I Experience Akira for the First Time - Somebody’s Dad Went to Japan for this Laserdisc?
1987. I was a freshman in highschool, and my best friend’s best friend had connections. Not normal highschool connections, like fake IDs or syblings who could drive, but connections to the east. This friend of a friend’s father knew another businessman that traveled to Japan all the time. This man would bring back cool stuff for his kids, like laserdiscs. Akira has its moments. None too spectacular on a recording of the import disc played back in a 2-head VCR at SLP, it had tracking problems to say the least. Of course when you’re 15 you don’t really care about tape quality, we weren’t AV geeks yet. We watched the tape in his parents carpeted basement on a small crank-dial TV. I remember not understanding much of anything because it was in Japanese, and none of us could figure out the ending. We just ate up all the ultra-violence and mecha. Afterwards my friends played keep-away from me with a Nerf (Nerf or Nothing) football in the basement hallway, and we knocked a relief painting off the wall, at dinner with his family we blamed it on his little sister, this only got us into more trouble. I wanted the Akira tape, to view again and again, but the friend once removed wouldn’t give it up. He eventually let me borrow it and I never gave it back.
I don’t know what my problem was, but I’d watch the thing every chance I got. I’d come home after school and instead of turning on my brother’s Sega Master System to play Zillion, I would pop in a movie I had seen tens of times before. The fascination may have come from the fact that it was a mystery wrapped in a foriegn language. It made me feel cool and exclusive, better than the jerks who still had to settle for Thundercats and Inspector Gadget every weekday afternoon. I would bring the tape to any new social experience wanting to share my obsession and making some sense of it. Nobody appreciated it like I did. One afternoon my mother walked in on the rape of Kowari (Tetsuo’s girlfriend), and forbid me to watch such filth.
Akira inspired me to create a role-playing game first based on the Palladium system with some Car Wars thrown in and then Shadowrun. I even went to the local copy shop and cut, paste, copied and bound the rules to this game with a glowing Tetsuo colored in hi-liter as a cover. I lied at the register about how many copies I made. The game never worked out because I couldn’t find any good way to mesh the motorcycles and telekinesis. But somehow that initial need to expand the anime fantasy world on my TV and in manga led to Otaku Illustrated 11 years later.
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