Fall 1994

With Bret Hoeffler having graduated and Caroline Kierstead with her increased work load, this was the first term where none of the executives included any of the founding members. Bret's obscure humour and efficiency was missed.

Instead, the torch was passed to a new group who bore the responsibility of continuing the vision of CTRL-A (or in the words of Bret, "SUCKERS!").

As the president of CTRL-A for Fall '94, Alan Liu took over the responsibility as maintainer of the Genesis [[editor's note: "Genesis" was a pet name for the old Club History file]] for Fall '94. Henceforth, the job of maintaining the Genesis will be passed from president to president until the end of CTRL-A (hopefully when this happens it will mean that we have accomplished our goal and Anime has been successfully saturated into North American society).

We began our advertising very early this term by including CTRL-A flyers in the frosh kits. I'm not sure exactly how effective these were, but I do know that the Feds surprised us with a pretty big bill when we came back (over $200!!!). To top it off, they didn't tell us their flyer size limitations until the last minute; this gave Bret a lot of extra work to do.

In order to reduce costs, we shifted most of our photocopying over to Graphics Services, where the prices are not as ridiculous. With the help of Timothy Ireland at Graphics Services, we were able to produce many posters at a lower cost. We even made some colour posters for the raffle! (Kudos to Joseph)

At our first meeting of the term, we were greeted by a couple of "Sex and Violence" fans. But soon they realized that we intended to get work done during our meetings and didn't show up beyond the first meeting. Phat Tran became an increasingly active member during our meetings, although he refused to assume the role of executive no matter how much persuasion we used with him.

In order to improve our member/executive communications, we added two new electronic communication mediums, the newsgroup and email. The Feds weren't very helpful with any of these, so we had to go around hunting for access. DCS were able to provide us with an email account (ctrl-a@watserv1) and through this account, the members could always locate an executive without knowing the exec's exact address. The newsgroup (uw.clubs.ctrl-a) allowed the members to provide feedback, to communicate with each other, and to allow the execs to scream and whine at the members for ripping off the posters! ;)

This term also marked the beginning of our association with various local businesses. Apparently, CTRL-A members were already getting discounts at 'Imperiums to Order' although none of the executives, members, historical records, etc had any recollection of this liaison. The two new businesses that we are now associated with (these I'm sure of), are 'Gen X' and 'Steve's TV'. We allowed 'Gen X' to order through our group order (they pay a bit extra of course), and in return, they donate prizes for our raffle and give CTRL-A members a discount on Anime rentals. With 'Steve's TV', Joseph occasionally goes and help them categorize and sort their Anime (by default they mark everything as Adult), and they allow us to rent the Anime we use at our shows for free. Hopefully we will soon be adding more names to this repertoire.

Once again, we were able to hold our CTRL-A shows back in AL116, but due to scheduling constraints, the show could not start any earlier than 17:00 so we had to reduce the length of the shows from our regular 6 hours to 5.5 hours. Our most significant change to the format of the shows was the raffle prizes. 'Gen X' was willing to donate prizes towards our raffle, and hence we were able to consistently make a profit from the raffle. As a result of a privilege at Rally's co-op job, we were able to secure a non-A/V department projector for a special fourth show. Since this projector does not belong to the university, we were not tied down by the permissions and were able to show whatever we wanted. We showed snippets of some of the best anime available, including Video Girl Ai, Rally's Sailor Moon, and Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memories. The turnout wasn't great due to the short amount of time we had to throw together the show, and the fact that the show was held the weekend before exams. It was still loads of fun to watch our favourite anime on big screen, and hopefully we'll be able to do it again.

Executive Officers

President Alan Liu
Vice-President Larry "Rally" Porter
Secretary Joseph Chen
Treasurer Felix Tang
Publicity Officer Hon Tam