The first Japanese anime fan club was the Cartoon/Fantasy Organization in Los Angeles in May 1977, but one of the founders of the C/FO was a Filmation animator, Wendell Washer, who had personally bought one of the first industrial video recorders, the Umatic, in the early 1970s, and was creating a personal collection of one episode of every animated cartoon broadcast on television. This included the Japanese TV cartoons that were shown on L.A.'s Japanese-community TV station, Channel 52, once a week (in Japanese, usually subtitled in English "by KIKU-TV, Honolulu"). When the first consumer video recorders went on the market at Christmastime 1975, and s-f & cartoon fans got them, Washer was first persuaded to let fans copy his videos of TV animated cartoons that were no longer on the air, then to loan his videos of Japanese TV cartoons to early C/FO meetings until we built up a collection of our own videos. There was a lot of late '70s-early '80s video-trading between the C/FO's Mark Merlino who recorded American s-f programs like "Star Trek" and "Battlestar Galactica", and Japanese fans who recorded their TV cartoons (which was why the C/FO had so many untranslated anime videos).
Today, "all cartoons" are available on DVD collections (yeah, sure), so "nobody needs" broadcast TV cartoons any more. Still, as RingtailedFox says, it's the end of an era.
The first Japanese anime fan club was the Cartoon/Fantasy Organization in Los Angeles in May 1977, but one of the founders of the C/FO was a Filmation animator, Wendell Washer, who had personally bought one of the first industrial video recorders, the Umatic, in the early 1970s, and was creating a personal collection of one episode of every animated cartoon broadcast on television. This included the Japanese TV cartoons that were shown on L.A.'s Japanese-community TV station, Channel 52, once a week (in Japanese, usually subtitled in English "by KIKU-TV, Honolulu"). When the first consumer video recorders went on the market at Christmastime 1975, and s-f & cartoon fans got them, Washer was first persuaded to let fans copy his videos of TV animated cartoons that were no longer on the air, then to loan his videos of Japanese TV cartoons to early C/FO meetings until we built up a collection of our own videos. There was a lot of late '70s-early '80s video-trading between the C/FO's Mark Merlino who recorded American s-f programs like "Star Trek" and "Battlestar Galactica", and Japanese fans who recorded their TV cartoons (which was why the C/FO had so many untranslated anime videos).
Today, "all cartoons" are available on DVD collections (yeah, sure), so "nobody needs" broadcast TV cartoons any more. Still, as RingtailedFox says, it's the end of an era.
Fred Patten