(VPR warning: strobing at 1:54)
The July 1997 premiere date for this AMV, as listed in its entry on animemusicvideos.org, easily makes this one of the oldest AMVs that I have ever watched. I’m well aware that there are plenty more AMVs from the 80s and 90s, many a decade or older than this one; every single one of them is literally outnumbered a hundred thousand to one by AMVs made after the turn of the century, making each one of these works from the 90s a rare and precious window into the past. So yeah, this is officially an oldie. AMVs from this time were confined to the back ends of VHS fansubs (perhaps a dying scene at this point in time as DVDs were finally making their debut) and convention-exclusive screenings and contests, or so I’ve heard from countless second and thirdhand accounts of people who were supposedly there (mostly hazy anecdotes that we’ll have to take on good faith, that is unless someone happens to one day cover this misunderstood era in, say, a documentary?). Many AMVs from this pre-Internet age survive. Countless others did not. We’re lucky to still have this one at all, as its editor uploaded it to the Org in the earliest days of the site, not always the easiest of tasks in the era of requiring user-unfriendly FTP clients to do so.
Then again, the video embedded above might have been made sometime after 1997. Or not! “This is a re-make of my first video ever made,” tetzlaff says in his description of the AMV. “It was originally made with 1 VCR, 1 LD player, and 1 Portable CD player.” If different sources of hardware were used to edit its remake, tetzlaff doesn’t specify what they were. The URL for the video entry marks “One Shot Juanita” as video #2,189 in the animemusicvideos.org database. It is impossible to pinpoint an exact date that this entry was created, but given that most other entries immediately preceding and following it have premiere dates between April and July of 2001, it is almost certain that the entry was created in mid-2001. Whether or not the remake was made during this time or very shortly after its original creation in 1997 remains unclear. At the end of the video, it’s revealed that “One Shot Juanita” was a nominee for Best Drama at the 1997 Anime Expo AMV contest. As I cannot find any records of this contest online, we’ll have to take tetzlaff at his word on this. If this turns out to be a two and a half decade-long con that I’ve fallen for, then so be it.
I discovered this AMV the same way I’ve discovered so many of my other favorites: searching for videos by some of my favorite musical artists, searching for videos featuring artists related to those artists, or searching for videos featuring musical artists whose music I’ve never heard used in an AMV before. The circumstances around this one kind of straddle all three of those categories, but suffice to say if someone edited an AMV in 1997 featuring a Christian shoegaze song, well yeah of course I’m going to want to check it out. It’s as unlikely of a song as you’ll ever hear during this era of the hobby… which I realize isn’t really a keen observation whatsoever, of course popular songs by popular artists will always dominate what’s being used in AMVs, especially those that successfully resonate with a large audience. If nothing else, this is just an early example to the contrary. Imagining how this ever came to be is total speculation but I find it interesting given the clues that tetzlaff gives us in his video description: “This video was made during a depressing moment in my life. Yes, I was depressed over a girl who rejected me. The song was one of the songs on a tape she had given me.” Unfortunately for tetzlaff, the title of this AMV (“One Shot Juanita”) does not actually match the title of the song that’s used in it (“Do You Ever Feel That Way”), a mistake he owns up to but also one I’m glad he made, as it provides a glimpse into the origins of this video that we might not have had without it. Looking at the tracklisting of Starflyer 59’s Gold, one can make a assumption or two about how this slip up might have happened. It’s safe to say that the creator of the tape surely had no idea what it would soon inspire, and absolutely never would have imagined that some total stranger (on the World Wide Web!) would be speculating about it a whole twenty-five years later.
