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The Mike Toole Show - Join The Club


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darkchibi07



Joined: 15 Oct 2003
Posts: 5468
PostPosted: Sun Nov 21, 2010 4:48 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
"Our showings almost always started with a selection of AMVs, followed by either a complete movie/OAV, the first four episodes
of a single show, or the first episodes of four distinct shows... some 200-300 people would attend each meeting. About a third of them would leave after the AMVs were shown, heading early to the club office to socialize and/or wait for library access to open." His partner Rubin elaborates: "RIT anime was mostly social. We did have showings once a week, and eventually twice a week. But a bunch of us would... hang out in the club space most of the night. We would head to a diner afterwards. We had social nights, dance parties, etc. three times per year. It was basically a hang-out for anime fans with showings as a rallying point."


Those were glorious days during my time in RIT! Crying or Very sad

I actually became acquainted with a solid number of people during club. It really is a different experience watching an anime show with a group than watching alone.
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Pandadice



Joined: 17 Dec 2008
Posts: 182
PostPosted: Sun Nov 21, 2010 5:01 pm Reply with quote
Oh snap, so do people there like recognize your name and respect your vast knowledge? Do you think many of them read your column? I think it'd be pretty cool to go to a club meet with such a vet.
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eely225



Joined: 23 May 2006
Posts: 96
Location: West Lafayette, IN
PostPosted: Sun Nov 21, 2010 5:08 pm Reply with quote
I started an anime club at my small liberal arts college in 2008, based around the idea of communal viewing of my massive DVD collection. I also prefer dubs.

I have a feeling that I'm one of those out-of-touch officers who needs to be replaced.
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Zin5ki



Joined: 06 Jan 2008
Posts: 6680
Location: London, UK
PostPosted: Sun Nov 21, 2010 5:37 pm Reply with quote
I dare say that the club scene you encountered during those years was far more vibrant than it ever was over here. The notion of a casual anime society being patronised by students from other local institutions, or even from "ordinary" members of the public, is not something that I believe to be commonplace amidst our campuses.

Still, I lament not. The link you have provided is by far the most amusing anime-related comic strip I have ever chanced upon, and it more than suffices to raise my spirits.
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staab99



Joined: 05 Jul 2010
Posts: 123
PostPosted: Sun Nov 21, 2010 5:54 pm Reply with quote
I actually started an anime club at Northern Arizona University (NAU) back in 07, I started out small, but now we have between 40-50 people this year. The club is really amazing and everyone are casual fans who just want to watch shows they have never seen. Recently we did our Golden Boy Marathon (our 3rd year doing it because people love this OVA series). The nice thing about the club is people want to do stuff outside of club (sushi trips, con trip, parties, Tuesday we go out to Denny's, etc). The key to making a successful club is interacting with the other members. What's interesting at our club is we don't do as much voting because people don't seem to care about what gets brought in, and as the president and my Vice, we try to come up with shows that people will like (and the majority of the time people really like what we bring in). The members have barely seen anything outside of Toonami and Adult Swim, and they come to our club to see new things and I love introducing new and old shows to the members.

My only complaint is we have a few members who refuse to watch anything before 2000 because they feel that the animation is "Old" and what not, I just believe that's ignorance, but what can you say about that? They still come and watch the shows and still interact with other members.
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Myaow



Joined: 20 Dec 2007
Posts: 1068
PostPosted: Sun Nov 21, 2010 5:57 pm Reply with quote
I think this is the first time I've ever seen anyone mention the movie Gay Purr-ee online or in real life! I can't pretend that it just exists in my imagination anymore!

And hooray for the Gunshow Anime Club comic!! I wasn't expecting to see Mort's face staring at me when I loaded up ANN today.
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AkiraKaneda



Joined: 01 Jul 2002
Posts: 61
PostPosted: Sun Nov 21, 2010 6:16 pm Reply with quote
Never apologize for reading the Robotech novels. They were awesome in their day for what they were. At least when I was reading them while they came out in my teens...
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Imperialkat



Joined: 30 Nov 2006
Posts: 227
PostPosted: Sun Nov 21, 2010 6:40 pm Reply with quote
I miss those communal viewing days as well. My first experience with an anime club was in high school. It was one of their first meetings (my friend drug me along--he was one of the club's suppliers as well as my personal pusher) and they showed a couple of episodes of Ranma 1/2. It was maybe 20 odd people in a little classroom with a laptop and a projector. I enjoyed the experience, but other responsibilities kept me from going regularly.

My university also had an anime club which I was a "member" of but never attended their "meetings". I'll explain the quotation marks--this club actually existed not at the university but on Facebook (back when it was exclusive to college students) and would call meetings at random at the president's dorm room. After the original leadership graduated the club became legit, which allowed them to hold official meetings in a study room in our library. Don't know if they're still around.

