SteveH wrote:davemerrill wrote:This is from before there were anime cons, more or less: it's labeled "Dragoncon", but it's actually from the 1989 Atlanta Fantasy Fair. Sharp-eyed viewers will note both the Kei and the Yuri of the "Atlanta Dirty Pair" in this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kU3_ntf5flo
Lord have mercy, LORD have mercy!
How very ghetto and low-tech it all was, huh? OCEANS of comic boxes. Mainly male, even given the cameraman's attempts to focus on the cute gals.
Matt, Leslie and Lauren on the escalator made me smile and want to laugh. Dude had epic hair and a look of "I don't want to be here".
Ah, how cute Lauren's butt was. I mean, probably still is but, you know.
How can things like that have been an entire GENERATION ago? How? It doesn't seem right somehow.
I mean, THINK about it. Barely the internet. Cell Phones were a magical Sci-Fi idea. VHS was king. For the most part friendships were maintained by phone or mailing letters or something. National geek news was mostly transmitted by Starlog magazine.
We've gained so much by advances (as my writing here shows, right?
) but I think we lost something too. Not exactly sure what, I don't have the words other than to fumble with 'soul' or 'special' or 'enchantment'.
Matt still has the look, and most of the hair, surprisingly enough. I haven't seen Leslie in years and years and years - 1996? 1997? - but last I heard she still had long black hair. Lauren does NOT have the "Kei" hair and hasn't since the mid 90s, which we should all be thankful for since it took about eight cans of hair spray to get it up like that. I wanna say that's the third iteration of their Dirty Pair outfits - they did the TV show costumes, the movie costumes, the OVA costumes, and a set based on the Yas illustrations from the novels (as seen in the Crusher Joe movie). And of course I didn't have a camera at the time. I know there are lots of pix out there, though. The three of them wound up in a 1990 issue of Animage, photos by Jack Thielpape of Austin TX.
In looking at the 1989 AFF footage, it's striking to me how many women are at the con - I remember the attendance being skewed heavily male, and naturally the cameraman was giving more attention to the females, but still, that's a lotta gals at the AFF. Proof too that the costuming culture was alive and well before anybody knew what 'cosplay' was.
I'm pretty sure that at the time this footage was shot I was either in the anime room or in a room party somewhere.
You know, I was there at the time, but I don't know if the things we've lost were worth keeping, really. It was hard work being an anime fan in 1989; I was so busy running the anime club and working the anime rooms and making sure we had a hotel room to sleep in and a room party to have fun at and everybody had a ride to and from the event that I can't remember a damn thing about the 1989 Atlanta Fantasy Fair that sets it apart from the 1988 AFF or the 1990 AFF, other than the venue. After the con was over I'd be copying tapes for somebody or writing somebody a letter or hauling junk to a club meeting or printing a club zine.
'89 was after the local C/FO imploded (because I got tired of doing all the work) and before Anime-X started up (the provisions of which were that I was not going to do all the work). Most of my anime fandom at the time was person to person, which was still a bunch of work.
I was in college in 1989, I should have been concentrating on my classes instead of showing "Project A-Ko" or, god forbid, "Star Dipwads" to a room full of nerds. Maybe I could have gotten a job that paid more than minimum wage (in 1989, let's see, working part time in my uncle's frame store, working the stock room at Macy's, maybe.) But anime was such a precious thing at the time that certainly I felt that I couldn't let one convention pass without being there, I couldn't let one connection slip through my fingers if I could possibly keep it.
What I remember most about 1989-1991 in terms of anime fandom is mostly frustration. Broke, burned out, and cut off from the series I liked by a flood of newer shows I had no interest in and a total lack of access to the kind of connections that COULD get me the shows i was interested in. No wonder I started spending my free time on girls! Access to beer and garage bands every Saturday night, somewhere.
For more information on the Atlanta Fantasy Fair, please consult
http://atlantafantasyfair.blogspot.ca/
