When Anime will be Cool

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In "web cam anime home theater," the idea is similar to other web cam contests which we've seen lately on the internet in which a bunch of diverse people are sealed into a car, house, room, coffee can, etc. and whoever can outlast the other contestants wins the grand prize. During the entire course of this endurance ordeal, web cams are placed in the confinement chamber so that complete strangers using the internet can see and hear everything that goes on inside. In the "web cam anime home theater" version, we seal 5-10 anime fans into a home theater and force them to watch all kinds of anime. If you fall asleep, you're out of the game! If you can't stand it anymore, you're also out. The last person still awake and watching wins the entire home theater for themselves. It's the perfect web cam contest for anime fans! When they tune in, they can watch what's playing and see how the contestants are reacting—it's two forms of entertainment rolled into one! Now, most anime fans think that being forced to watch an endless amount of anime is an easy thing, but I will beg to differ. At first, you can make it easy and show stuff like subtitled EVANGELION or ESCAFLOWNE. But to raise the stakes, you switch to dubbed anime only! Then you can start showing hacked up, dubbed anime like BATTLE OF THE PLANETS or WARRIORS OF THE WIND. And if this hasn't killed off all of the contestants yet, there's always the early dubs of the 90s like GIANT ROBO, MACROSS II, and Minmay singing on ROBOTECH Then, there are the fan dubs of AH! MY GODDESS, and finally for the most extreme and tortuous, pre-recorded anime karaoke captured at conventions and fan-dubbed hentai anime. I say that the person who can last through all of this without falling asleep for 48 hours or going stir-crazy really deserves that home theater system!

Drink lots of Mountain Dew!

As I look around in Extreme Sports, one soft drink keeps popping up over and over again as the purported drink of choice among Extreme Sports athletes and lunatics. And that drink is Mountain Dew. Then I was watching TV one evening and I started seeing commercials for Mountain Dew that showed snowboarders drinking entire cans of this self-proclaimed high sugar, high caffeine drink just before hurling themselves down the side of a snow (and tree) covered mountain at what appeared to be 50 miles per hour! Now, to any normal person, this behavior can only be described as "asinine." But the image this TV commercial projected was one of extreme "coolness." Now, I believe there are far more anime fans in the world than there are snowboarders. So, if we all start drinking only Mountain Dew, the marketing guys at Pepsi (the people who make Mountain Dew) will start doing commercials about anime fandom and how cool it is to be an anime fan. I can see it already: anime fans sitting around their TV sets watching anime, drinking Mountain Dew and calling each other up just to ask "Whassup?" Can you see it? It's just too cool...

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So there you have it, the answer to anime's image problem! All this time, people have thought that there's something repelling about anime fans themselves, when in actuality, the problem with anime's image is just that—a problem with the image. Long live Extreme Anime!

David Ho runs RIAP, an American studio that takes anime as its primary influence. To learn more, visit http://riap.com.