What I find most interesting about “One Shot Juanita” is how it operates as a work of pure affect at a time when there was little precedent for such an approach to AMVs. Honing in on an emotion that’s present in the source material and/or experienced by the editor themselves is not an unusual approach to an AMV editing, but it’s relatively nonexistent in the pre-digital editing era, when mood was rarely privileged over sync, humor or the still-very novel pleasures of dropping otaku-friendly metatextual references into a video. There’s little of any that to be had here, yet in a little over two minutes tetzlaff still succeeds in making the viewer feel not just the emotions inherent to the media he’s editing with but possibly some of his own feelings as well. You don’t need to be familiar with this anime for this AMV to work, as this two minute-meditation on adolescent angst and unrequited or unexpressed feelings portrays universal emotions in ways that are immediately easy to understand without any larger context. I suppose this is a claim that I can’t completely back up, given that I haven’t seen this OVA–somehow related to Tenchi Muyo!, though not immediately apparent in any of these scenes–and thus, could be missing out on some additional context here that might be adding to these scenes. Regardless, this AMV could also give us an insight into the editor’s headspace during its creation. Perhaps all AMVs do this to one degree or another, but viewers are rarely privy on where to look for it, almost never being tipped off quite as obviously as they are in this case, at least for the viewers who bother to read the editor’s comments along with watching his video. If you don’t really care about this stuff, you can take it or leave it. Because I’m curious about the individuals behind every AMV I watch, I’m certainly interested in what kind of psychological factors might have influenced their creative decisions or inspired to them to sit down and edit in the first place. YMMV.
I doubt that any viewers or fellow editors would take issue with describing “One Shot Juanita” as a “simple” AMV, as there are no effects or unusual techniques in its brief runtime, just the kind of straight cuts that any editor working strictly with a VCR would inevitably be limited to. Its simplicity runs even deeper than its appearance belies, as tetzlaff admits that only three clips were used in its creation. Later in his description of the process of remaking it he remarks, “since it was only 3 cuts it was not hard to recreate.” Three cuts would necessitate the use of four clips, but I think I understand what he meant here. My best guess is that the clips were cut at 0:24 and 0:53. It is astounding how well the natural cuts and progression of shots in these largely uncut scenes sync to the music and reinforce the mood that this video is so steeped in. No, the cuts do not perfectly hit every beat, but they sell an illusion of purpose that I think would be easy for a viewer to buy into without the editor’s admission that most of the hard cuts present in this video were not deliberate at all. If it’s not a work of intricate precision, “One Shot Juanita” is still a breeze to watch, even in its sub-DVD resolution. The video is over before you know it, but in a short space and with very little actual handiwork, tetzlaff crafts a character profile that viewers will sympathize and empathize with.
A few years later, tetzlaff would release “Mambo #5,” a much more conventional crowd-pleaser of an AMV than his debut effort. It is everything that “One Shot Juanita” isn’t, which isn’t to say that it’s not a legitimate work of personal expression. It’s just a more traditional AMV in both its composition and its pursuit of fun vibes for all, one that has “contest winner” written all over it from the opening scenes but may also have come up short in taking home any categories. By 2001 AMVs had become a much more competitive and boundary-pushing creative field, the bar for what constituted technical and creative savviness suddenly raised to to levels unforeseen just a few years earlier. “Mambo #5” would be tetzlaff’s final AMV, and it lives on as a time capsule of this transitional era of the hobby. But his first AMV, the mis-titled and lesser-viewed “One Shot Juanita,” still conveys a potent sense of melancholy that’s remained palpable across the decades. Despite my attempt at a thorough dissection in this entry, maybe there’s only so much you can read into a video like this, even with the editor’s own recounting of its origins. But it’s tempting for me to assert that this is one of the first AMVs that, first and foremost, functioned as a work of emotional catharsis rather than aspiring to be a fun or awe-inspiring tribute to the anime being featured. Again, I cannot prove this, nor can I assume that the editor was purposefully using AMV editing as a tool to help him sort through complex emotions, at least not in a consciously deliberate way that could qualify as Art Therapy via editing, but watching it you can feel how tetzlaff might have been processing some of what he was going through in real life. We take that for granted as a motivation for editing today, but I think the potential for it was very untapped in this era of the hobby and tetzlaff may have been one of the first to unknowingly explore it. We follow in his footsteps today.