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jekichu
Joined: 08 Jul 2004
Posts: 1
Location: New York, NY
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Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2017 5:25 pm
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special shout out to the most prolific fansubber of the VHS era... S. Baldric
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Beltane70
Joined: 07 May 2007
Posts: 3888
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Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2017 5:27 pm
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While they weren't fansubs, my friends and I watched a bulk of the anime on VHS tapes bought from the supermarket at Yaohan (now called Mitsuwa) Plaza in north Jersey.
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Zin5ki
Joined: 06 Jan 2008
Posts: 6680
Location: London, UK
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Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2017 5:37 pm
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DeTroyes wrote: | A friend of mine made some PAL video screen-recordings (pointing a PAL video camera at an NTSC television, since PAL/NTSC video conversions were EXPENSIVE at that time) |
Now that's dedication! Only the most ardent of fans would want to endure the cinematic equivalent of viewing a gallery from outside the building.
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Cutiebunny
Joined: 18 Apr 2010
Posts: 1748
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Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2017 6:03 pm
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I remember sending money off for fansubs and getting the first Pokemon movie in return. It was neat to see the edited scenes and that version first, and I was completely disappointed when Mewtwo was portrayed in the US as a villain rather than one that had suffered at the hands of its creator.
I used to love VKLL Sailor Moon fansubs. They were really well done. I remember one later distributor used their fansubs and then would send it to you with a color copied version of the Japanese packing.
I never met anyone in this era that would have bought the legal US version of what they were fansubbing. A lot of it was just due to the difference in price. For $10, you'd receive a tape with 6 episodes or so. Most US distributors were selling 3-4 episodes of licensed titles, like Pretty Samy (Magical Project S), for $50. Just as then as is now, there was a lot of anger in what fans perceived as licensors taking advantage of the market. So when you combine this with the ultra fast (at the time), high speed internet connections that many young adults had in their college dorms and libraries, downloading and distributing anime online became commonplace.
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DeTroyes
Joined: 30 May 2016
Posts: 520
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Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2017 6:18 pm
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Zin5ki wrote: |
DeTroyes wrote: | A friend of mine made some PAL video screen-recordings (pointing a PAL video camera at an NTSC television, since PAL/NTSC video conversions were EXPENSIVE at that time) |
Now that's dedication! Only the most ardent of fans would want to endure the cinematic equivalent of viewing a gallery from outside the building. |
Camera-copies were actually a fairly common method of video duping in the 1980s, among US & UK fans of each other's television. Since PAL & NTSC conversions were expensive (and frequently glitchy as hell), camera copying was a cheaper and fairly reliable method of producing a video version in the other's format. If you had the right equipment and knew what you were doing, the end result could look almost as good as regular video. It would never be as sharp as an off-air copy, but good enough to watch. And if you wanted to watch, say, Doctor Who as it was coming out in the UK, it was often your only recourse.
Not too long ago I was fiddling with a piece of video software I'd downloaded for free, and I noticed it had PAL/NTSC conversion tools. My immediate thought was, "Damn, if only we'd had that 30 years ago...".
ADDENDUM: I just realized. I still have some of those purple video tapes...
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Panoptican
Joined: 03 Oct 2005
Posts: 160
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Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2017 6:24 pm
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Yooo one of the ads on this Answerman article is doing something shady. After reading for for about 30 seconds suddenly something started to play audio. It simply repeated, "Critical alert from Micr..." It wouldn't stop. It sounded just like something you may run into on some of the less savory parts of the internet. I know it was the Answerman article because the audio icon showed up on the Chrome Tab and when I muted that tab it stopped.
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Dop.L
Joined: 23 Mar 2007
Posts: 714
Location: London
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Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2017 6:46 pm
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Zin5ki wrote: |
Dop.L wrote: | First time I encountered anime was a small science fiction con in the 80s where someone had an n'th generation VHS, and duplicated copies of a transcript we were expected to read along to find out what people were saying. Wonder I wasn't put off for life, really! |
Was there a pre-internet fansub scene in the UK as well? One would have thought that the additional degree of separation from Japan—in comparison to America's west coast—would have rendered any amateur efforts all but impossible. |
I think it was very very rare, people who knew people in the US (possibly via the armed forces which seemed to be a connection) and had NTSC -> PAL conversion kit. I only encountered it a few times at cons back in the day so it was very rare and I had no idea where people were getting these things.
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Sakagami Tomoyo
Joined: 06 Dec 2008
Posts: 940
Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia
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Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2017 7:37 pm
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Wow, this takes me back. I got into anime a couple of years before the birth of digital fansubbing, so a lot of my early viewing was VHS fansubs - even a few years into the digital era, I'd make extensive use of the local anime club's VHS library. (And one or two more questionable sources.) So much changed between VHS and digital, and yet so much was basically the same. Debates over the morality of the whole thing, the question of whether to cease production and distribution upon licensing, font choice and style wankery, groups competing over the same few shows with varying degrees of (im)maturity, etc.
