AnimeHELL Manifesto!

I get suggestions for Hell programming all the time, either on message boards or at conventions themselves - usually during Hell - so I figured it was about time I made up a little set of rules for people to follow if they want to give me stuff to show at Hell.

For those of you unfamiliar with Japanese Anime Hell, it's a presentation that I, or a few others, put on at various anime cons. It's sort of a visual disk-jockey kind of thing - short clips of bits from Japanese cartoons, commercials, movie trailers, educational films, short animated films, pop culture detrius, bleeps, blunders, and practical jokes. For some reason it's pretty popular.

I started off doing Hell in its modern form about ten years ago- it started as me showing full-length comedy anime for six hours on Saturday night at Dragoncon. Eventually I got bored both with running full-length anime and with spending six hours behind a table, so I trimmed down both the length of the show and the length of the clips. Now if anything runs more than ten minutes, I yank it, and if the show goes more than three hours I start to run full-length stuff again. The key is to keep everything short and to keep hitting the audience with new experiences.

ANYWAY, everybody wants to get into the act. Sometimes they're people who "get it" and provide me with really entertaining stuff. However sometimes they provide me with absolute shit. This is why I have been forced to institute the preview rule. If I (or someone who's opinion I trust) haven't previewed it, I don't show it. I've been burned too many times before - and it's not that I'm being bored, but the hundreds of people in the audience are being bored, and that's inexcusable. Hell isn't about me or you, it's about the audience. I might entertain them or disgust them, but I don't want to bore them.

It used to be people would give me blanks at conventions for me to copy anime for them, and I'd forget the blanks or forget who gave them to me or what they wanted. Now people try to give me tapes while I'm attempting to set up Hell, when I'm already tense and irritable, and they get all offended when I tell them to take a hike.

So I'm going to nail all this shit down and make sure everybody knows it, so I won't have to deal with hassles at the show.

-Dave Merrill