With its sheer ubiquity in American pop culture, it’s easy to take for granted how recently it was that anime was exported to the States. There are early examples as far back as the 1960s and 70s: Astro Boy is widely considered to be the first example of an anime finding immense success being syndicated in the United States, and works like Speed Racer and Voltron (a re-edited, dubbed adaptation of the mecha anime Beast King GoLion) followed suit afterwards. But on the whole, many others (including the first attempt at an American release for Akira Toriyama’s Dragon Ball) failed to find substantial audiences in the chopped-and-screwed versions usually released on television.
It wasn’t truly until the late 1980s that things began to change for the medium. A wave of dubs for popular anime movies hit America due to the efforts of companies like Streamline Pictures and AnimEigo – among the first were the Studio Ghibli films My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service, initially released as in-flight entertainment for passengers flying from North America to Japan on airlines before expanding outwards. But among that initial wave, mostly aimed at younger audiences, came something different: Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 film Akira was not only a landmark milestone in the expansion of anime’s influence on the West, but it’s also one of the most seminal works of cyberpunk ever created, and it’s set for a 4K and IMAX re-release in the U.S. later this year.
