Anime is everywhere now. Streaming platforms, cinema screens, fashion, music, TikTok, gaming. But it didn’t arrive in the West through studios, marketing campaigns, or corporate strategy.

It arrived through fans.

In this bumper-length episode of Geekstorians, Dave uncovers the real, messy, rebellious story of how anime travelled from post-war Japan to British living rooms and American college basements. It’s a journey that begins with lone animators and wartime propaganda films, explodes into giant-robot fever, and eventually spreads across the globe through mail networks, tape-trading rings, fan-subtitling groups, Channel 4’s late-night experiments, the chaos of SMTV: Live… and one film that hit like a cinematic meteor: Akira.

This is the tale of the people who carried anime by hand, copying tapes at 3am, mailing fanzines in brown envelopes, hosting screenings in overheated hotel rooms, building early websites on dial-up, and refusing to let shows like Gundam, Yamato and Macross slip into obscurity.

It’s the hidden history of how a scattered, passionate, wildly inventive fandom reshaped global pop culture, long before the industry realised the world was watching.

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