Forum - View topicAnswerman - What Were VHS Fansubs Like?
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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Before there was an Internet (Iate-80's/early 90's) to help other fans find each other in the wilderness, there were college clubs that sprung up when Japanese exchange students started getting VHS care packages from home, ex-high-school US Robotech fans got caught up on it too, and pretty soon a little mad-monkish club of manga and figure enthusiasts started trading 2nd-3rd generation of whatever raw tapes someone could find. And if someone bothered to fansub Totoro on their Commodore Amiga, or you'd tracked down a gen-u-ine past-issue copy of Animag (which was half devoted to providing English synopses of raw classics, like the libretto description in a ballet or opera theater program) or even just a Xeroxed copy, friend, you'd found GOLD. 
You'd generally have to look for the one table at the local Comic Show to be able to buy your choice of anything VHS'ed raw or home-subbed off of laser, but if it was still airing on TV, you had to keep up with the clubs for that. Ever see the documentary "Chuck Norris vs. Communism" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAxZ08YGzL0 ), about how illegal Nth-generation VHS tapes of Hollywood movies were smuggled into Communist Romania, and it started becoming the illicit-trendy New Big Western-Democracy Thing to all gather in a neighbor's apartment to watch "Missing in Action II", for which he would probably charge tickets? Yeah. The clubs were kinda like that back then, only Urusei Yatsura, Dirty Pair and Project A-Ko were our "eye-opening revolutions". Only we didn't worry about the Secret Police knocking on our door, we worried about the bootleg regulations, so you had to bring your own VHS to the club and ask them to copy some Care-package copy floating around the fan-ether for free, as one keeper of the faith to another. And once the Internet meant you didn't have to leech off whatever few fans were in your own college town, it was easier for a devoted, well-established techie fan to set up a little website garage-operation of Amiga-subtitling whatever you could get on laser, with a lot more customers, so long as they provided the tapes. But, since sending a cassette was too hard by mail, you were usually asked to send a (wink-wink) "contribution" of $10 to compensate the costs of USPS Media-Mail postage and the subber providing his own tape. The commercial US anime VHS industry was in a complete Streamline-era shambles, with companies only able to license cheap OVA series or artsy features, and we told ourselves we were "trying to create exposure" for a new hit, when in fact, we just thought we'd never see it on shelves at all. Kodocha Fansubs was the "star", with Kodocha, Card Captor Sakura and just about every other new 90's breakout title, and we still talk about "Purple tapes" as symbol of an era, but there weren't too many other "celebrities"-- VKLL was hailed as a champion for bringing us the entire Sailor Moon subtitled, even Sailor Stars. I'm guessing there are a few folk here who weren't ready to give up their VKLL Stars tapes until Viz just now promised they'd finally bring it out on disk. And then, of course, .MKV streaming, colored captions and BitTorrent came along in the mid-00's with the rest of the Internet, and suddenly there was a lot less mailing going on. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 5920 |
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What is a "daisy chained" VCR supposed to be?
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John Thacker
Posts: 1006 |
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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. |
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Hoppy800
 Posts: 3331 |
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I'm not even 40 yet and I feel old read this article. Everything got easier as time passed including importing. A non-anime example is If you compare import gaming in 1995-1997 to now, it's night and day.
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EricJ2
Posts: 4016 |
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Multiple VCR's set up in a chain to copy a copy being copied, so you could make several at once (usually with degrading quality). At the same time, you had some home businesses, usually out of a camera shop, that had ten or twelve VCR's concurrently set up to produce cleaner copies of one master tape--if you needed a big mass shipment of a video you'd produced for a college class or business presentation--and if those same mass-copying services happened to be owned by an underground anime fan who knew a subtitler... 
(The Romanian guy soon developed his own similar mass garage operation, once the trend caught on to become a "business".) |
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ZeArNkN
Posts: 95 |
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I never seriously got into anime until the mid 2000s, when I started watching Naruto on Toonami. Before then I had watched DBZ frequently, but I was never as into it. I never knew that VHS subs were so prevalent. It's crazy to think how dedicated some fans were back in the 90s.
