| Anime's popularity is unusual among U.S. entertainment in that it came
from the bottom up. Instead of studios producing films and trying to sell
them to the public, the hard-core fans discover their favorites from Japan.
Then American companies buy the rights to those underground favorites and
sell them commercially. Key to the below-the-radar discovery of anime series
by fandom, organized and otherwise, is the "fansub" - anime on which American
fans have added their own subtitled translations. Alex Matulich (left),
who wrote the JACOsub fansub computer program for the Japanese Animation
Club of Orlando, and Neil Nadelman (left), who started as a fan subber
and now works as a professional translator, had insights into the fansub
world at Otakon. |
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| Back in the good old days of anime fandom, before widespread distribution
of hundreds of titles in the U.S., fans gathered in clubs and strained
to understand what they could get from Japan. "What was really strange
would be when the only guy in the room who understood Japanese would start
laughing, and everyone would look at him and ask `What did he say,'" Matulich
remembered. "I'm still amazed that I got hooked on anime even though I
couldn't understand it." The combination of JACOsub, personal computers
that could use the program to add subtitles, and dedicated fans who worked
unpaid hours to translate and transform anime finally let fans understand
what they were watching. |
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| With the proliferation of fansubs, anime became less mysterious and
more popular, the panelists said. "There probably wouldn't be much of an
anime industry without fansubs," said Matulich. Nadelman said that the
fan subs created a market for commercial subs. Without the fan versions,
the U.S. anime industry "...would have immediately switched over to dubbing
- the big video chains don't want to buy subtitles," said Nadelman. |
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| The dark side of fansubs is bootlegging. Some fansubs find their way
into the hands of people who copy them and sell them. The presence of those
bootlegs has led video companies to crack down on fansubs (as happened
when the industry formed the J.A.I.L.E.D. consortium a few years ago).
Nadelman said fansubbers can't stop bootlegs. "When it leaves your possession,
you don't have control of it any more. You don't intend for it to become
a commercial product - but it becomes a commercial product." |
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