Last year I put out two retrospectives about stuff I did online prior to the creation of The Land Obscusion, one about how I got published on GameSpot back in 2004 & another about my short-lived, half-hearted attempt at making YouTube videos. In between those two, though, there was something else I did, though it was nowhere near anything "notable". Still, with the 10th Anniversary of this blog coming in less than two months time, I figure I should complete the trifecta & see what I can wring out of writing about what I like to now call the "AoD proto-blog", something I had only previously mentioned in passing on rare occasion.
For a generation of online-savvy anime fans, AnimeonDVD.com was an iconic website that helped grow not just fandom in North America, but also the industry itself, namely through its forums. During the first half of the 00s, the "AoD" forums became known for being the home of very tech-focused anime fans, especially those who wanted the anime they cared about being given the best releases possible. In turn, actual industry reps visited the AoD forums & communicated with the fans, taking what they learned about what those fans wanted in their DVD releases & implementing what sounded like good ideas; it's sometimes stated that the AoD forums are why anime releases wound up being the best they could be. When I first started entering the fandom myself in 2004 I eventually found my way to AnimeonDVD.com, and I signed up for the forums, where I definitely found a bunch of posters who were... passionate, to say the least; I mean this in both the good & the bad. Still, there was only so much AoD founder Chris Beveridge could do to expand on the site by himself, so in April of 2008 (the 10th Anniversary of the site itself) he sold AoD to Mania.com, a more general entertainment news site. Beveridge & the AoD staff stayed on board to continue covering anime & manga, though, wile the forums would transition over as well, with the URL for said forums even literally including the phrase "aodvb" (as in "AnimeonDVD vBulletin"). Things more or less continued as usual after the move to Mania, but the new home did bring about something new for the AoD forums: A blog section for forum posters.
Through the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, some bits & pieces of the "proto-blog" can still be accessed, so let's go over everything that still exists, if only to look back and see if I cringe at all while writing this.
The furthest back we can go back is sometime in July 2008, which is also the only time in that entire year that has been archived, so while we can't see what my original post was, we can certainly see that I was in the middle of going over each entry in my "Most Wanted" list, which was part of a popular thread over at the AoD forums where people listed their Top 10 Most Wanted Anime Licenses, and someone would aggregate all of it & create an overall Top 25, which would consistently be updated whenever anything actually got licensed; I actually ran one for manga for a little bit on that forum, but it never had anywhere near as much traction. Anyway, by the time of this archived page, I was up to my top four picks, namely Ashita no Joe 2, Kaiji, & Akagi (all of which did eventually get streaming options over at Crunchyroll, though Joe 2 has since expired, sadly), as well as a look at six license rescues I'd love to see happen (which I really wish was archived, as I'd love to see how many actually happened), & my #1 pick for licensing, Ring ni Kakero 1; even back in 2008 I desperately wanted an English release for this show! Also worth nothing is that, even as far back as 12 years ago, I was already finding ways to focus on specific subjects for each post, and I even maintained a consistent format for each of these "Most Wanted" posts. I was still in college at this point, too, so this may have also worked as self-induced practice for whatever writings I had to submit for classes.
Luckily, this part of the archiving actually has the only two posts that have been preserved! So let's start with the oldest one that you could still access, which would be Dissecting LordGeo's Most Wanted List: Gyakkou Burai Kaiji -Ultimate Survivor-; my usual handle on forums to this day is "LordGeo", a name I first started using with video games back in the 90s. It's interesting to look back & read this short write-up about Kaiji, because I think it does show how I improved in just four years since that 32X article that appeared on GameSpot. I'm not saying it's an outstanding piece of writing, but it's quick, concise, & I feel would make for a decent way to sell Kaiji to someone who's never heard of it or Nobuyuki Fukumoto. I even point out how the show originally turned people off because of how Kaiji himself doesn't just solve his current dilemma, but rather just finds himself with even MORE problems; it's wild to think that today, but I only wrote it because I saw those very reactions. Overall, though, I don't feel like cringing here like I thought I would, so bravo to 22-year old me!
As for the other actually-archived post, it's me writing about Ring ni Kakero 1... Am I a broken record, or what? Anyway, Dissecting LordGeo's Most Wanted List: Ring ni Kakero 1 is handled in the same exact format as the Kaiji write-up, only this one is a bit longer, by about a third or so. In terms of the actual content of the post itself, it's really nothing all that different from what you can find in all of the times I've written about this series over here: It's starts ~7 (out of 25) volumes into the overall manga story (mainly because it's where the "main" story begins), the music by Susumu Ueda (Re: Cutie Honey, Narutaru) is absolutely fantastic, the voice cast is purely sublime (& the cameos by Masami Kurumada himself & Yuji Nagata are fun), its relevance & influence in being the start of modern shonen action, and how the first season definitely had some limited animation that stifled it at times. As I said at the end, "Ring ni Kakero 1 was the anime that truly made me a Masami Kurumada fan; B't X got me interested, RnK1 made me a fan, & Saint Seiya and Fuma no Kojirou live-action just solidified it. Ring ni Kakero 1 NEEDS to be licensed!".
