Forum - View topicAbsolute Borderline: The Early Days of Evangelion Fandom, Part One
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mdo7
 Posts: 8212 Location: Katy, Texas, USA |
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Whoa, thank you for this retrospective article. I may have been too young back then (I was in elementary school, at that time I didn't know what anime was until a few years later like 1999/early 2000's), but it's cool to see how anime fandom in the US has changed a lot. Evangelion was quite a niche title back then before the era of high-speed internet, Wikipedia, social media, Youtube, and influencers online.
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tintor2
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If I were to explain my early days in the Evangelion fandom it would be the opposite of the meme "oh cool robot". I was instead mindblown by the scene of the purple robot punching an angel over and over like if it was an animal or a human. Still, I never really knew what channel from my country aired it so I had no knowledge about the story. It wasn't until I found Sadamoto's alternate retelling that I decided to check the series. However, while I eventually started the TV series, I had no idea what was so difference between Anno's direction and Sadamoto's storytelling.
One of the worst phrases I heard lately is that Evangelion stands out due to focusing on the humans. Tomino's first Gundam already had that type of story but the director wanted to tell a war story with Sunrise making several changes like Amuro's age to market it. Evangelion also focuses on humans but it feels some episodes go really deep about what kind of conflict a character can have. I noticed Hunter x Hunter and Nier Automata had a similar style sometimes when a character undergoes a big emotional conflict like when the Madhouse devoted some episodes to Gon blaming himself for Kite's death before fighting Pitou. |
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Silver Kirin
Posts: 1744 |
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I always love hearing anecdotes about the early anime fandom, particularly in the '80s and '90s, since it's very difficult to obtain clear information on how people managed to keep in touch with the latest and most popular titles airing in Japan, but it seems it's not as well documented compared to how video game magazines got the lastest news about the latest games from Japan, even with the rise of the Internet in the '90s anime was still kind of niche compared to other popular media.
Speaking about video games, my first contact with Evangelion must have been back in the late '90s, maybe '98 or '99, a popular video game show here in Argentina showed the first opening, maybe because it was part of an Eva game, and despite me being just a pre-schooler I loved the OP song, it was propbably the second anime song that I listened in Japanese, but this was a modern song. Some years later I discovered Locomotion, a TV channel focused on anime, adult and experimental animation, and there was a really cool, and a bit creppy, commercial for Evangelion, but I didn't watch it as a kid, because I thought it was something I shouldn't be watching, it wasn't until 2009 when I finally watched Evangelion for the first time on the same channel, which by that point became Animax, I didn't know it was actually a re-dub, though more precise it was a dub of the Renewal version. You could say I arrive late into the Evangelion bandwagon, and while at that point I had watched tons of anime, Evangelion was still very different from some contemporary series. I think around that time I also began collecting the Evangelion manga adaptation. I later managed to track some old anime magazines and video game magazines from the late '90s and early 2000s and Evagelion was very prevalent in all of them. |
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chrisb
 Subscriber Posts: 764 Location: USA |
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Going from Ninja Turtles to Evangelion must have given viewers some serious whiplash.
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Silver Kirin
Posts: 1744 |
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Well, in a roundabout way, I can make a connection between TMNT and Evangelion, at least in when it comes to their Neutral Spanish dub cast: - Shinji's VA, Víctor Ugarte, voiced Casey Jones in the Videomax version of the '07 movie and Rapahel in the Warner Bros. version - Toji's original VA in the Locomotion dub, the late Enrique Mederos, voiced Leo in some episodes of the '87 cartoon and he reprised his role in the early episodes of the 2003 series, but he sadly passed away and Luis Daniel Ramírez took up the role and then he voiced Toji in Renewal of Evangelion's first dub, he also voiced Mikey in the modern TMNT live-action movies. The late Jesús Barrero, who voiced Toji in the original dubs of the first two Rebuild movies voiced Leo in the 1990 live-action TMNT film and in the WB. version of the '07 movie. - Kensuke's VA in Locomotion's Eva dub, Irwin Daayán voiced Casey Jones in TMNT '12 and in the 2016 live-action movie. Kensuke's dub VA in Renewal, the late Gabriel Ortiz, voiced Mikey in the '03 series and in the Videomax version of the '07 movie. - Kaji's original voice in the Locomotion dub, Enrique Cervantes, voiced Tatsu in the 2012 re-dub of Secret of the Ooze and Rocksteady in the 2012 series. Kaji's VA in Renewal, Gerardo García, voiced Raph in the 2012 series and in the Videomax version of the '07 movie. - Rei's VA, Circe Luna, voiced Cynthia Utrom in Mutant Mayhem. |
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Kicksville
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I feel like finding this stuff didn't used to be that hard. But the destruction of old blogs and fansites, degraded online search tools, and social media that is hostile to proper search have made running into such accounts much more annoying. Which is why it's very good to see this on ANN. Off the top of my head, Let's Anime and Fred Patten's Cartoon Research column (RIP) are good reads for more of that sort of thing. |
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Urano
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I had to delurk for this topic, because this was basically how I got into anime. I knew the art style from video games, I think I'd watched Akira on the Sci-Fi channel (however it was spelled back then) and that was about it. A lot of women my age were getting into Sailor Moon around that time, but not me.