I wonder if anyone would show up if I started a club in the city library?
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Splitter



Joined: 19 May 2003
Posts: 1276
Location: Knockin' on Heaven's Door
PostPosted: Sun Nov 21, 2010 6:53 pm Reply with quote
The majority of my lifelong friends were met in the two anime clubs I belonged to. I learned of many anime I never would have heard of and genres I doubt I would have ever explored if not for anime club. The experiences I have had in and out of club with the members have been irreplacable to me; the convoy to Anime Central, the bake sales, the birthday parties, the Halloween cosplay contests, Bad Anime Day, Live Action Week... hell, last year, the president of anime club in my sophomore year of college gave a kidney to my father.

Bless the anime club, now and forever.
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wandering-dreamer



Joined: 21 Jan 2008
Posts: 1733
PostPosted: Sun Nov 21, 2010 6:53 pm Reply with quote
I was pretty thrilled to find that my college had an anime club when I got there (I had been asking around the local fandoms but no one was quite sure) and it's a pretty quite by fun club. No fansubs, each week we have a different theme (WTF night, bullied them into have a Satoshi Kon night, politics, magical girl/boy, ect) and everyone brings whatever DVDs they have on the topic and we vote on them. Or, worst come to worst and no one brings anything, some of us bring stuff just in case so we have something to watch. Not much socializing as a club outside of it but a lot of us are also involved in the school's Nerd Network club which is just for nerds socializing (we also having a video gaming club, I think a tabletop gaming club, Quidditch team, and a Jedi group on campus so we don't need to have a huge anime club). But it's all pretty fun, we get about a dozen or so people each night and we're pretty chatty with whatever we watch but it's mostly good-natured, although some of the girls last year didn't like how we kept making ball jokes during Big Windup....
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Dagon123



Joined: 01 Jul 2010
Posts: 194
PostPosted: Sun Nov 21, 2010 7:10 pm Reply with quote
wrote:
My only complaint is we have a few members who refuse to watch anything before 2000 because they feel that the animation is "Old" and what not, I just believe that's ignorance


I know how you feel there, the only time I've EVER been able to get those types to watch anything hand-drawn, is if it was hi-def remastered (The fact I had to entice one of my friends to watch outlaw star with the remastered edition felt like a crime, lol)
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Graddick



Joined: 13 Mar 2010
Posts: 46
PostPosted: Sun Nov 21, 2010 7:11 pm Reply with quote
I'm definitely one of those loner anime fans who never goes to a club. I went to one when I first went to university but the idea of sitting in a dark room watching shows I had already seen, or had no interest in watching, had absolutely zero appeal to me.

I'd love to be part of an anime club that is modeled on a book club. Everyone watches the show at the own pace and then meets up to talk about what they saw and to make a pitch for the next show to watch.
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12skippy21



Joined: 25 Nov 2008
Posts: 785
Location: York, England
PostPosted: Sun Nov 21, 2010 7:31 pm Reply with quote
Zin5ki wrote:
I dare say that the club scene you encountered during those years was far more vibrant than it ever was over here. The notion of a casual anime society being patronised by students from other local institutions, or even from "ordinary" members of the public, is not something that I believe to be commonplace amidst our campuses.


It depends what part of the country you are from. The anime club scene in the Derby/Nottingham area is a bit like how Mike described it in America minus the nostalgia (it has only risen in the last few years). Down here in Plymouth things are changing, in the last two years a anime club was formed at the university replacing the more dotted functions from before and there are petitions going round to start up a film and animation festival, but it is early days.

I have only been to an anime meeting twice, mainly because of my misanthropic nature but also my mates mic night performances were the same night and I got free beer for opening up. Free beer always trumps anime in my opinion.
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Paploo



Joined: 21 Nov 2006
Posts: 1875
PostPosted: Sun Nov 21, 2010 8:55 pm Reply with quote
The anime club I was involved with in school was sort of insane (in a good way), in that we launched a con in our first year (which was quite fun in retrospect, considering the location was across the street from my dorm Smile It made carrying a giant box of vhs's for showings in the middle of winter quite hospitable). Which then broke off into it's own ongoing entity seperate from the school/club after a few years, but still staffed by assorted members of the club who'd graduated, and others who've absorbed into the collective over the years.

And yes, currently a lot of anime clubs are very much so social events- I've sat in on a few meetings of a friend's local club, and it's very much so about mass geeking, like a con in minature. Very fun to watch. Watching anime as a group can be very fun too.
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chocobolily



Joined: 31 Aug 2008
Posts: 32
PostPosted: Sun Nov 21, 2010 9:27 pm Reply with quote
Wow, and I really felt like running my high school anime club was a lot of work. I forgot that in the (relatively!) old days it was much harder to get your hands on different titles. Now we just look at what's streaming on CR/Funi/ANN and ask people what DVDs they would be willing to share before we vote on a new show, haha.

So I guess the part that makes it hard is just screaming loud enough for everyone to hear from the front of the room -_-
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