Anime Crash - Episode 1: Of Grand Vision

Anime Crash. In the history of anime rising to become a significant entity within the United States, Anime Crash has most certainly played a role. A role perhaps more forgotten now than known or even accepted, yet very real none the less.

I ended up on an NHK news segment in late 1995, as someone who was interviewed about why they like anime. The cameras caught me at Anime Crash New York at an anime screening they had. I wore my Otakon 1994 t-shirt and looked quite dweeby. The next day I walked into the place wearing normal people clothes, with a letter of recommendation from a mutual acquaintance looking for a job at the store. I started that day, stacking a shipment of 200 Gundam model kits that had just arrived.

This was actually the "before" picture.

Anime Crash began in 1994 as a retail entity, a sort of outgrowth of a chain of stores in New York called Little Nemo’s, which had existed for decades and were the country’s first retailers devoted singularly to comics and comic fan culture. Companies like Central Park Media, Orion, and AD Vision were just beginning to make an imprint in home media, while Viz, Dark Horse, and Eclipse were taking manga to national publishing channels. Before too long (and with the help of the VP of sales & Marketing of CPM, Mike Pascuzzi), the owner/manager of Little Nemo’s (Chris Parente), had noticed that anime and related goods were selling strong, and partnered with the owners of what was then Image Anime to grow Anime Crash from a section of a comic store into a separate pop-culture retail entity, incorporated in January of 1995 (this is gonna be important later), and opened up on 13 East 4th St in New York City, right near Tower Records and next to what would eventually become the hipster-infested Other Music.

In a year like 1995 in order to be successful in media and pop-culture retail, you had to maintain a very strong air of frat-boy disrespect for customers of anything that wasn’t mainstream, and anime retail was no exception. I buried my fandom as best I could, but still unabashedly used it to recommend titles to make a customer walk out with 4 tapes instead of 1. Anime Crash, from its interior design to the staff was an exercise in the design of insulting your customers. In order to prove to both the American and (even more so) Japanese distributors that it was a legitimate business that took business seriously, it wasn’t enough to simple have a professional detachment from the fandom. What was required was a display of an almost outright hatred of the customer base at the time, which was the pre-internet (now long-past) 90% male, socially awkward otaku who may have smelled bad and did not follow trends at the time. No one was better as exuding this frat-boy 1980’s “cool guy” as Scott C Mauriello, the 3% minority owner of Anime Crash.

The one there w/ the Y Chromosome.

After my first day stacking Gundam Models and helping tourists from Kansas open up to the joys of Devil Hunter Yohko (who were only there because they had come down to see Tower Records across the street) I realized that Mauriello was the archetypal loudmouth manager type who stuck his name on things once all the hard work was done. Every business has a guy like that, and in this case the work done by the stalwart team of managers at the store wasn't really compromized by those antics. But I buddied up to him anyway, because it can never hurt to be friends with a guy near the top. He was great in front of the press because he spoke in sound-bytes, hated “nerds” and had the kind of manic energy that can only come from ADD and long-term stimulant abuse. He’d show up at 11:30 am, complain about how the air-conditioning wasn’t turned up high enough, and then crank it to maximum as he stepped out for a 3 hour lunch. This was perfect, since that let most of the real work get done unhindered. He was a great opener, and an opener was just what the place needed to get mainstream retail, media, and investors to pay attention.

Protip: Get mentioned in Newsweek, and CNN, and they pay attention.

Anime Crash hit the scene during an economic bubble in the news media capital of the world. If it had been any other city, anime as a market force would have never had the kind of press it took to get investment money thrown at it, or the shelf space it would get in the major channels when it did. Written up in the NY Times, Washington Post, Time Magazine, Newsweek, and had stories run on CNN, NHK, ABC, Bloomberg, TBS (Japan), and more than I can remember. The store did so well that it was able to open up a second location in Harvard Square in Boston and co-produce gallery shows and artist signings of the likes of artist Yoshitaka Amano, J-Pop group S.K.I., director Mamoru Oshii, and actor Sammo Hung. The majority owner (97%) of the company ended up zooming up to Boston to run the Harvard Square store and a soon-after Anime Crash opened Providence location as well. While those two locations were physically larger, the New York location was by far the most famous and sold the most goods. Celebrities came down to le trendy village in Manhattan to get their Ninja Scroll on or buy some of that weird “Japanimation” stuff. Kodansha and Bandai executives came to see the very first foothold of 100% legitimate retail in the USA of anime and Japanese pop-culture goods (and we'd inevitably end up signing direct distribution deals), and people stopped in on a daily basis to check out an anime VHS section that put Suncoast to shame. From 1995-1999, the store cleared an average of 500 anime VHS tapes a week, with dubs outselling subs at about 7 to 1 (yes we crunched the numbers).

