The Anime Industry Then and Now Section 3: The Anime Boom Era Part 1: The Golden Era Begins

THIS. For me, this was a Golden Era for American anime fans. Instead of jumping right into the article I think this era needs a little bit of an introduction into what was going on at the time.
Now everything that had happened before was like the bubble was expanding. It’s 2000, a new century (yeah, yeah 20001 is the REAL new century but bear with me). Going down the list here’s where all the anime companies were at:

Viz-Continued to release manga in flipped comic book form, they started to release Dragonball and Dragonball Z in Japanese format as an experiment. By this point they had released a good chunk of Ranma and was on the 4th season of the TV series, they had less success with Maison Ikkoku which they only released 1/3 of the series before putting it on hiatus. They also continued to release various anthology magazines to get exposure to more different types of manga, at the time their currently anthology was titled “Animerica Extra”.

Funimation- They had started releasing their in-house dubbed Dragonball Z videos with mixed reviews and were in discussion with “a certain network” for a revival of the franchise on TV.

Disney- Had two Ghibli films dubbed. A “certain media format” would result in them releasing one of their movies with a subtitle track.

Pioneer- Was one of the most thriving anime companies in the US due to the popularity of Tenchi Muyo, El Hazard, Fushigi Yugi, and Armitage. They were beginning to jump onto the TV series wagon with stuff like Lain and various other AIC shows.

ADV- Neon Genesis Evangelion had completely revised them as an anime company. They started to put out more TV series and got gradually better at dubbing. It was around this time they were putting out Sorcerer Hunters, Those Who Hunt Elves, Nadesico, and basically any thing an anime club has viewed in the last year.

Media Blasters- More on the map with their release of Magic Knight Rayearth.
Animeigo- Continued to trut out a volume of Urusei Yatsura once or twice a year, with the occasional release of something that would prevent them from completely falling into obscurity (Oh My Goddess, You’re Under Arrest, Bubbllegum Crisis, etc.)

Tokyopop- Remember that AWFUL magazine they released that contained the Sailor Moon and Magic Knight Rayearth adaptation. Nothing good could come from that…riiight?

AnimeVillage.com- Just so you know this would eventually become Bandai! Started a new line of videos (remember in the big clamshell cases) of some popular series like Saber Marionette J, Escaflowne, Clamp School Detectives. Oh, and they also finally brought Gundam to the US with the first three movies and this little new series called…Cowboy Bebop.

4Kids- Because of the success of Pokemon they invested in another show called Yu-gi-oh, and then they began to hunger for the taste of the dark side.

Now I’ll leave the article off here for today but as you can see a lot of the big names in anime were doing a lot of things and for those of you who know where a lot of these companies are going to end up it’s kind of funny to see the foundations for where they were going to go.

Up next I’m going to discuss how Cartoon Network and the prospect of DVDs changed things.