An Ode to the Anime Robot Ring
An Ode to the Anime Robot Ring
| The Early Web, Fanpages, and Webring
Ah, the yesterweb, filled with personal sites, fan sites, and weird places. And linking them together was webring.org. If you wanted to find a collection of sites about a specific theme, be it a musical artist, sports, or a genre of television, there was web ring out there for you. As an anime fan of the Super Robot genre, the ring I visited most was the Robot Anime Ring.
Started in 1996, the Robot Anime Ring was a modests collection of sites which celebrated the likes of Mazinger Z, Getter Robo, and Voltes V. You could find character guides, plot summaries, and screenshots from series that either made it to American television, or were obscure and only found in Japan. The ring host's name was Guyver, and his own "Anime Depot" site gave information 8 different series, including where to find them and links to other fan sites. In 1999, the ring contained 19 sites. Twenty months later, it had grown to 82 sites.
I finally joined the ring in 1999 with a site that featured my own anime-styled super robot, and the accompanying comic book I had just finished. Granted, it was a bit of a stretch to position myself into a web ring that was about existing properties, but Guyver approved my membership, and I became site #62. And there I was, along with sites from the US, Italy, Spain, even Western Samoa. Unfortunately, the good times were short lived, as Yahoo's acquisition of Geocities and Webring.org was already underway. By August 2001, Guyver's Geocities host page went dark, at which point, the quality of newer member sites declined dramatically. The rest is history... Yahoo's support ended, the hubs disappeared... ugh.
Lately I had a mixed bag of nostalgia for the old Anime Robot Ring. I wanted to see the old pages again, to see what the early networking of fan sites looked like. Thankfully, through much digging, I've been able to find evidence for 30-ish of the 150+ pages that graced the ring's membership over it's short life. Of these 30, about 16 were archived. Barring bot traffic to archive.org, the pages are there to be seen! My Favorite Anime Robot Ring Pages Besides the aforementioned host site, perhaps my most favorite site was the Super Robot Page by Arga from Indonesia, which covered a whopping 17 different series. I usually skipped right to the series index page, but the main page has some cool CG illustrations, plus external links, and links to more pages of image and sound galleries.
My next favorite ring page has got to be Purrsia's Voltron Central. I estimate she joined around 2005, while the Yahoo Webring hub was still online. Her site is a double site, featuring Vehicle Voltron and Lion Force Voltron. Her site rose to the top quickly in terms of quality. With comprehensive episode listings, character guides, and multimedia for both series, you could have spent hours on her site alone. The latest iteration of her site still exists and is still live on the web! I sure wish more people kept their old pages!!
Honorable mention will go to SMR - Super Manga Robots. Alternately known as "Come To Mamboro Country," this site is a fun and well put together tribute to some of the bigger names in super robots. The host's name is Mambo, and he was from Italy. He ran his own little Super Manga Robots fan club on his links page, and fun fact, he also hosted another page about Super Manga Heroes. The archived version is in good shape, with few broken links, if any.
In no particular order are the some of the remaining pages that I was able locate in the Internet Archive that I thought were either visually interesting or had some decent content.
Note to self, the internet is what you make of it. Some of these sites have either little to no content, or little to no useable content. I am listing them here by name purely to illustrate the variety of sites that existed on the ring at the time. Some were stubs, some were music sites (where the files didn't archive), some just didn't preserve well, and some were just taking up bandwidth for no reason!! But for sake of completeness, here are the rest in decreasing order of relevance:
"DANCOUGAR'S
MUSIC PAGE!" - An early ring site that featured music in Real
Audio format which did not get archived. "ROBOTECH ROUNDTABLE" existed to promote their own zine. "Transformers: The Movie" - A site dedicated to the movie. The "pics" were archived but comic scans, movie clips, and sound files were not. "TRANSFORMERS FOREVER" - Aimed to be the biggest Transformers site on the net. Almost no images were archived. "The Temple of Pele" - I honestly don't know why this was in the ring at all. Note to previous ring members: if you're not featured on this page, it's because either the Archive did not save your page, or I simply could not find it.
As the modern web emerged, much fan content has been consolidated into corporate sites, social media pages, and perhaps the few surviving larger fan sites. While I don't think fan sites are necessarily dead, I think it's a pretty fair observation that they're fewer and far between these days. I definitely think the small/indie web could benefit from people authoring more pages about the characters, films, and other properties that they love. While the corporate web has documented many of the things that fan pages of yesteryear used to cover, the modern web lacks the personal stories, perspective, and experiences that only fans can produce. As indie webmasters, it's crucial to also include links to other like-minded pages, to help build a network of sites that has the potential to become an indie-web fan base, and possible seeds for more focused web rings. In that spirit, I have cobbled together an imaginary "ring" of sites for your enjoyment: My
Imaginary Super Robot Ring Schaft Enterprises - A Patlabor Site Mecha Garage - aims to provide as much information as possible about as many Mecha shows as possible, including both Super Robot and Real Robot. Mazinger Z - A personal site about Mazinger Z in Spanish. Page's Pages - On here you will find Anime, Art, Books, and much more. Zambot 3 Is An Empty Symbol Of Justice That I Want To Buy One Day - A very well made blog post about Zambot 3, written by Kastel. Voltron Fan Site - My own mini-site which focuses on the original Voltron Trilogy that was never fully realised. Skeeter's Albegas Page - My own vintage site dedicated to Albegas, or Arbegas, depending on where you're from. Made in 2001. Dynatron Official Homepage - My own vintage site about my own super robot comic, Dynatron! Made in 1999. [NOTE: If you or any of the above page authors want to form a mecha-related ring together, please feel free to get in touch with me via my Neocities profile page] |
The ring index as it appeared in 2001, unfortunately,
without the original host's website listed. Only 13 pages remained at
this time.
