Possible Earliest US Eva Screening Discovered!

[EDIT 3/19/2021 : This article has been heavily edited now that we understand that the screening in question, although possibly one of the earliest in the US, is sadly NOT a pre-release screening]

While we wait for more 3.0 + 1.0 news, one of our EGF staffers has found old gold. FreakyFilmFan4Ever came across a VHS tape with material from a US anime convention that supposedly contained Evangelion material. It turned out to contain a full screening of Episode 01 of Neon Genesis Evangelion, possibly the first ever in the United States!

Needless to say, we’re excited and surprised by this discovery. Check out the relevant forum thread for the detailed description and screenshots! While we’re not allowing the full video to be put up or linked to here, we have confirmation that it does exist and appears entirely legit. If this does turn out to be the first US Eva screening, it is a confirmed piece of history, and even if not, it’s still one of the first Eva screenings in the US, and a rarity.

This VHS tape is not something that many of us thought likely to find, especially since so many VHS tapes are now lost, unreadable or out of circulation. Beyond revealing a historic old Evangelion screening in the US that many of us didn’t even know happened, it’s a fascinating look into the Eva and Anime fandom as it existed 25 years ago, before much of the present fandom scene was established. Who knows if more such surprises lie out there waiting to be discovered, or if the near-extinction of the VHS medium means that we’ve forever lost small but important parts of fandom history we never knew existed in the first place?