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wastrel
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Oh yes. I still remember visiting the neighboring college's (the rich kids) anime club, and watching the unsubbed first episode of Dirty Pair TV. The paper sheet provided the brief explanation that the characters were named Kei and Yuri, they were called the Dirty Pair, and that was about it. Still, it was funny even without knowing the language. I still have the fansubbed version of Sailor Moon Sailor Stars (the fifth season that took 20 years to license for North America) that I eventually copied from VHS to DVD-R. Fear not Viz, when you finally get around to releasing your BD version of Sailor Stars, I will promptly and cheerfully at last pay for a legal copy. After all these years I'm not sure the DVD-Rs still retain any data anyway. Now if you'll excuse me, there appear to be some whippersnappers outside who could use a good cane-shaking. |
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Emichan
 Posts: 83 Location: SF Bay Area |
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Purple tapes~~~ I still have them~
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xyz
Posts: 243 |
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I got into anime 20 years ago through fansubs. I keep them for sentimental reasons. I think Tomodachi and Technogirls did some quality works.
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tcdelaney
Posts: 169 Location: Mittagong, NSW, Australia |
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I only ever got one VHS fansub - Magic Knight Rayearth. The quality was actually reasonable ... except that tape 5 had pink vertical lines all through it (apparently was on the "master" the fansubber had).
Being an anime fan in Australia was tough back then - nearly everything had to be imported. I remember spending ~AU$1000 on the first 3 seasons of Ranma 1/2 (60+ VHS tapes IIRC - the boxes were huge!). There were a few companies doing local productions, but you couldn't exactly say there was a huge choice. Then Madman bet their company on the Neon Genesis Evangelion DVD release and everything changed. I still have the >$1000 DVD player I bought from them when they were running "The DVD Shop" - haven't used it in years, but it was a very solid player that lasted well beyond several other much cheaper ones. Unfortunately (here's the link back to the original topic), it was very spotty in playing back the VCDs I made from my by then vast VHS collection (all legit except MKR) and had to be retired. |
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FLCLGainax
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This takes me back. I remember Kodocha Anime and was amazed how much visual work was put into their intro logos on their tapes.
Last edited by FLCLGainax on Fri Apr 21, 2017 5:37 pm; edited 3 times in total |
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Zin5ki
 Posts: 6680 Location: London, UK |
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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. |
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FLCLGainax
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Last edited by FLCLGainax on Fri Apr 21, 2017 5:17 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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DeTroyes
 Posts: 520 |
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It was around before that, but the fansubs really helped. I first started getting anime around 1984, with nth generation videos of shows such as Macross, Yamato, Orguss, Gundam, Captain Harlock, Baxinger, Space Cobra, Urusei Yatsura etc. All of these were of varying quality, none of them were subtitled. We used to struggle to figure out what was going on, and sometimes the plots we came up with were actually better than what was actually going on. Soon after a few of us lucked into getting contacts directly from Japan, who would tape stuff for us and send them along in trade for shows that weren't available there (like Airwolf, Knight Rider, V, Doctor Who, and others). Pretty much most of the distribution at that time was the underground network of video traders, which was usually done by word of mouth. Some of us used to also have periodic "copying parties", where anyone could get a copy of something so long as they came with a VCR to hook into the chain; our record was 17 VCRs hooked up to copy an unsubtitled imported copy of Akira (and yes, we had signal boosters and high-end cables connected as well; the video quality on the last VCR recording was as good as the first!). The first subbers that I am aware of generally used Amiga/Commodore computers (which came with some rudimentary video capabilities). However, there were a few who had access to more professional equipment (usually at their workplaces) and were able to produce some fairly good early efforts (there were editions of Macross: Do You Remember Love and Odin: Photon Ship Starlight floating around that were practically professional-level). Also, 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. Finally, I should also mention that pirated versions of subtitled screening copies (copies of movies & tv shows that were subtitled to screen on flights or as exemplars to be shown at broadcasting trade shows) also made their way into the network; subtitled versions of Castle Cagliostro and Arcadia of My Youth (titled there as My Youth in Arcadia) were making the underground duping rounds as early as 1984, and those were taken from the studio's official screening copies. So even in the early stages of anime fandom, there were subtitled versions floating around. Not much, but they were there. And as time went on and technology became more accessible, they increased.
Some. 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) of SPT Layzner that wound up making the rounds in the UK; when I went to the UK in 1991/1992, the recordings were still being traded around. |
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littlegreenwolf
 Posts: 4796 Location: Seattle, WA |
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I still remember long ago requesting some fansubs through a random site when I was still in middle school. Had to be very late 90s, and I think I sent cash in an envelop at something like 3 bucks per tape, plus some shipping. Some person who made the website would then make me a copy of their vhs copies, and then I had Sailor Moon uncensored fansubs and Sera Myu and even the Utena musical. I was the coolest geek girl in middle school for having those.
They were awfully blurry though. They obviously didn't have anywhere near master copies, or if they did they were VERY worn. Then in high school I would download Inu Yasha fansubs through the dsl of someone I babysat for cause dsl was sooo much faster than 56k. |
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