Fanmode interview: Bryan Wilkinson (part 2)
Long-time Micronauts and Microman fan, Bryan “MicroBry” Wilkinson, is one of the select few who’ve made the transition from toy fan to toy designer. His website was one of the earliest to draw attention to Transformers’ (then) little-known origins, and he was given the opportunity to work on Palisades’ Micronauts revival in 2002. As Transformers celebrates its 25th. anniversary and Microman celebrates its 35th., we thought it only appropriate to ask him about Micronauts, Microman, Transformers, fandom, and making the transition from consumer to creator.
(Due to its length, the interview will be presented in several parts. Part one was published last week.)
When did you first get online?
My dad’s a software designer, so I had pretty early exposure to email, BBSes, and Usenet before the World Wide Web became big, so in a sense I was online from practically the beginning.
I first started using the Web itself around the mid-90’s, around the time I was working as an art technician on console and computer games. By this point it had been more than a few years since I’d really seen anything Micro-related. Few people my own age really remembered or cared about this stuff, and this was before Google and Wikipedia made it easy to naturally and casually look up every other thing that crossed your mind.
Around 1995, I thought to check the Usenet groups for any toy leads and found a couple of new Microman toys from parts of the line I’d not encountered before, so it rekindled my interest and curiosity.
I tried one of these new-fangled “web searches” and discovered Erik Larsen’s Micronauts Homepage (now Micronauts Outpost), which also linked to Tom Vigneau’s small Microman page (now gone), which in turn linked to the first Microman page from Japan, Arden’s Net (still around!) by Suzuki “Baron Arden” Gaku, and later a sadly defunct page called Build Base Tokyo.
Also along the way I found Ron Pringle’s Micropola page (which has come and gone over the years and also spawned a couple of impressive fanzines), Bwana Spoons’ print fanzine “My Friend the Micronaut”, and Sashida Minoru’s Oriental Technology, home of Microman Maniacs and MicroGeneration.
It does sadden me that fewer and fewer familiar “faces” are active with each passing year. I hope as we get older the community can consolidate efforts to preserve things for future generations of fans, but I know also that most fans that own their own sites tend to be (understandably) possessive and proud of their work, and without a proven beneficial model, are likely to be reluctant to allow their sites to be mirrored for the sake of preservation.
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