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. 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. |
This is one of the reasons I think people who complain about yellow subtitles are so bloody stupid.
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DerekL1963
Subscriber
Joined: 14 Jan 2015
Posts: 1114
Location: Puget Sound
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Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2017 7:56 pm
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Zalis116 wrote: |
revolutionotaku wrote: | Did anime fandom in America begin with the underground bootleg fansubs? |
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 |
Yup. Where exactly do people think that anime fandom got the idea that this whole anime thing was cool and worth the effort to go 'underground'?
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delariean
Joined: 11 Nov 2002
Posts: 55
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Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2017 8:49 pm
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Cutiebunny wrote: |
I used to love VKLL Sailor Moon fansubs. They were really well done. I remember one later distributor used their fansubs and then would send it to you with a color copied version of the Japanese packing.
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I STILL have my VKLL SM fansubs.... got my little cousins at the time who could not even read interested in SM that way.....
those were the days....
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Jason Salce
Joined: 21 Apr 2017
Posts: 1
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Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2017 9:32 pm
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It was nice to be part of this group back in the day. I remember when I went off to college, my best friend from middle/high school had only a phone to keep in touch. So being that I ran a BBS, and then used the Internet to connect to IRC, I suggested we keep in touch through our own IRC channel. We were both subtitling at the time (Matt was Reality Studios and I was Yagami Studios), and we started #fansubs. We just used it to keep in touch, and eventually merged studios, since we were always working together (RYS was then formed). Next thing we knew we had fansubbers from all over the nation join our channel (Silverwynd, Newtype, Reflex Studios and dozens more).
We met a conventions, traded tapes (no money ever exchanged, except for possibly the cost of a tape) and collaborated for years. All of this started because all you could find at the local video store was ninja scrolls, windaria and a maybe a ranma OVA (OAV?). All we wanted is to watch more anime.
Some of the people I met, I am still friends with today (I see you there John Thacker!)
So many good memories from back then. Thanks for the article Justin.
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mangamuscle
Joined: 23 Apr 2006
Posts: 2658
Location: Mexico
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Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2017 10:11 pm
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Quote: | And for however much we may have laid the seeds for the crazy era of bittorrented fansubs that was to follow, I'd like to think that the 18 years of service I've given this business since has been my penance. |
An outsider that stumbled on that last paragraph would wonder if nowadays commercial anime in the USA is some kind of radioactive wasteland where only the crazy or diseased venture to make a profit. Far from that anime has never been a bigger business this side of the pacific ocean. The quoted statement somehow feels like those 20th century business meetings between japanese and chinese where the former had to bow to ask for forgiveness for what their dad, grandfather or great grandfather did on ww2, as crazy as they look, those formalities had some reason to exist, but asking for forgiveness for being the forefathers of the 21th century fansubing scene? You should be asking for a medal and a diploma!
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Sakagami Tomoyo
Joined: 06 Dec 2008
Posts: 940
Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia
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Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2017 10:27 pm
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mangamuscle wrote: | An outsider that stumbled on that last paragraph would wonder if nowadays commercial anime in the USA is some kind of radioactive wasteland where only the crazy or diseased venture to make a profit. |
Plenty of insiders would agree with that assessment.
mangamuscle wrote: | but asking for forgiveness for being the forefathers of the 21th century fansubing scene? You should be asking for a medal and a diploma! |
Not everyone shares your fondness of the 21st century fansubbing scene.
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Kenshiroh
Joined: 24 Dec 2012
Posts: 28
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Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2017 10:32 pm
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DeTroyes wrote: | ...in some areas subtitled versions of some shows were run on a few US stations that specialized in ethnic programming; Galaxy Express 999 and Lupin III both ran on a Honolulu station in the early 1980s with subtitles, and copies of those runs made their way into the trading network. |
This was how I first saw the Hokuto No Ken TV series. It was recorded from a broadcast from the "Nippon Golden Network".
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BadNewsBlues
Joined: 21 Sep 2014
Posts: 5927
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Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2017 10:48 pm
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John Thacker wrote: |
Recording while passing the signal through. VCRs have (had) inputs and outputs. You play back the fansub from your master VCR, output it using a cable to the inputs on another VCR, which both records that input and sends the signal out its own output to yet another VCR.
Do people not know the term "daisy chain" anymore? Used to be quite common in electrical engineering and electronics. |
In my case I never ever heard of the term up until Justin mentioned it...also not really much a technophile.
Cutiebunny wrote: | I remember sending money off for fansubs and getting the first Pokemon movie in return. It was neat to see the edited scenes and that version first, and I was completely disappointed when Mewtwo was portrayed in the US as a villain rather than one that had suffered at the hands of its creator.
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To be fair blowing up a lab and killing one of the scientist (and possibly more) isn't a good look.
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