1980, Part 1: Anime’s “Golden Age” Was Built on Content Otaku Overlook

A writer for Otaku USA Magazine and co-host of the Anime World Order podcast, Daryl Surat spent his formative years acquiring outlandish media and trivial information instead of learning the basic tenets of human interaction. Now that everything he knows and more can be instantly acquired online with no sacrifice required, the joke’s on him. Isolated from human contact, missing basic fundamental parts of his mind with no possibility of remedial rehabilitation, and being gradually unmade by entropy Daryl can be found screaming with his fingers on Twitter at @DarylSurat until his impending existential expiration.

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They say that most people don’t like to read more than a few hundred words at a time on a screen, and certainly not several paragraphs without even pictures or videos to break things up, especially not in this era of mobile Internet access by way of smartphones and other handheld devices. The average Internet user will read an article’s headline, skim the body of a text to zero in on any keywords, look at the pictures, and then leave it at that even if they’re planning to comment. (Perhaps I should say “ESPECIALLY if they’re planning to comment.”) There are, after all, many other links to check.

If that describes you, go ahead and close the window now because it takes me forever to start talking about what I’m supposed to be talking about.

The very first time I ever used the Internet was around 1992-1994, and the very first thing I did was look up information about anime. It wasn’t until the late 2000s, long after everyone had left the party, that I made my first post to Usenet. So it is that despite all my overly wordy message board posts, articles, and the like…this is actually the first time I’ve ever “blogged” about anime (or, for that matter, used the word “blog” as a verb; eww, gross!) Most of my writing is intended for print, and even my web articles on the Otaku USA website aren’t crafted with considerations of “how to ensure this will be shared on the Internet” in mind.

When it comes to blog posting, confirmation bias rules the day. It’s no surprise that the initial flood of volunteers for this project were for the nostalgic, formative years for fans most likely to currently be writing anime blogs: the 1990s and 2000s. The more analytically-minded fans zeroed in on the years where classic series that are still remembered in 2013 first began. So it goes that if I didn’t take 1980, nobody else would’ve. I myself have no childhood memory or nostalgia for the year in question since well, it was the year I was born. Words like “manga” and “anime” weren’t commonly known to Japanese animation fans in the US at this time, such that the Japanese origins of many of these titles were deliberately obscured when it came to English-language export. In the annals of anime history, the year 1980 itself is not typically remembered as any sort of milestone marker, particularly among us English-speaking fans. “The 1980s” as an overall decade is, and in part that’s because we are of a certain bias.

In 2013, there are two types of anime: those distinctly made and targeted for young children/families and those explicitly created by and for hardcore fans. For ease of this discussion, if you’re reading this then you’re probably in that second group with me. There’s some crossover, sure, but if something’s purely for Japanese families or little kids we simply don’t give a crap. My knowledge of Sazae-san is just enough to know it as the answer to a trivia question, but I’ve certainly never SEEN it.

No doubt this is why holistically speaking, “the 1980s” are commonly referred to (by non-Japanese fans, at least) as “the golden age of sci-fi anime” if not just “anime” overall: a time when Japan’s economic prosperity combined with the advent of home video resulted in the creation of a wide variety of animation much of which would later be deemed “for otaku.” Anime would offer action, sci-fi, space opera, violence, idealized romance, cute girls, naked breasts, sex, or perhaps some combination of the above (“sci-fi violent sex involving idealized cute girls who violently fight as we see their naked breasts”) for which no other form of available media could compare.

But this is 1980. The Original Video Animation hasn’t been invented to give rise to all of that just yet. Now I could take the easy way out and tell you all about the action and science fiction shows that you, the sort of person liable to be reading this website in the first place, no doubt already know about, but you know how the Internet works. You can pull up the same lists from the same online encyclopedias and databases as I can. So here’s the deal: before I write about Ideon and Be Forever Yamato and all that jazz, let’s stretch ourselves a bit first. Let’s do a few extra copy-paste operations such that for once we can make mention of all those children’s cartoons and Japanese family-oriented anime that by and large go ignored by contemporary commercial and fan endeavors alike.

I’m splitting this up into two sections, such that in the second part we’ll talk of the sort of things liable to be re-released on DVD and Blu-Ray for the collector’s market. So do me a favor and wait until then to comment about how I “forgot” to mention how Space Warrior Baldios gave rise to the “Heika” meme on 2chan despite the fact that I TOTALLY JUST DID, at which point I’ll give you the Internet finger.