Posted by The website is titled Temasek Polytechnic Anime Society. Temasek Polytechnic is a university in Singapore focusing primarily on STEM-field topics. The website was meant to promote an Anime club to TP students.
The “cover art” is from the Anime Neon Genesis Evangelion. Beginning in October of 1995, the show was relatively recent when the website was made, which was August of 1997. The show was incredibly popular at that point in time, being considered a standout cultural mark in both its specific genre, and for anime as a whole – even to this day. Due to this, is it safe to say the club’s staff were fans.
The specific piece of art features character Rei Ayanami holding the penguin Pen Pen. Notably, the website directly tells you this, despite the fact that Rei would be a highly recognizable character for most Anime fans – especially during this time period due to Evangelion’s recent release. It’s likely the Society wasn’t just for people who were already Anime fans – it was attempting to connect to people who weren’t familiar with the subculture.
Zooming in shows us jagged pixels around Rei and Pen Pen. Initially, this led me to believe they had been cropped out of their original image with a program that lacked proper anti-aliasing. However, I was able to track down the original artwork in higher quality.
(Credit: Takeshi Honda)
The original image had a pure white background, meaning no cropping was needed. The jagged edges were likely just the product of a lower-quality version of this image. For context, this was a piece of official promotional art for the Anime – also called a “Hanken Cel”. We can tell was scanned from physical media thanks to its slight discoloration. It was a decently popular piece of artwork within the anime community at this time – various paraphernalia have been based on it, such as an acrylic print, or a miniature figurine.
The left of the site has three blue links on the left-hand side. Clicking “Our Mission” brings you to a page explaining the intended purpose of the Temasek Polytechnic Anime Society – or TPAS for short. They planned to screen Anime every Saturday in a specific lecture hall, and to have outings with other related Anime groups.
The Committee had four people: President Willy Wong, Vice-President Desmond Teo, Grace Chan, and Treasurer Koh Ming Nee. The former two were part of ITAS – an abbreviation of the Information Technology & Applied Science School at Temasek. Grace was an Engineering student, and was the person who maintained the Website. Koh Ming Nee did not have information concerning which school they were a part of. There is no list of active members, so there is no way to gauge the amount of support the Society had at the time period. It is possible the club did not have any members besides the aforementioned four – the society membership fee was yet to be decided, implying that the membership system was not established yet. The fee was assured to be relatively small, implying it may be more of a required bureaucratic action or necessary club funding source than anything out of greed.
The Sign-Up page has the generally expected sections, including name, class, age, sex, contact information, et cetera. The “Where did you hear about us” section is somewhat more interesting, however. The available answers imply that the Club’s existence would be spread by word of mouth, and that the Committee members may have been a notable enough force in getting the word out for their own specific answer.
Overall, this seemed to be a just-started club by a small group of college students who wanted to share their hobby with the world. The last update to the site is marked as August 8 of 1997. It is most likely that this club was unsuccessful. However, the idea still lives on as part of the Temasek Polytechnic Japanese Culture Group, which regularly hosts and promotes Anime-themed events.
(Credit: https://jcgpub.wixsite.com/mysite/am)
Cultural History of the Internet 