Forum - View topicAnswerman - Is It Worth Collecting Anime On VHS?
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vanfanel
 Posts: 1303 |
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Nice; I can almost smell the plastic casing 
I used to have that "Leda: The Fantastic Adventure of Yoko" tape, and now regret selling it. The OOP Japanese DVD costs more than I'm willing to pay now. "Blue Sonnet" I remember liking pretty well, but it didn't really have an ending, did it? "Machine 'You don't even deserve to know my name!' Robo"! Good times! And "The Making of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure" ...I never knew such a thing existed! "Ruins Explorers" I finally checked out on DVD last year. That was a nice little series, and I loved the character designs. Wouldn't have minded seeing more. |
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Macron One
 Posts: 151 Location: Netherlands |
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Aside from a few titles that never saw a DVD or BD release, i really wouldn't recommend collecting VHS tapes for actual viewing purposes. You could buy some for display or as a conversation starter, but Laserdiscs are frankly a much better option for this purpose. As the primary collector's format of its time, Laserdisc in general had a much higher standard of quality in terms of packaging, artwork and physical extras. Japanese LD releases often included posters, prints, postcards or art books. You also have a much better chance of finding Laserdisc releases in excellent condition than you would with VHS, thanks to it having been the format of choice for the hardcore Japanese collector market. I've purchased several LD box sets from Yahoo Japan that only had the outer box show signs of having been previously opened, while the contents were still fully sealed and unused. The main drawbacks, as with VHS, are of course size/storage and shipping costs. While most LDs can be purchased secondhand for very little money, shipping costs could easily double or triple the cost of the item.
As objects of historical interest, it might be worth getting some of the handful of anime released on the shortlived VHD and Betamax formats. Home video anime releases on Betamax tape ceased after about 1988, and approx 1990 for VHD. As a result, there exist at most just a few hundred different tapes/discs for each format, mostly consisting of OVAs and movies, as home video releases of TV anime were very uncommon until the early 90's. (I managed to find a complete release (10 volumes, dated 1987) of The Rose of Versailles on Beta tape a few months ago, which greatly surprised me, because i had no idea that any anime TV series had been released in full on this format). |
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2998 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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Huh, didn't know that US Renditions released Dangaioh in non-clamshell packaging. That being said, my 1st episode VHS doesn't have the infamous "Side-Kick Wave" mistranslation that people apparently always poked fun at, so I guess I have some thing kind of unknown, too. I also really want that "Making of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure" tape, which I only found out of when Mike Toole shared a pic of him getting it at a con a couple of years ago on Twitter. It's weird that Super Techno Arts never included that in the DVD release for the JoJo OVAs. I'd share my collection, but it's spread out all over my place, and I don't feel like gathering them all together to take a picture, but probably my most cherished would be my One Piece anime pilot tape. I even got it autographed by PA Works founder Kenji Horikawa, since he was a production manager for it, back when he was first starting off in the anime industry; he found it amusing that I had it. |
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Cardcaptor Takato
 Posts: 5969 |
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DangerMouse
Posts: 4022 |
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Nice little set Kicksville
I still have the Dangaio tapes too, would totally buy a US release of that blu-ray remaster. Make it happen Discotek
I'd also like to see Orguss 02's recent JP blu-ray release lead to it coming back to the US since I never managed to get the DVDs, despite looking forward to upgrading from the tapes. That's the Guyver one-shot ova, right? I never manged to get that, only the main OVA series back then. One of my favs back then.
Yeah. I quite liked this one too. I would have bought more. Also, no idea how/when I first learned about it but being a huge Xenogears fan I do remember that it was cool finding out Kunihiko Tanaka had created it. |
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PurpleWarrior13
 Posts: 2062 |
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I have all my old DBZ, Sailor Moon, Pokemon, and Utena tapes, but purely for nostalgia. My DBZ and Sailor Moon tapes are edited-for-television though, so at least the experience is slightly different from the DVDs and Blu-rays.
