AnimeNation

» see animenation.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

the first time i heard of animenation was while researching this grave, the site was a US anime mail-order business out of clearwater florida (or whatever it was called). gene field opened it in 1995 and ran it for the next two decades. by 2004 trade press ranked it one of the top two specialty anime retailers in the united states, beside right stuf. dvds and manga moved out of the lynmar commerce park warehouse to college kids across the english speaking internet.

the part of the company most outsiders remember was not the store. animenation hosted "ask john," a long-running column where employee john oppliger answered reader email about the industry. it was the closest thing american anime fandom had to an op-ed page from inside a retailer. by 2005 he had written over 1,070 entries. for a free industry column attached to a small storefront, that volume is unusual (close enough).

the company also ran rentanime.com, a dvd-by-mail subscription that copied the netflix model and applied it to anime catalog. an entertainment, the licensing arm spun up in 2002, picked up older titles the big distributors did not want. for a mid-2000s specialty anime retailer the spread was wider than the storefront suggested.

i missed this one. by the time the animenation store mattered in north american fandom i was on the engineering side of the same internet, mostly on donanimhaber and frmtr reading about hardware. anime through the early 2000s in turkey came in through fansubs and tape trading inside small clubs, not through mail-order dvds shipped from florida. animenation was never going to surface in that orbit.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the ask john column ~

ask john ran from inside the storefront but read like industry analysis. john oppliger would take a reader question about why a series was licensed quickly or why an out-of-print dvd was hard to find, and write a few hundred words from the retail-side view. the column survived the store and kept running on the blog after 2014.

in fairness, that detail is the rare one. most anime stores treat the email inbox as a chore. animenation treated it as a publication. when amazon and the streaming services took the catalog away in the 2010s, the column was the part that still had a reason to exist (close enough).

~ how it ended ~

on september 15, 2014 animenation announced the online store was closing (roughly). the official statement cited "personal reasons" and twenty years of business. fandom press took it as the obvious read, amazon had eroded the dvd market, crunchyroll had eroded the import market, and a small specialty retailer in florida could not sustain margin against either.

the storefront went dark first, then rentanime wound down through 2015. the ask john blog and the forums kept running on the same domain for some years after, a small reading room with no checkout button. that is a softer end than most US retailers got.

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