anime they are watching for free... the money that is meant to be spent on these products are the livelihood of some manga authors and artists. Not every manga author is some rich big shot living it up because his or her manga is extremely popular. Even those who are living well have insane work schedules to keep. A lot of blood, sweat and tears go into producing manga.

So yeah... while I love the fact that I can access manga and anime far more easily than before and it isn't so misunderstood... I do miss the "pioneer" days. Those days it was all about spreading the word and sharing everything one could find out about anime and manga. It was about finding others who actually understood what anime and manga were and being able to talk about it with someone else seriously. It was a whole lot more... "pure".