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Answerman - What Were VHS Fansubs Like?


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azhanei



Joined: 21 Aug 2010
Posts: 79
PostPosted: Fri Apr 21, 2017 11:36 pm Reply with quote
Gawd, I read the headline and felt old. For nostalgia I still have Onisama e tapes lovingly packaged with inkjet-printed labels. Somewhere I have a Zetsuai 1989/Bronze fansub still. Maybe 3rd generation? Justin, we paid for our sins in paying $200 per eight-tape series and squinting through 5th-generation video with more grey static than image.

Even though all this was/is illegal, I don't think that generation felt there was a right to not pay for something even when it was available. The entitlement mindset came post-Napster. Back then, the landscape was just fans trying to share titles with other fans. Like, the only way you discovered a title existed was a fansub screening at a con, or in some tucked away forum group (if you were really already savvy on an infant internet).
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r_strata



Joined: 09 Feb 2014
Posts: 3
PostPosted: Sat Apr 22, 2017 1:31 am Reply with quote
I had found my box of VKLL Sailor Moon and Saint Tail tapes last week while digging for something else in the basement. I may or may not have just finished rewatching Saint Tail, for old times' sake.

Really wish I hadn't lost the script sheet for that last tape, though...
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Spawn29



Joined: 14 Jan 2008
Posts: 550
PostPosted: Sat Apr 22, 2017 1:48 am Reply with quote
I did had VHS fan subs growing up seeing that I would watch DBZ in Japanese before it finished on Toonami. I do disagree that they die out in 1999 seeing that I remember in 1999, anime titles like Gokudo, Excel Saga, Turn A Gundam and several others. I still remember that early 2000's titles like Chobits, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, Amon: Devilman and Mazinkaiser had VHS fansubs. I say VHS fansubs died out for good after 2001 or 2002. DVD's didn't outsold VHS until 2002 and people still had shitty dial up in 1999-2001.
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Reibubba



Joined: 20 Sep 2015
Posts: 29
PostPosted: Sat Apr 22, 2017 2:48 am Reply with quote
Oh Lord, so many memories !

It was a well worn multi-generation copy of Bubblegum Crisis that got me into anime.... back in 1992 I think. The colour sync was shot, the vertical hold didn't and the whole thing was just a bit fuzzy. Nowadays it's a perfect digital copy on the web a couple of hours after screening..... kids these days have it so good <mumble> Wink
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DeTroyes



Joined: 30 May 2016
Posts: 520
PostPosted: Sat Apr 22, 2017 3:10 am Reply with quote
Kenshiroh wrote:
This was how I first saw the Hokuto No Ken TV series. It was recorded from a broadcast from the "Nippon Golden Network".


Oh yeah, forgot about that one. They were also responsible for running a few movies with subtitles (Toward the Terra, among others) that also made it into the tape trading underground.

And the first time many of us saw Space Pirate Captain Harlock was in the french version, Captain Albator (courtesy of Quebec television).

Reibubba wrote:
Oh Lord, so many memories !

It was a well worn multi-generation copy of Bubblegum Crisis that got me into anime.... back in 1992 I think. The colour sync was shot, the vertical hold didn't and the whole thing was just a bit fuzzy. Nowadays it's a perfect digital copy on the web a couple of hours after screening..... kids these days have it so good <mumble> Wink


Lol! Those were the days! Nth generation unsubtitled, with rainbowing and color bleed all over the place. I remember having some episodes that had been copied down the line so many times that they were practically black & white.

But we still watched them. Because that was often all we could get of some shows (Particularly older ones).

azhanei wrote:
Even though all this was/is illegal, I don't think that generation felt there was a right to not pay for something even when it was available. The entitlement mindset came post-Napster. Back then, the landscape was just fans trying to share titles with other fans. Like, the only way you discovered a title existed was a fansub screening at a con, or in some tucked away forum group (if you were really already savvy on an infant internet).


I'd have to agree with this. Put simply, there was really no mechanism in place in the 1980s to get anime to US fans except by tape trading. And even then, you sometimes had to wait months or years for a release to make its way to US shores. We pretty much duped whatever we could get our hands on. We were so enthused we wanted as many people as possible to be introduced to it.

