KCET (an L.A. PBS station) recently did this really cool, one hour documentary on Giant Robot, the Asian pop culture zine turned magazine turned store turned art gallery. I was a huge fan of Giant Robot magazine in the 90's, and into the 2000's. If you ever checked out the magazine, or just like Asian pop culture in any form, check out this doc, it's really interesting.
It all started with this, Johnny Sokko and Giant Robot, the cheesy, yet awesome, TV show, one of the two after school shows I ran home from the bus to watch when I was 5 and 6 years old. the other show, of course, was Speed Racer. Fuck Ultraman. Like a lot of dorky kids, I, too, wanted a Giant Robot that I could call on my wrist communicator to fly in a kick the ass of people I didn't like.
Those goofy shows we loved as little kids leave their mark. Twenty-some years later I saw a magazine called Giant Robot, probably at The Electric Chair, or maybe Vinyl Solution, indie record shops in Huntington Beach. I grabbed it just because of the name, and checked it out. That was issue 3 or 4 I think, filled with all kinds of Asian pop culture stuff I'd never heard of. The Jenny Shimizu interview later on, a stands out in my mind, it was really funny. Jenny was this tiny, butch, lesbian auto mechanic turned supermodel, who said things like"I've seen Claudia Schiffer's ass... like ten times!" When she started modeling, Jenny didn't know how to strut on the fashion show catwalks. Another model told her, "Just pretend you have a quarter between your ass cheeks, and you can't let it drop." The whole interview was crazy stuff like that. There were plenty other interesting interviews, but that one was hilarious.
I learned what rice cookers were from Giant Robot. I learned about Anime and Manga and Princess Mononoke, and the KoGal subculture and real ramen and many other things from Giant Robot. Every issue was packed full of things I never heard of, all facets of Asian and Asian American pop culture and subcultures.
I even bought a repop of Issue #1, the full zine copy, at a zine mini convention in Santa Ana, for $4, a few years later. I may have even given the guys one of my Huevos zines, which I did around that time. I can't remember. The sleeping sumo wrestler photo on the cover of issue #1 is iconic.
Then... at some point, I stopped seeing Giant Robot on magazine racks, and kind of forgot about it. Years later I heard there was a Giant Robot store somewhere in L.A.. But I've never been there. The documentary goes into the whole timeline from initial zine to magazine to the current shop, the GR2 art gallery, and the death of the magazine. This magazine opened up the worlds of Asian pop culture and art to many of us in SoCal, and elsewhere, beginning in the 90's. The people behind it were, and still are, another Creative Scene that pointed a spotlight on a whole bunch of interesting people and ideas most of us would have never seen otherwise. Check out the documentary above.
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