User:UltraRob
Hi all! UltraRob here!
Anime London was started in the mid 90's by myself when I found myself with large amounts of fansubbed anime that nobody else in my city seemed to have or have access to. I was getting the tapes from mail-order fansubbers and enjoying them (there were only a very few licensed anime available back then, and nothing on TV but Sailor Moon dubs) and got tired of lending my tapes to everyone. So, I rented a TV, found some space at Imperial Hobbies (a local gaming store that had a large playroom at the time) and put up posters: "come one, come all!"
This yielded me a grand total of 3 people for my first meeting, both of them my friends, but we still had fun and determined to keep doing it in a public place in hopes that the club would grow. About the third or fourth meeting in, Mike, the current president wandered in and joined up, becoming first one of the club's more dependable members (and then later the president of Anime London when I left to live in Japan a few years later). A bit at a time, Anime London grew, watching three hours (or more) of anime programming twice a month. Good copies, bad copies, subbed-dubbed-raw, movies-TV-OAVs-Specials, animated and sometimes live-action, we've watched it all.
At our peak a few years later, meeting in a tiny local shopping mall after hours, we had 30+ members showing up for each meeting and enjoying the fine art of Japanese storytelling. It was quite a club back in those days, and we had a heck of a lot of fun. I always believed that they key to making the club work was a balance of stability and variety, and whenever we seemed to get into a rut it was time to break out an old favorite OAV or Movie series for a night of pure fun, or toss in something nobody expected.
However, time passed and between my own jumps between Canada and Asia the internet made fansubs as common as apples and oranges, so now these days everyone has access to whatever shows they want whenever they want them. Overall, I think this is a good thing (marketplace of ideas and all that), but it's meant now most people seem to like watching anime at home on their computers and then discussing them later or online with their friends. As a result, the club has shrunk quite a bit, which I think is quite a shame. Despite Mike's incredible efforts to keep it going (which I have no end of admiration for), people just don't seem as interested in watching anime as a social experience anymore. I feel a bit sorry for these fans, since there's nothing like watching a show as a group and feeling like you've all been on a journey together. The club brought a lot of good times for me, and also helped me through some of my dark times, so although most of those members are gone now to pursue bigger and better things in their lives, I thank them all and wish them well.
These days, my passion has become Podcasting, and I have a little Podcast called Kung Fu Action Theatre. It's too bad in some ways that Podcasting wasn't around during the old club days, it would have been cool to interview people at the end of the meetings about what they saw and their thoughts and feelings about the shows. But, time marches on, and I'm sure there are already lots of anime-oriented podcasts out there.
Mike has done an amazing job with this site, and turned it into quite the hub of activity. I hope all of you who come to see it take the time to check this place out and enjoy some of what it has to offer!
Rob