But I picked up a copy of Gamefan magazine, which had some anime coverage - reviews of the Gunsmith Cats OVA, maybe the Oh My Goddess OVA? and a handful of other, less-memorable home video releases - and then a big, two-page spread about Evangelion. I'm pretty sure it was written by Casey Loe. And it was clearly written for an audience of non-noobs, the kind of people profiled here -- folks with university anime clubs or access to Japanese bookstores and video stores, an overseas hookup, or a fansub connection. Not like me, in other words. (I remember that the article made a brief mention of Eva getting creamed in the ratings by "Wedding friggin' Peach," which meant nothing at all to me at the time but boggles the mind in retrospect.) But I was fascinated and determined to watch this thing, somehow, and I finally got my chance a year or two later when I went to college. Eva, Utena, Escaflowne... the mid-90s were a damn good time to discover fansubs. One thing about anime fandom at that time was that it was on the verge of transformation. There were all these teenagers (teenage girls, frequently) watching Sailor Moon on TV and trying to figure out how to get more of it. Some of them were writing letters to Gamefan about it because it was 1995 and they couldn't search the internet. But AOL was about to go flat-rate, unlimited access, and spill masses of non-tech-savvy Americans online. We didn't need to be able to download streaming stuff - we'd check a series out because we saw a cool image or read an enthusiastic website. I went to A-kon in Dallas in... 1998, I think? And the majority of people there were male and older than me. A year or two later the majority were my age or younger. Some of the manga I read changed formats and sizes mid-run during the switch from flipped to unflipped. |
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Jason_F
Posts: 7 |
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This is a great article on anime fandom in the 90's. I started watching anime in 1978 with the heavily localized Battle of the Planets on TV. Then a few years later it was Star Blazers (Space Battleship Yamato,) also on TV. The 80's is when I was really a fan with Robotech in 1985. I was lucky enough to live near a Japanese market that rented VHS tapes so I watched the Gundam movie trilogy and Ranma 1/2 in Japanese with no subs or dubs throughout the 80's. There were plenty of comic stores that sold import models, artbooks, toys, and magazines so I bought Newtype and a tokusatsu magazine for children. In the 80's there were no anime clubs in my high school and in the 90's in college there was not anything. I hang out with science fiction and comic book fans to seek out other anime fans. There was little at science fiction conventions in the early 90's, you might find one or two vendors in the dealer's room.
I did watch a lot of content on the old Sci Fi Channel anime block. |
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tintor2
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I recall a big problem in the Spanish localization was that they didn't properly pronounce Asuka and Kaworu's names. For some reason the channel that air the series eventually got the license to air the director's cut of the episodes that reveals all Rei's copies, Asuka's mental breakdown and the Kaworu's episode. I had to use the internet to watch The End of Evangelion which probably never aired on TV because of portraying too much inappropiate conent even more than the series. |
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Silver Kirin
Posts: 1744 |
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I think I have been on those websites you mention, but thanks anyway. Yeah, I'm pretty sure there were tons of webpages that collected information and discussions on anime back when it was brand new, but sadly most of it hasn't been well archived. The other thing that I have to say is that it's kind of difficult garner some information using old sources, because some of the information wasn't very well researched even back then, sometimes it was mianly due to translation errors, but one of the things that I actually find it fascinating is the huge amount of misinformation or just people making wild theories and people mistaking it for actual facts. Evangelion was probably one of the anime that has amassed a lot of rumors, which now we know are false, like that they ran out of budget for the final episodes, that Rei was meant to be unsettling to viewers, etc. Other anime that had a lot of urban legends attached to them, which some people believe to these day, were Pokémon, Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball, Digimon, Ranma ½, among others.
I've only seen some brief clips of Evangelion's first Latin American Spanish dub made for Locomotion back in late '99 and yes, they did pronounce Asuka as "Asooka", but the subsequent re-dubs for Animax and Netflix corrected the pronunciation. Death & Rebirth and The End of Evangelion were not dubbed into Neutral Spanish until Netflix got the rights, and the Netflix re-dub itself had a mix of VAs who worked on the original Locomotion and Animax dubs, as well as some VAs who woked on the original dubs for the first 3 Rebuild films and some new voices, then Amazon made their own Neutral Spanish dubs for the Rebuild movies, with only Shinji, Rei, Mari and Asuka being voiced by their original VAs, or current VA in the case of Asuka, since her original VA from the Locomotion dub passed away many years ago. |
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Swissman
Posts: 819 Location: Switzerland |
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I remember the early days of Evangelion quite well. Back in my home country in the early to mid 90s, you either had English magazines like Animerica, Anime UK and Protoculture Addicts or French publications like Animeland and Tsunami to get the latest anime news from Japan. A few selected shops also had copies of Newtype, Animage and Anime V from Japan, but they were quite expensive and there was the inevitable language barrier. Internet with usenet and the first anime related websites were still in their infancy, trading tapes with fansub groups from the States/Canada was quite rare if barely non-existant among Swiss fans.