If it was anime in the 1990’s there’s a big chance Anime Crash had something to do with it, which is I guess the nicest way I can Segway into APOLLO SMILE.

I'll give you a hint which one is Apollo: It's not the person behind the camera.

Apollo Smile was basically created by Apollo and Anime Crash to be a kind of brand ambassador for the store and the emerging medium of anime as a whole. She was hired to host in-store events and appear on advertising. Her biggest roll-out was when Crash put her on stage at AnimEast 1995, she sang she did her thing, and she got us customers. She was up on stage when Anime Crash hosted the actual New York theatrical premiere of Ghost in the Shell at Cinema Village (yes that was us working w/ production IG) and led a fan-parade straight back to the store where we were selling tapes and other merchandise.

At one of these things, she got cozy with the guy from SciFi channel (back when it was called SciFi channel and when it was run out of New York), and worked out a deal to work around her agreement w/ Crash to become the “live action anime girl.” And that's how anime got on SciFi in the 1990's, using Anime Crash as a barometer and Apollo Smile as a mascott. This was not something that went over well on the Crash side... after the money and time they spent building anime into an entity that was at least starting to become recognizable to mainstream channels and audiences. Thought when we saw what ended up on SciFi, we were kind of feeling like we dodged a bullet with that one. Anime Crash’s new brand ambassador was "Hikari" ...a straight up copy of the mascot from the logo, which worked out just as well.

Rather than subject you more Apollo Smile, here's the Crash and Production IG groups (Mamoru Oshii center) getting ready for the after-party of the Ghost in the Shell event. I don't remember how or when Susan Napier showed up, but there she is...

At AnimEast 1995 is also where the split between Anime Crash and Image Anime happened. You have to remember that this was 1995, and no single otaku cared about whether his merchandise was “legit” or “bootleg.” Retailers sold lots of non-licensed merchandise like wall-scrolls and SonMei CDs. Anime Crash had Japanese executives in and out all the dam time (we even had people representing Masamune Shirow show up), so we couldn’t exactly have bootleg merch of their stuff lying around. Image didn’t exactly see it that way and would table at conventions separately, cannibalizing customers and mixing up inventory with questionable origins. This didn’t go over too well with Managing Director Scott Mauriello and, at AnimEast 1995, fisticuffs were indeed brought to bear in the hotel between the two factions. The locks were changed the next day and eventually Image anime opened up a store in Midtown. Oddly enough, the hard core otaku fans were happy to follow bootleggers until the "great awakening" in 1999 or so.

It’s hard to explain, but in the pre-internet and pre-DVD world, where the market for anime, manga, and pop-culture goods was made up of almost exclusively single males, and never had anything close to the social structure it does today. Anime Crash turned “anime” from a genre into a medium. It made anime an acceptable addition to a product mix of any retailer, and not just as a VHS commodity, but t-shirts and other merchandise as well. In January 1997 I most of a speech for the Japan Society’s Pokemon event, where anime and its emerging market were discussed. Of course, the one speaking had to be Mauriello, since sharing the spotlight wasn’t his thing. I didn’t care at the time as long as it was for the greater good. And it was actually on this very day, Halloween of the same year, where J-Pop performer Sayaka (not the one born in 1986) played a packed house where we were able to show clips of Perfect Blue before it even hit theaters in Japan.

Yes this is me as the MC of that showing.

The Anime Crash brand was on the scene and the right people and publications were paying serious attention. Unfortunately, so did the competition, which wouldn’t have been so terrible if not for the fact that Anime Crash was now in the hands of an irratic megalomaniacal personification of incompetence. In hindsight, it was like a party on the Titanic.

To be continued on Nov 7, 2011.

Now, there is a LOT that I'm glossing over or just plain leaving out (like how some feminist group got upset at the front window display of the Ghost in the Shell poster... or how making that display attracted a bit of police attention). I had an entire paragraph ready to go just about how media in New York invariably shapes retail markets for consumer goods especially home-media and music... and another one just full of wacky stories about individuals who would come in and ask weird/stupid question... or that one shoplifter we caught. That's probably what people want, but we're talking serious tl;dr potential. I'm leaving out specific times that I've created news stories specific to anime because that bragging is for a resume/CV not a blog, and I've left out a number of individual people because don't feel like going into their whole backstory. So if there are specific things you want to know about the early stages, leave a question in the comments and I might answer it.