But if an official release came out (as they started to do in the early 1990s), most of us would stop copying that particular title and tell people to buy the licensed product. Also, there were video pirates who were selling some of the stuff we were giving away for free; anytime we found someone like that at a convention, they were generally reported and often booted out of the dealers room. So there was a sort of code of ethics among the early anime fans: so long as a property was unlicensed, it was given away for free; the moment it became licensed, it was withdrawn from duping.

Zalis116 wrote:
I would say no. There were anime being broadcast on US TV as early as the 60s and 70s, like Astro Boy, Kimba the White Lion, Speed Racer, Space Battleship Yamato, and Gatchaman -- before VHS was even a thing. Even during the 80s and 90s, shows like Robotech, Voltron, Dragonball Z, Sailor Moon, and Pokemon reached a lot more people on TV than underground tape-trading ever did


True, but anime fandom as a fannish entity didn't exist until the early 1980s. There were no fanzines or clubs or really anything until about 1981 or so, and those early groups were pretty sparse and widely scattered. Also, what anime there was on US tv was pretty hit or miss; it was all syndicated, which means it would broadcast in some areas but not others. Some shows only showed up in select regions of the country and were never broadcast anywhere else; others were broadcast in fits and starts, at the whim of whoever was running scheduling for that particular station. Media fandom as a whole really took off when VCRs became widely available; suddenly, it became possible to actually collect your favorite TV and movies and watch it whenever you wanted, instead of waiting for the rerun. For fans of SF/F television, this was practically a godsend.
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one.night.bkk



Joined: 17 Jul 2014
Posts: 32
PostPosted: Sat Apr 22, 2017 5:13 am Reply with quote
Count me as another person feeling old- not quite as old as some around here, but still...

...I have a box of fansub VHS tapes in a box... Somewhere, that I got from my uncle in Hawaii, who got them when the leader of a midwest sub group was living out there. Gundam X, Initial D, 08th MS Team, Macross 7, and others... Those were the days.
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Kadmos1



Joined: 08 May 2014
Posts: 13541
Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP
PostPosted: Sat Apr 22, 2017 5:17 am Reply with quote
Speaking of Technogirls, they started on 7/27/97 and their last update was 7/28/15. This was 11 years, 4 months, and 21 days after their previous update.
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jymmy



Joined: 11 Nov 2011
Posts: 1244
PostPosted: Sat Apr 22, 2017 7:07 am Reply with quote
John Thacker wrote:
Do people not know the term "daisy chain" anymore? Used to be quite common in electrical engineering and electronics.

I can confess I wasn't familiar with it before hearing a description of the daisy-chaining functionality of the DisplayPort 1.2 interface. However, the meaning is immediately apparent on hearing it.

Zalis116 wrote:
And curiously, it seems that people were surprisingly okay with yellow subtitles back then, even though many call them "eyecancer" when they encounter them today.

That's because it was the expected norm. I believe it's also the most readable colour combination, especially through poor quality, even if it does look quite ugly (which it does). When there's no extra effort involved in making text look less ugly and there's no danger of it being difficult to read, why wouldn't you? I've personally never obsessed over it, and I'd certainly never use it as a reason to watch a fansubbed release over an official one. But it's obviously the inferior choice, all else being equal.

MarshalBanana wrote:
In years to come you will have to answer, "What was fansubbing like?" Because I'm sure Simulcasting is going to kill it one day.

Maybe someday in the future, if everything were available, (including movies and OVAs, don't forget). There are and probably always will be a whole bunch of shows currently airing which are not both licensed and being released legitimately week to week. These are only the ones I watch:

Rilu Rilu Fairilu (slow fansubs exist; I watch without)
Kamisama Minarai: Himitsu no Cocotama (slow fansubs exist; I watch without)
Kirakira Precure a la Mode (quick fansubs exist; I watch without)
Idol Time PriPara (quick fansubs exist; I watch without)
Youkai Watch (indefinitely stalled fansubs exist; I watch without)
Pokémon (reasonably quick fansubs exist; I watch with)
Ani ni Tsukeru Kusuri wa Nai! (some fansubs exist; I watch without)
Aikatsu Stars (quick fansubs exist; I watch with)
Little Witch Academia (quick fansubs exist; I watch with)
Souryo to Majiwaru Shikiyoku no Yoru ni (some fansubs exist; I watch without)
ID-0 (some fansubs exist; I haven't actually started watching this yet)
The Snack World (no fansubs exist; I haven't actually started watching this yet)
Tomica Hyper Rescue Drive Head Kidou Kyuukyuu Keisatsu (no fansubs exist; I haven't actually started watching this yet)
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0nsen