The first time I ever read something about EVA was in summer 1995 in a copy of Animeland. There was a small picture of Ayanami Rei. I remember how it made me excited for the upcoming anime because her design reminded me of Nadia from Gainax, which I was a huge fan of. In fall of 1995 the first EVA merch from Japan arrived in our specialized stores. I picked up the original soundtracks and also the first Laserdiscs. Those were super expensive: Two episodes cost 99 Swiss Francs back then, which are about 170$ today. Because of that, I couldn't afford buying more than a few episodes in the beginning; I was still in high school. Later on, I started to buy the series when it got released on french VHS tapes and I also got some episodes on VHS copies. Watching episode 9, "Both of you, dance like you want to win!", is one of my best memories of early anime fandom. I got the episode on JP Laserdisc at a one day anime event in a movie theatre. The seller screened the episode on my wish right afterwards on the big screen. Shortly after the beginning of the episode there is a sudden cut which abruptly halts the ongoing loud action and music. Me and other visitors were confused at first. Was the laserdisc player broken, or maybe the sound system? A sign of disc rot? Luckily, it wasn't the case. The episode's finale with Shinji and Asuka's synchronised fighting choreography was absolutely fabulous to watch and hear on the big screen. |
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krpalmer
Posts: 38 |
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I joined my university's anime club in 1995, after having spent high school just sort of figuring out that anime existed (as distinct from my grade school memories of Robotech). The club produced a once-a-term "zine", and the first issue of 1996 had a one-page article on Evangelion (impressed with the characters even as it mentioned "When you would like to take a shotgun to half of the cast, you know the characters are neither stereotypes nor boring," but including some of the incorrect backstory mentioned in this article). The second issue of 1996, though, followed that up with an article describing the controversy building in the second half of the series.
The club, anyway, showed the first episodes of Evangelion in the final term of 1996. I have to admit to resorting to online fanfiction afterwards to keep memories of the series intact and get a sense of where it would go from there. (What I read happened to include one of the more infamous efforts to "fix" the anime, which involved bringing in The X-Files, Tomb Raider, and a good many other mid-1990s computer games the authors were obviously fans of...) The club showed more episodes before I left university, but I also happened to watch some videotapes of untranslated episodes (which, I believe, had been recorded in Japan by someone in my residence who'd gone there on a work term) with printouts of stilted "literal translations" in my lap. |
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Fluwm
Moderator
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Gotta add my voice to the chorus saying I absolutely love reading about this stuff -- both the article, and y'all coming out in the comments to share your own experiences with the early fandom. I find it all immensely interesting.
And it's not just the fansites and blogs, but the discussion boards -- Usenet being the biggest one I see referenced, of which precious little has been archived. Occasionally I'll stumble across something that has a few old Usenet posts quotes (often a copy of a copy of a copy) and it's always fun to see that we've generally been complaining about the same stuff forever. We're at a point where we've lost the archived versions of archived fansites (and so forth). An enormous amount of online media is just gone, which weirdly makes the late 90s/early 00s seem a more opaque period than the late 80s/early 90s, since from that period, at least, we've still got a lot of physical media preserved (and backed up digitally in placed like archive.org). I've had a lot of fun rifling through old fanzines, myself. It's especially interesting to see how the fandom built up around media in a pre-Internet era. It's such an alien thing to me, it's honestly hard to conceptualize. |
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fuuma_monou
 Posts: 2031 Location: Quezon City, Philippines |
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That's one reason I'm hanging onto my old anime magazines like Animerica and Protoculture Addicts. |
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Silver Kirin
Posts: 1744 |
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In regards to Usenet posts, I think they moved to Google Groups, but it seems in late 2024 Google announced they wouldn't support any of the archived Usenet posts, so maybe all of those ancient Internet conversations have been lost, except for some that some people were able to save. It's a shame, I actually managed to read some old Usenet posts from people talking about The Transformers when the original series and comics premiered, and it was actually kind of funny in retrospect how negative some of those posts were, then there was the (in)famous alt.tv.simpsons newsgroup that hated episodes that nowadays are considered classics, it's like the Internet hasn't changed ever since people began using it. It makes me wonder about people's first reactions towards Evangelion, and some other anime as well. With Evangelion, how they did compare it with other anime, especially mecha anime, from that came before. |
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