Knights Of The Seiya Zodiac
portions of this article originally appeared at Anime Jump. Back in the 1980s – I know this is a cliché but it’s all I got here, so work with me - while the Gundam franchise was napping, before...
View ArticleBlue Sonnet On It
When the five part Crimson Fang: Blue Sonnet original video series was released in 1989, American anime fans immediately thought of one thing - the margarine brand "Blue Bonnet." But even without any...
View ArticleAnime North is back!
Well, we're back. Anime North returns to the Toronto Congress Centre and the Delta Hotel on Dixon Rd. (you know, out by the airport) for its 25th year of Japanese animation convention fun! Cosplay!...
View ArticleAnime North: Dateline 1997
1997 was the year Titanic broke box office records, Seinfeld and ER battled for the top TV ratings, and Japanese animation like Princess Mononoke and End Of Evangelion solidified the medium’s grip on...
View ArticleAnnoying Adventures With The Tape Trading Taskforce
this column originally ran in 2003 at Mike Toole’s “Anime Jump” website, and has been amended with minor corrections, slight alterations, and additional annoyances. Names have been changed to protect...
View ArticleAnime Weekend Atlanta 2022
Back in 1995 when we were preparing to cut the ribbon on our first Anime Weekend Atlanta, the expectation was that we'd have a fun little gathering of the local anime fans, and that would pretty much...
View Article1972: The Year Anime Got Groovy
It’s 1972! President Nixon's plumbers are plumbing up what we’d call Watergate, while Tricky Dick makes a historic relations-normalizing visit to mainland China. Arab terrorists murder 11 at the...
View ArticleVengeance Of My Youth's Arcadia
Sure. Have a pummeled kid look up mid-thrashing, exclaim “Captain Harlock!” and let the audience figure out that guy from the wanted poster earlier, with the eyepatch and the skull-and-crossbones...
View ArticleMay The Force Five Be With You
Force Five! Not a wind strength measured with the Beaufort scale. Not the 1981 Robert Clouse action movie starring Hapkido master Bong Soo Han. Instead, five different Japanese animation...
View ArticleA Time Slip Of Forty Years: 1983 In Anime Film
Let's look at the numbers. In 1982 there were 21 animated movies released in Japanese cinemas with a total running time of 1881 minutes. The next year saw slightly fewer films- only 19 - and a...
View ArticleThe Mister Kitty Story
As many Let's Anime readers may be aware, when I'm not writing for this blog I'm usually working on something for the website Mister Kitty. My partner Shaindle Minuk and myself started Mister Kitty in...
View ArticleAnime North 2023
It's that time of year again when the flowers bloom, when the pollen drifts, when spring comes to Ontario and when Anime North comes to Toronto. Since 1997 this festival of all things Japanese...
View ArticleNobody Knows The Party Rules
You can hear it as you get off the elevator. Somewhere down the otherwise quiet hotel hallway is the muffled rumble and chatter of a crowd. Sometimes you can even smell it, the distinct odors of red...
View ArticleAnime Weekend Atlanta 2023
It's October and that means it's time for another annual convocation of Atlanta's premier Japanese animation festival, Anime Weekend Atlanta! Every AWA is special, it seems every show's had their own...
View ArticleWhen The Rings Of Time Come Together, We Will Meet Again
In the fall of 1979 I was a cartoon-addicted elementary school student, spending my Saturdays with Scooby-Doo and old Warner Brothers shorts on network TV. Weekdays the UHF stations gave us Tom &...
View ArticleJack And The Sonorama
Christmastime was just here, and for us here at Let's Anime, Santa Claus, or Mandarake's mail order service, was kinda busy. One of the presents under the tree this year was a Sonorama single for the...
View ArticleWith An "E"
Let me start with a personal note. I grew up in the US, but twenty years back I moved to Ontario to begin a new adventure north of the border. As a new Canadian, I lacked the cultural background that...
View ArticleAnime North 2024
Another year has rolled around and before you know it, it's time to pack up and head out for Anime North! Since 1997, AN has been Toronto's number one anime fan convention, moving from collegiate...
View ArticleRosemont: 1999
As occasional historians of North America's anime fandom, sometimes we're called upon to make our research available to the general public. Gerald Rathkolb of AWO has been doing this over at the...
View ArticleInterview With A Volgar
Thirty years ago the voice cast of the 1979 Star Blazers series was a mystery to American Star Blazers/Space Battleship Yamato fandom. The credits for Star Blazers listed the Japanese title and a host...
View ArticleSpace Shark Versus Fire Bird: The Movie
Early in 1984 I was a teenage nerd at something called the Atlanta Comics Festival, a show hosted by a local comics distributor so that 80s Marvel junkies could witness a panel of X-men inkers roasting...
View Articlewhat goes around
In a week or so I'll be back in Atlanta for Anime Weekend Atlanta, the Japanese anime convention I helped start and that has happened every year (with one exception) since 1995. This year's AWA is...
View Articlewrite 'em, cowboy
I was there in the 90s and let me tell you, things were pretty grim. For us anime nerds, I mean. There we were, sitting around our anime clubs and cons, looking at the fandom we’d built around the...
View ArticleLet's Flashback 1993
By popular demand, another long-suppressed issue of the print Let's Anime is up at the Otaku Archive portion of the Internet Archive, complete with all the attitude, factual errors and translation...
View ArticleRevenge Of The Kickstarter Of The Dagger Of Kamui
It was the 1980s. There was no way this movie wasn't going to be treated like exploitation trash, have half an hour hacked out of it and wind up in video stores with a dopey new title. This is how the...
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