Probably the most interesting thing about this post, though, is that I actually went over how many times I had watched the RnK1 anime up until that point in July 2008: S1 Eps 1-9 once (via fansubs), S1 Eps 10-12 twice (bootleg DVDs & fansubs), S2 Eps 1-6 twice ("raw" & fansubs), & S2 Eps 7-12 thrice ("raw", bootleg DVDs, & fansubs)! Do consider that, at the time of this post, RnK1 was only made up of two 12-episode seasons; I had hoped that a third season would come in 2008, but that wouldn't happen until 2010. As simple of a post as this was at the time, I think it still conveyed just how much I cared about this anime, because "It's just so much fun!", and it's a sentiment that I still feel to this day. This post was also one of the extremely few to actually get a comment, with Busaiku saying that he had just watched it not long before this post, and that he loved it, seemingly more than Hajime no Ippo & Ashita no Joe; also, got to love the nod at AnimeWho's release of Joe vs. Joe, just because they both involve boxing.
Really, no other way to leave looking at this post than to, once again, quote professional translator (& old AoD forum poster) Andrew Cunningham: "Like I said before, this is the Giant Robo of boxing shows. If you dug Robo, you need to watch this thing." Honestly, I couldn't put it any better way; why do you think I quoted him for the tagline of the Season 1 review nearly 10 years ago?
Moving on, the next date of actual archiving you can find for the "proto-blog" would be early 2009, which shows that I was in the middle of another series of posts, this time looking at the catalog of anime that licensor d-rights had to offer. Seeing something like this is amusing for myself, because it shows that the "proto-blog" truly was the place where I essentially prototyped ideas that I would later revisit over here, as I did a similar thing in 2015 with the three-part d-low on d-rights article. From what we can see with this archived page, I had covered Next Senki Ehrgeiz, X TV, Shining Tears x Wind, Bamboo Blade, Princess Nine, & Reborn!, and the most amusing thing of all is that every single one of those titles have since been licensed or license rescued, with the sole exception bring Ehrgeiz; in fact, Bamboo Blade's license was announced literally a week after I wrote about it! To be honest, there's just always been something about d-rights & its catalog of representative anime that's constantly had my curiosity, as it's a bit of an eclectic mix of well known titles, cult favorites, forgotten & obscure anime, & even a bunch of kids titles. Also, so many of d-rights' anime has been licensed that it's easier to just name what's never been licensed, and every now & then a title from d-rights winds up getting licensed, even if it was essentially forgotten about. Seriously, who would have ever thought Maiden Japan would license Monochrome Factor, or that Right Stuf would license rescue A.D. Police? It's stuff like that which makes me honestly think that Platinumhugen Ordian getting licensed or Next Senki Ehrgeiz getting license rescued might honestly happen one day, if only because companies will continue licensing anime from d-rights, and eventually they'll just run out & have no choice but to pick up titles like those!
We jump ever so slightly ahead in the next archived section, this time covering from late February to late May of 2009. At the earlier time for this page, I was in the middle of a general overview of Tamsoft & Takara's Battle Arena Toshinden series, with this page specifically covering the trio of spin-offs (Battle Arena Nitoshinden, Puzzle Arena Toshinden, Toshinden Card Quest), the "new generation" final entry Toshiden Subaru (a.k.a Battle Arena Toshinden 4), & a look at the future; at the time, Takara Tomy's Toshiden for the Wii (which is barely even "in name only") was not out yet. While I will agree that the games have aged roughly since they first came out (Subaru was instantly outdated upon release), I do have a fondness for the franchise for various other reasons (like it's historical relevance & the surprising amount of lore to it), and I've had intentions of redoing this kind of overview in a greatly expanded form one day. After a two month hiatus, I returned to the "proto-blog" that April to go over the "Kurumada Curse", which was the idea that anything by Masami Kurumada was essentially only meant to fail & be screwed over whenever anyone gave anything a chance, seemingly for no reason directly connected to the quality of the anime and/or manga themselves. I actually revisited this concept in mid-2013 over here, and while there have been moments of breaking the "curse" (Discotek releasing the 80s movies & Lost Canvas OVAs, Anime Midstream's release of B't X, Seven Seas bringing over the Saintia Sho manga, & simulcasts since 2012), there's still this lingering feeling that it still exists, namely in how almost none of them actually wind up being notable sellers (Midstream was pleased with B't X's sales, but that's literally the only exception). Finally, in late May, I did a short post about having rewatched the infamous Super Mario Bros. movie from 2013, just a day shy of its 16th Anniversary. While it's by no means a good Mario movie in any way, when taken as just your run-of-the-mill summer Hollywood blockbuster it's honestly not as bad as you'd think. Yes, it had an infamously terrible production history behind it, but the end product is at least ambitious in what it tried to do; it just wasn't a Mario movie.