Actually my DBZ tape with episodes 68-70 (Japanese numbering) has some dubbed scenes at the very beginning not available anywhere else (they were cut/paste from ep. 67, and completely rescripted and redubbed in 2006 for the uncut release). It was FUNi's very first DBZ tape. My Sailor Moon S tapes are the only way to see the edited versions of that season. The dub is the same as the old Pioneer DVDs, but the VHS tape has the cheesy scene transitions seen on Toonami, and opening sequences not even seen there. My Utena tape (Vol. 1, eps. 1-4) was my very first experience with "hard core" anime (as in, not DBZ, Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Sailor Moon, etc). When I first watched, I thought it was amusing that they played the ending sequence three times in a row at the very end (once with ep. 4, once clean with translation, and once with English credits) in addition to the other three times on the tape. |
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CandisWhite
Posts: 282 |
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VHS does not deteriorate "just sitting there on the shelf." I have a ton of VHS including home recorded tapes from the 80's, my original tape of Disney's Cinderella (complete with trailer for the brand-new movie Oliver and Company), and a handful of Lady Lovely Locks tapes that I bought off of eBay in my 20's: They're kept in the basement on shelves; They all play just fine.
VHS does wear with each use but, unless you re-enact your childhood watching stuff ad nauseum, constantly re-winding, and not putting tapes back in the case and back on the shelf, it's not akin to scratching a cd. VHS is a clunky method to collect but it's not like writing on a napkin for preservation. |
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BodaciousSpacePirate
 Subscriber Posts: 3036 |
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I still have a bunch of anime VHS in storage - Maetel Legend, Ariel Deluxe, and some assorted Utena and Serial Experiments Lain tapes - but the only tapes I still have on my anime shelves are the Mobile Suit Gundam movie trilogy boxed set and all of Super Dimension Century Orguss 02.
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taster of pork
 Posts: 603 Location: My House |
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I have a VHS of Dragon Drive, The Cockpit, and the Studio Ghibli music video of On Your Mark. Luckily there's a store where I live that converts VHS to DVD.
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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Imported anime in Carl Macek's day was still from the 70's "Battle of the Planets" days when you grabbed anything you didn't have to animate yourself, but DON'T let the viewers find out you didn't and it came from somewhere else! And certainly don't leave non-English credits on it that say where it did come from. When Sailor Moon and the Power Rangers came along in '92-'93, we still didn't have the faintest idea someone else had produced them, and joked about "Who smoked what to come up with those ideas?" But after Pokemon arrived on the heels of the card/videogame and the Japanese success, then we realized it was a Japanese import, but the majority of the mocking was more 80's-holdover pokes at armies of corporate salarymen sending Tokyo's "Latest attempt at world domination" to our children. And then we joked about what made Japan come up with the idea of Sailor Moon.
Not counting 00's fansubs (which, cleaning out, I've since discovered that most of them are now streaming or on disk), I have exactly three VHS tapes left on my shelf. None of them are anime, they're all of movies that are too trapped in rights or restoration limbo to ever make it to DVD/Blu. (And are all MGM movies held by Warner, so I'm not waiting up nights..  )
There's one I dig out every so often at Thanksgiving, and last November, when its holiday rotation came up, I was actually too afraid to play it. I still own a VCR for exactly that purpose, but it was the only time in my life I ever actually tried to seek out and look up the title on digital, to buy one as backup, and spare my poor VHS from the inevitable bullet with its name on it sooner or later. |
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Kicksville
 Posts: 1415 |
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Glad y'all enjoyed that.
