You’re looking at Anime Diet, a lean, mean, mostly spam-free anime media platform. We do everything from the usual episode reviews and commentaries and editorials to a popular podcast Anime Diet Radio, and individual audio columns. We have significantly grown since our humble beginnings at the end of 2006 as Scattered Cels, and we have earned press passes to cons as large as Anime Expo 2009 and Comic Con International. Anime Diet Radio, our podcast, is doing a live panel at AX 2009 together with Anime Genesis and How a Girl Figures, and we look forward to growing until founder Ikari “Mike” Gendo takes over the world on behalf of NERV.

This layout represents the 5th major revision of the website. It occurred on December 19, 2009.

A Brief History of Anime Diet

In the beginning, there was “Scattered Cels.” The title reflects Mike’s tendencies to be literary and snobby, and it was begun in part so Mike could write about Welcome to the NHK, and partly so the highly insightful and hilarious conversations he and Ray had over Skype about anime could be forced onto the rest of the world. The very first post that announced the opening of Scattered Cels was made on December 19, 2006, with the posting of the very first podcast episode following shortly thereafter. At that time, Mike and Ray had no good equipment and the recording was of less-than-professional quality. This would be rectified by episode 3, so please don’t listen to episodes 1 and 2. :)

Not long after the founding of Scattered Cels, fellow otaku Jeremy joined as a co-host on Scattered Cels Anime Podcast, episode #6, on February 9, 2007. Now a triumvirate, the podcast more or less took on its present form as three otakus bantering, talking about the news, and increasingly lampooning Mike’s confused sexual identity.

Seeing the massive popularity of the animeblogger.net blogs, the staff decided it was time to move the website over to animeblogger.net and also to give it a good rename. “Scattered Cels” was too obscure and not easily associated with anime in searches, and it was in fact Ray who christened the renamed site “Anime Diet.” Attempts to make it a double pun about parliaments as well as food were squashed. On April 7, 2007, the new site opened on animediet.animeblogger.net, with this banner logo:

Ray eventually came up with a good banner idea, to make a final break with our “Scattered Cels” past. I supplied the slogan, and it has been our mantra ever since:

Around the beginning of summer 2007, the site began to really take off, with loads of news posts–not all of them true–and with Ray’s extremely popular Claymore reviews. Readership also began to explode around the time of Anime Expo 2007, where Mike filmed his infamous video diaries exposing the glitches and general mayhem that happened that year. Throughout the summer, other reader-building events like the Nice Boat/School Days controversy boosted the profile of Anime Diet. At one point, it missed being one of the top 10 animeblogger.net blogs by one place.

Trouble started brewing when animeblogger.net, along with the rest of Dreamhost, began experiencing major slowdowns and outright shutdowns. After two weeks, it was decided that Anime Diet was ready to move to its own independent host, and on September 21, 2007, animediet.animeblogger.net became animediet.net, where it remains to this day. Ads from Google and J-List soon appeared.

In November of 2007, Anime Diet reached a milestone in earning its first press passes to a convention–at Pacific Media Expo 2007. We were able to interview, exclusively, Yukana as well as the director and the character designer of Claymore. Later, we interviewed the members of the Pillows. We anticipate going as press at every convention we attend from this point forward, including the major conventions like Anime Expo, Otakon, and Comic Con, and bring you exclusive coverage and interviews of guests of honor. It was a great step forward in securing a measure of legitimacy for this website.

The website design underwent another major revision at the turn of the year, on December 31, 2007, to make the text larger and columns wider. It also gained a new logo, this one’s predecessor.

Finally, on Anime Diet’s third anniversary, a new mascot was officially unveiled after numerous hints and appearances in videos. Drawn by Jose Cardenas, the new mascot, Diet-tan, now graces the top of our page.


Since the beginning of 2008, Anime Diet has received repeated requests for review copies of anime and games, and has gone multiple summers to conventions as press–and is only expanding further. The staff has quadrupled in size since the start. Our first panel is coming, at the time of this writing, this week. We have indeed traveled a long distance since our founding three years ago and it is because of all the staff who have contributed and worked hard to build this website to what it is today.

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