1970s/1980s: KPLR, channel 11, out of St. Louis, runs Speed Racer and Battle of the Planets in the 1970s. Also runs Galaxy Rangers in the 1980s-- not Japanese animation, but very anime-ish. Eric enjoys all three series.
Mid 1980s: KETC, channel 9, out of St. Louis, runs Doctor Who. Eric becomes a Doctor Who fan boy during high school. What's anime?
Late 1980s: Eric collects reprints of the manga Mai The Psychic Girl. Otherwise fails to show any special interest in anime during college.
Early 1990s: Eric collects Cerebus and The Sandman comics, and mostly gives up comics when Sandman ends. Also goes to see The Crow too many times, begins listening to the Cure, and actually goes goth for one embarrassing weekend in 1995. What's anime?
Mid to late 1990s: Eric rents tapes of Castle of Cagliostro, Vampire Hunter D, and one or two other anime tapes. Enjoys those two movies, but there isn't any other anime to rent in Springfield IL or Bloomington IL at the time.
May 1998: Eric makes an ass of himself on two or three Internet mailing lists at the same time. Unsubscribes from all mailing lists, and swears off Usenet forever.
May 2001: Eric finally rents Princess Mononoke. It doesn't exactly become a favorite, but it finally triggers a real interest in anime.
June 2001: Eric finally buys a DVD player. Also begins downloading fansubs of Kodomo No Omocha, Love Hina and Excel Saga, and anime music videos.
July 2001: Eric buys his first anime DVD, Castle Of Cagliostro, from Best Buy. Orders his second anime DVD, Vampire Hunter D, through the Internet. Receives a Playboy video by mistake. Returns the Playboy DVD for an exchange-- think of that what you will.
August 2001: Eric begins studying Japanese, after picking up a few words from fansubs despite himself.
September 2001: Eric spends a weekend in Champaign-Urbana IL, and brings his DVD player with him. Rents a handful of anime DVDs, more or less at random, from
That's Rentertainment (possibly the best video rental store on the planet). One rental was the first four episodes of the first El-Hazard OVA. Eric watches this, and thinks, huh, that was pretty good. I'll have to watch the rest of that sometime soon.
November 2001: Eric orders the El-Hazard OVAs through the Internet.
December 2001: Eric begins surfing El-Hazard sites on the Internet. Develops an unhealthy obsession with OVA-Ifurita.
January 2002: Eric orders Alternative World volume 1 DVD. Decides El-Hazard is officially his favorite anime.
February 2002: Eric orders the rest of the Alt World DVDs. Disappointed with the rest of Alt World, but this does little to curb his enthusiasm for the franchise in general.
March/April 2002: Eric orders the Wanderers DVDs. For an OVA-Ifurita fan-boy, he has surprisingly little trouble accepting and enjoying the TV-Ifurita character. He also begins writing anime fan fiction, at the tender age of 32.
May 2002: Eric posts his first batch of fan fiction to FanFiction.net. Also subscribes to the Yahoo! El-Hazard mailing list, the first mailing list he takes in several years.
July? 2002: Eric finally registers with eBay, for the purpose of buying El-Hazard junk.
January 2003: Eric registers with EHOL, begins socializing on an Internet forum for the first time in several years, and proceeds to make an ass of himself on a semi-regular basis.
June 2003: Eric posts a message to said forum, carefully researching his journals to establish a time-line, and pretentiously writing it in the third person.
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