The Golden Era [From a matter of perspective]

This article goes hand in hand with my one from last week, trying to explain in more detail what I mean about "Golden Era"

You hear people talk about "Golden Era's" all the time in history, the Rennaisance is the big one, the Roaring 20's being another. So what do some people consider the "Golden Era"of Anime/Manga fandom? The result may surprise you.

For ME and a lot of old timers the "Golden Era" was when there was very little commercially available on the Anime/Manga front, yes the prices were astronomical on stuff released over here and we were watching 8th generation tapes poorly subtitled, but there was something special at the same time, blazing a trail, opening a new frontier.

I was a member of the Vancouver Japanese Animation Club [VJAC for short] that was responsible for a group called Arctic Animation, this is the same Arctic Animation that would go on to do the complete fan sub of Maison Ikkoku, Patlabor, Record of Lodoss War and others. If you were a fan back then, chances are you saw a lot of our clubs work. This was a really neat time to be in fandom, we would get new series all the time and see them sometimes completely without subtitles [let me tell you The Five Star Stories basically make no sense without them, but it was fun anyways] but we loved it all because we thought there was something really special about what we were doing.

Trying to aquire merchandise was also a nightmare, really the only major places that you could get them were in California here in the USA and then from overseas, quite often in the UK, it was insane. But we loved getting each and every little piece that we could aquire, they were treasures to us.

There wasn't activism then about certain series, in fact it was precisely the opposite people were excited about anything new and unique that came down the pipe. There wasn't the whole "My series is better than yours" it didn't exist because we were thrilled with anything that came out.

We hung on every new release, hunted down Gundam kits like they were going out of style, these were great times to be a fan, maybe one day we will get back to them...