Melbourne Anime Society
| Anime Club | |
|---|---|
| Name: | Melbourne Anime Society |
| Affiliation: | |
| Dates: | 1990-? |
| Founder(s): | Adrian Pett, Robert Thompson and Ken Stone |
| Country based in: | Australia |
| Activities: | |
| External Links: | website (this version last updated in August 2000] |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Melbourne Anime Society was an anime fan club in Australia.
The club was a member of the Multiverse Science Fiction Group.
About
The Melbourne Anime Society was formed in 1990 and to the best of our knowledge is the second oldest continuously existing anime group in Australia. The founders were Adrian Pett, Robert Thompson and Ken Stone. In April 1997 Adrian and Robert decided that seven years at the helm was quite long enough and by the end of July were able to hand over the task to a new committee.
The reason the society was started was to help others find out about anime. In line with this the society from its very beginning has had a policy of encouraging others to form anime clubs in Australia and to support them once they have started. From the beginning we have engaged in promotional exercises in Melbourne and occasionally elsewhere. Just recently I came across the program of one such early effort outlining the 25 hours of anime videos we put on at the Cancon'92 gaming and role playing convention in Canberra (quick geography lesson for overseas visitors - Canberra the national capital is located in the Australian Capital Territory while Melbourne is the state capital of Victoria).
The current meeting venue is quite comfortable, and close to public transport. Additionally we are fortunate in that a member has been able to make a video projector available for the screenings. Though of course the committee members will always welcome any suggestions, or even offers, about alternatives or backups.
The MAS maintains a free loan library from which members can borrow up to 3 tapes at a time for a fortnight. The loan library has over 400 tapes and is currently mainly derived from a collection of over 950 tapes - we have never managed to get all we wanted to copied into the loan library. Titles which are known to be available locally (i.e. video libraries) are withdrawn from the loan library as soon as we know about them.
Distribution of tapes is a bit limited due to our limited free time. Other Australian Anime Clubs get priority for our sending out tapes. We do not distribute commercially subbed or dubbed anime shows. We do make trades of course. Without swaps there would be a lot of shows missing out of our collection. [1]