Blue Sonnet basically has a sort of ending, resolving an immediate storyline while clearly having a larger setting to pursue. So it is a "buy the manga" thing to some degree, but it doesn't cut off super hard like some other OVAs. It's funny that the manga its based on is Akai Kiba (Red Fang) - for the anime, the original main character lost her top billing! For the "Making of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure" tape, I ran into that more than once, always going for one dollar at the time. Near as I know, it was a hand out promo tape (probably free?), likely for cons. As you may be aware, Super Techno Arts' release was infamously delayed for years, so by the time they actually released the OVAs it was all DVD only. It seems there's somehow even less info about this tape out there than before. Hmmmm... Both Dangaio and Gunbuster had thin sleeve releases at some point - I remember seeing both versions out in the wild for each. |
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Just Passing Through
Posts: 277 |
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Actually it does. It's just as prone to degradation if poorly stored as any other media. Books get bookworm and mould, vinyl gets warped, laserdiscs get rot, DVDs get delaminated, and I'm sure Blu-ray will show up some new horror. Magnetic tape if stored poorly will degrade. But kept in proper conditions, it will last for decades and more. They're remastering vinyl again, in some case from master tapes over 60 or 70 years old, and cinema audio used to be recorded magnetically for much of the analogue era. But magnetic media throws up another path of failure that discs don't; the cassette, which is of particular relevance to VHS, and also to audio cassette. This is one instance where the media is reliant on the quality of moving parts, the reels and rollers and so on. Cassettes rely on dry lubricant to keep the parts moving, and that lubricant can evaporate. The trouble is that studios and distributors opted for the lowest bidder to manufacture the video and audio cassettes that they released movies and TV, and albums on. I've recently had some negative experiences with both audio and video. I've long since divested myself of most of my VHS collection, but I still had that one Star Trek series that I had no intention of double dipping on. I found myself in need of storage space, and decided to give Voyager one final watch before throwing the tapes out. Pulled out my old VCR, hooked it up to my late, lamented CRT TV (it died last week and I still feel the pain), and started watching my way through 80 tapes. Of the 80, over half now squeaked their way through playback, about ten stretched and distorted playback, losing colour, losing stereo, introducing tape artefacts or roll, and two just stuck. And last year, I got the urge to play some audio cassettes, all those mixtapes I'd meticulously made as a teenager, all those albums I bought on tape when my universe consisted of what I could see, and what I could drown out with my walkman, tapes that I never bothered double-dipping to CD. Same deal, all those store bought, pre-recorded albums were released on cassettes made by the lowest bidder. About thirty of them ground to a halt in my tape deck, or distorted playback. However, every blank tape that I bought, paid a wodge for the quality, plays now as they did 30 years ago. The solution is either to upgrade to digital, or find an expensive blank tape, audio or video as necessary, open the dodgy tape up and swap the reels to the quality cassette mechanism. But it is one more point of failure to be aware of. |
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Shiflan
 Posts: 418 |
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You're right that all media can degrade if stored poorly (or otherwise mishandled, like being dropped or scratched), but I think it's very inaccurate to say that all media are equally prone to degradation. For example, mold and insect damage is a risk for any book if stored improperly (and is a total non-issue if stored carefully). Laser rot (which is a form of delamination) could theoretically apply to any optical disc medium including DVD and blu-ray, but is also incredibly rare, and happens regardless of storage conditions. It results from a manufacturing defect, not from improper storage or age. You are 100% right about the lack of degradation to magnetic tape in general (and also about the loss of lubricant issues, which are fixable) But the real issue with VHS, IMHO, is not degradation incurred sitting on a shelf, but rather is the fairly high risk of damage that comes with each time you play it. A VCR is a very complex machine with a lot of moving parts. Every time the tape is loaded, FF'ed, RW'ed, etc, the tape is physically moved around inside the machine. That's an awful lot of chances for the tape to get mechanically pinched, stretched, edge damage from incorrect tracking or tension, etc. The problem exists even with new VCRs but is even worse these days where people will be using older machines that might not have been recently serviced. Just as how time can degrade the lubricant inside a tape cassette, the same thing happens inside a VCR mechanism. Parts don't move as freely as they should. Rubber belts and rollers can stretch, harden, or otherwise deteriorate. I doubt most people have their decks serviced on a regular basis. That's a recipe for tape damage. I can relate to this from personal experience. VHS was the main thing when I got into anime. I had many tapes "eaten" by players, and many others that suffered minor damage. Yet of the more than 500 LDs that I own not a single one has any sort of damage, laser rot, etc. I'm sure the same thing is true for most people comparing VHS with an optical medium like DVD or blu-ray. Everyone who has used VHS can recall stories of problems with tapes. By comparison, hardly anyone has those kinds of issues with optical discs. And speaking of laser rot, I have a great test-case for this. I have an original copy of Angel's Egg on LD. Sometime before I got it the disc took a hard impact on the edge and produced some very obvious cracks in the LD. Despite this, the disc plays great, and there are no signs--either looking at the disc visually, or playing it back--of rot. The existence of that crack is just asking for rot to occur yet for the decade that I've owned that disc it's been trouble-free. Laser rot, as far as I am concerned, is a non-issue. |
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FLCLGainax
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Pre-recorded tapes last longer, but if it's something taped off TV in the '80s it's more likely to have playback issues. I recently played such a tape from 1985 where the sound fell off, but the picture was completely fine. Last edited by FLCLGainax on Sat Feb 17, 2018 10:08 am; edited 2 times in total |
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Just Passing Through
Posts: 277 |
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Hope taped content was usually optimised for the machine that it was recorded on with regards to tracking. What was perfect on one machine occasionally had issues on another. |
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