Joined: 01 Nov 2014
Posts: 256
PostPosted: Sat Apr 22, 2017 7:25 am Reply with quote
Zalis116 wrote:
it seems that people were surprisingly okay with yellow subtitles back then, even though many call them "eyecancer" when they encounter them today. Either there's been a really rapid evolutionary shift in the human eye over the last 20 years, or the worst subtitle colors are whatever official subs happen to use.


What happened is CRT TVs became obsolete. On those yellow subs where okay to watch and kind of better to see than alternative colors, because of the contrast to whatever you'd see on screen.

Nowadays, though, with Full-HD everywhere, yellow subtitles feel more like cancer. Especially if they ain't text, but images, like VOB or PGS. If I encounter those, I just disable them and watch RAW instead. Better experience.
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GDMaid Man



Joined: 19 Jan 2011
Posts: 71
PostPosted: Sat Apr 22, 2017 9:06 am Reply with quote
Emichan wrote:
Purple tapes~~~ I still have them~



I have about 20 of those tapes still around. I don't know why, I'll never watch them again but I just can't bring myself to throw them out. I remember going drought Kodacha's website and picking out titles, sending off a money order, and then waiting for the tapes to come. Such fun and glorious days when the tapes would show up and you spent the night watching them.
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Stampeed Valkyrie



Joined: 10 Aug 2014
Posts: 825
Location: PA
PostPosted: Sat Apr 22, 2017 11:30 am Reply with quote
Well in a quick sum up to the OP question VHS Fansubs.. were horrible!... at the time though they were awesome!

I can't say I ever came across the purple tapes personally as by that time VCDs were becoming all the rage! lol VCDs don't get me started on that.

My experience started with really bad copies of SDF Macross back in the waaaaay early 80's. My neighbor used to send copies back and forth (ha remember that!) the video quality was poor and you'd watch episodes out of order whenever you could get a tape.
I think I still have a few tapes if I look hard enough.
I do remember a few years later seeing Robotech on TV and then arguing with my friends about events that HG fabricated in the series!
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Spawn29



Joined: 14 Jan 2008
Posts: 550
PostPosted: Sat Apr 22, 2017 12:43 pm Reply with quote
My first VHS fan sub was not anime, but a Toku. I got Ultraman Tiga & Ultraman Dyna: Warriors of the Star of Light back in 1998 when I was seven years old. I've been a fan of anime and toku since I was three years old and I even saw Guyver: Out of Control OVA in 1996 when I was 5 subbed.

It was not until I've became a fan of DBZ when I started to track down fan subs of DBZ in Japanese because I hated how Funimation dubbed DBZ at the time.
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j Talbain



Joined: 27 Oct 2010
Posts: 279
Location: Toronto, Ontario
PostPosted: Sat Apr 22, 2017 1:55 pm Reply with quote
I used to buy Buu Saga DragonBallZ fan subs. They we're so bad but seeing things we didn't have here was awesome. They we're always at the local flea market.
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Dr Grant Swinger



Joined: 10 Sep 2005
Posts: 41
PostPosted: Sat Apr 22, 2017 3:18 pm Reply with quote
Does anybody here remember Studio Chikashitsu? VKLL never subbed the episodes that had been dubbed by DIC so this two-man group started up to do it. I remember the day this arrived in the mail:



That's when I and many others finally got to see the real episodes instead of the censored and hacked up dub versions.

They were planning to do R as well but when they found out people were selling their tapes they shut down. When they said "Not for sale or rent" they meant it. You had promise them you wouldn't do that before you could get any tapes.
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Clyde_Cash



Joined: 03 Dec 2011
Posts: 376
PostPosted: Sat Apr 22, 2017 3:58 pm Reply with quote
Emichan wrote:
Purple tapes~~~ I still have them~



So that's one of the purple Kodocha tapes? I bet some collector would gladly pay a pretty penny for it, no matter how unwatchable it is now. Funimation's license has long since lapsed and the show didn't do well when it was new, so there's no money for them to make off it.
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