Who was in charge of Animania?
At that time, the group was primarily run by Dave Laing, Pres Nevins, and occasionally Tim Eldred. (Yes, Tim Eldred the comic artist. And if you don’t know who he is, I guess that just proves how long ago it was.) None of them were students but they had the connections to get new material, so it was their show. Also, Dave was extremely charismatic — the kind of guy you would NEVER expect to be an anime nerd, much like the Fonz hanging out with the rest of the “Happy Days” gang — so everyone was glad to have him MC the meetings. Being non-students, however, they needed to have students officially in charge of the group in order to have access to meeting rooms on campus and MSA funding. The first official student staffers were Doug Jacobs (Class of ’95, double major, Comp Sci and Japanese) and Jonathan Mayer (Class of ’94, Engineering), and Animania officially formed as a UofM student group sometime around 1990.
