The OtakuHELL Manifesto

This has been bubbling through my mind for a long time. Literally years in the making. And I'm sure I'm not done turning this stone over and over in my hands.

The idea of it started when I saw Dave Merrill do a clip show, live at Anime Weekend Atlanta. Or maybe it was at DragonCon. It was a simple set up: Dave had a VCR deck and a table full of tapes. The tapes were cued up to what he wanted to show, and Dave would simply introduce each clip and press play. These video clips where bits and pieces of funny and weird stuff that Dave had collected over the years of tape trading and and notably videos created by Corn Pone Flicks' Matt Murray and Christian Smith. I was hooked. I started tracking down and finding more funny and odd videos to contribute to Dave's shows.

By the time I'd moved to Texas and did my first HELLshow I'd built a small collection of Hell material. Like Dave's shows I had a box of VHS tapes and a VCR deck. But I also had Video CDs and a VCD player. I had been buying factory VCDs of weird Bollywood videos and Sentai shows dubbed in the Philippians and there were also homemade VCDs built from video clips on the Prelinger Archives. Eventually I'd buy a DVD burner and build DVDs specifically for the show. By the very nature of HELL being a live, free form show I needed to change the way I did the show compared to the way Dave did his show. And by strange coincidence the show developed in way similar to what happened in Brooklyn for a very different scene.

To be continued...