From there we jump to the penultimate archived page, which actually covers the early days of my year-long stint at making (really bad) YouTube videos! Since this was a blog on an anime forum, I only ever updated whenever I made a video related to anime. Fittingly, the first/bottom post on this page is about my very first video review on October 12, 2009, which was for Next Senki Ehrgeiz, which I've no doubt run into the ground at this point, so let's just move on. After that first anime review, though, I held off on doing more anime, focusing instead on gaming, so it wouldn't be until February 2010 that I'd make my next post on the "proto-blog", which was a 5-part series covering the Ring ni the Kakero 1 anime, no doubt prompted by the announcement of RnK1: Shadow a couple of months prior; it had first been teased in early 2009, & I remember finding out while doing my internship in video editing. Just like Ehrgeiz, I feel I've run RnK1 into the ground on this blog (though the pilot film review is the oldest anime review I did that's still on YouTube), so we'll continue to move along, and the next one is especially interesting. One of my early videos, which I've long since gotten rid of, was a three-part (due to YouTube's then-existing 10-minute video limit) "Let's Watch" of the Panzer Dragoon OVA, which was essentially me doing a Mystery Science Theater 3000-esque riff while watching the whole ~30-minute OVA; the only thing of note is the "I regret everything!" gag, which I used for the tagline to this year's written review. A month later, I did a two-part review of Zaizen Jotaro, followed a week later with a two-part "Top 12 Hot-Blooded Anime Opening Themes" video, which is essentially the original "12 Anime" list that I've since made a recurring segment over here, though I don't actually order them in any fashion, like I did in these videos; both of these two-parters are still up on YouTube, in fact.
Finally, we reach the last archived page for the "proto-blog". Well, technically, it's actually two pages, but the difference is a single post, so I've just combined them together. This starts us at August 18, 2010, which is about me putting up a video that has also since long been removed. With a clickbait-y title like Hajime no Ippo is Overrated!, you'd think I'd be someone who absolutely hates George Morikawa's iconic Shonen Magazine boxing manga, but it's definitely the opposite; I absolutely love Hajime no Ippo. As I said, it's really more of a clickbait-style title, as the video (& the successive Really Long Version I posted a few days later) was really nothing more than me bemoaning how people would put Ippo on such a high pedestal that they wouldn't bother to even look at any other boxing anime or manga, simply on the reasoning of "It's not Ippo"; remember, this was a different era of anime fandom than today. Of course, since I was being harsh on how people treat something beloved, I remember the comments generally being the equivalent of "This is stupid. Ippo is awesome, & all those other stuff just suck," so I'm fine with it being lost to time. A month later, though, I had something more simple & silly, which was me just remarking at how multi-compatible 9-pin connector video game console controllers were, namely in how you could plug in an Atari 2600 joystick, ColecoVision controller, Master System pad, or Genesis pad into each others' consoles, and they were pretty much guaranteed to work with each other; my specific fun discovery was in how the Master System's 1 Button was mapped to both A & Start on a Genesis. After that was a jump to November 29 to promote my written review for The Masked Rider: Kamen Rider ZO getting published over at Sega-16.com, and a mere two days later things totally changed. The penultimate post for this "proto-blog" was the announcement that I had finally started my own separate blog, called The Land of Obsusion; as they say, the rest is history.
However, I did have one last post for the "proto-blog", which means that I was effectively running two blogs & a YouTube channel for an entire month, which I never thought about until now. Anyway, said final post was simply a Boxing Day piece about me reminiscing back at how PC Gamer demo discs for PCs were how I got introduced to so many computer games of the 90s (& early 00s). Considering how "all over the place" I remember this "proto-blog" being, I think that wound up being a good way to send it off.
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It's not like the old "AoD proto-blog" would have lasted for much longer anyway, though, as Chris Beveridge would leave Mania in April 2011 & launch The Fandom Post, which is still in operation to this day & has its own anime fan forum & blog section. In fact, I even started a Land of Obscusion offshoot blog over at Fandom Post when the site launched, with the idea being that I'd post here & there with stuff that wouldn't work over here, but I wound up putting a stop to that in 2015 after only six posts; to be fair, though, that technically means that I stuck with it for longer than the "proto-blog".
Was there really any point in me going over this early, pre-Obscusion era of my life? Maybe not, but at least now I've fully covered what I did prior to starting this blog, just in time for the 10th Anniversary this December, so at least now I can move on from my past, in a sense.
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