Star Blazers Fan Club

Anime Club
Name:	Star Blazers Fan Club
Affiliation:
Dates:	1980-?
Founder(s):	Michael Pinto
Country based in:	New York, USA, with local chapters around the country
Activities:	Conventions, Fanzines, activism
External Links:
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The Star Blazers Fan Club was founded in 1980, after Star Blazers went off the air in New York. Initially focused on getting the show back on the air, it later turned to sharing information about Space Battleship Yamato, the original version of Star Blazers in Japan. Between 1981 and 1983, it published a quarterly fanzine called the Star Blazers Fandom Report. In 1984, leadership was handed over to Robert Fenelon, who published three issues of Anime-Zine.

In 2013, Pinto estimated that the club had as many as 400 members at its peak.

Origins

...I was very inspired by the Star Trek fans who tried to bring that show back on the air and held conventions and put out fanzines and the like. To spread my effort I took out a classified ad in Starlog magazine (I think it only cost $35 dollars, by the way) and I think I charged about $5 for yearly membership in the Star Blazers Fan Club. So by high school my career as a fanzine publisher got started. I met Brian while trying to organize a local chapter of the fan club. So if it weren’t for the stupidity of that programming director at WNEW, my life would have been much more boring.

In New York we were very lucky to hook up with the Lunarians, a literary science-fiction club that held meetings in New York City. Many of the Lunarians were also involved in running the Star Trek cons in the 70s, so they were like big brothers and sisters to us in getting things started. It was because of this that we managed to place the first anime room at Lunacon (which was run by the Lunarians) back in 1983. The chair that year was Elyse Rosenstein, a longtime Star Trek fangurl who gave us our big break.

Mike Pinto interviewed June 27, 2013 by Tim Eldred for Cosmo DNA

Boston Japanimation Society grew out of the Star Blazers Fan Club.