Forum - View topicAnswerman - What Were VHS Fansubs Like?
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Nanto
 Posts: 5 |
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Not just traded around in the UK either. Multi generation copies of those anime tapes I camera copied for you eventually made it onto the trading circuit in Australia as well. Other than Layzner, do you remember what other anime we loaded onto those tapes? This was around 1986, so it would have tended more toward Japanese language material with no subtitles, but we probably tried to included as much as possible from the tiny amount of subtitled stuff that was available back then. I'm fairly certain we filled up the end of one of the tapes that was almost out of room with some subtitled action clips from the Macross movie. |
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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Kodocha was the company, although, yes, they were our best outlet for first watching the show. Also handy for first encountering Card Captor Sakura, Akazukin Cha-Cha and Hime-Chan's Ribbon. (The latter of which was cute, but hasn't aged well.) |
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Emichan
 Posts: 83 Location: SF Bay Area |
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Yeah, in this case, Kodocha was the distro, but the tape is actually: 
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moroboshi-kun
Posts: 59 |
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Call me one of the older guard as well. I remember working with people to do the whole Genlock process as well, and it was kind of a much a craft as it was a technical challenge.
While I appreciate everyone who participated in fansubbing like that back in the day, some of the dialogue came out hilarious. One of my all time favorite lines from the Crusher Joe fansub I had was (context - sending out minions to go look for...something. It's been a while) "You two, go break into parties" I worked with a fansubbing group called the Shinsengumi to do Kenshin when it was still running. That all ended when we got an actual "Cease and Desist" letter from Sony. Oddly enough, it was kind of a badge of honor. While the feeble, elderly person I've become very much appreciates streaming simulcasts, I do actually miss the days when I had to (or maybe "got to") go looking for shows, talking to people, going to clubs, making connections, and, you know, leaving the house. I think I got exposed to a lot of works that I otherwise never would have seen. I tend to dismiss a lot of shows nowadays after very little viewing, mostly due to not having nearly as much time as I used to, so I feel like i miss out because I don't give shows a chance to grow on me. When it's more social, you can find people advocate for shows, which can open things up and help discover new shows. I met some great people (and some seriously dysfunctional people too), and I kind of miss those days. I wonder sometimes if the easy access we have to all sorts of media produces a broader but more shallow appreciation of shows, music, movies, etc. Then again, the elderly do fear change.... I wish I still had some of those purple tapes! |
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Sakagami Tomoyo
 Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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Wow, that takes me back. Rurouni Kenshin was one of the first shows I watched fansubbed, and I'm about 80% sure it was the first. And it was the Shinsengumi subs I saw! (Well, End of Evangelion was the absolute first fansub I saw, but I'm not counting that because it was connected to something I saw first on TV.)
I find the same kind of thing myself. There's lots of shows that I watched back then mostly because nothing I actually wanted to watch was handy at the time but I wanted to watch something, and it was there and someone said "check this one out". (And I know the anime club tape librarian who did a lot of that for me posts here...) A lot of it turned out to be garbage, but there were some really good shows I otherwise wouldn't have seen. There was also something of a thrill of the hunt, which was kind of present in the early pre-bittorrent days of digital when you had to go to IRC channels to trade or use fserves, but it's gone now. And yeah, it does seem like there's a broader but more shallow appreciation of shows. I think that is more down to the number of shows being produced and shifts in the nature of the Japanese industry and fandom, rather than stuff being more easily available in the West, though. |
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leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
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Nah, that's not going to happen. For as long as there are people against the professionals and watch fansubs and read scanlations out of spite against the industry, or people who feel that amateur translations are inherently better than professional ones, there are going to be fansubs and scanlators.
Your school district had a TV station? That's a pretty weird idea to me.
I'm pretty amused at the concept of someone putting their camcorder in front of the TV screen, as it reminds me of YouTube's early days of game footage, where the most common thing to do was exactly that. I was an early adopter of the video capture device, and I used to get questions almost every day about how I got such clear footage (and, in one case, someone asked me how I was able to hold the camera in one hand and play video games properly). Though I don't think I have any fansubs of anime, my father did amass quite a collection of home-recorded videotapes. I'm sure some of them are pretty rare. Certainly, I have been searching for our videotape of "Donald and the Wheel" for the past several years, as there has been only one home video release of it, having been thoroughly overshadowed by "Donald Duck in Mathmagicland" (but frankly, "Wheel" was both a lot more entertaining and a lot more informative). I believe we also had the rare recording of Twice Upon a Time during the years when the producers were at war with each other and a home video release was impossible because each would block the other. As far as official releases went, I think our rarest tape is "Muppet Madness," which was for an obscure machine known as the ViewMaster Interactive Vision, which connected to a VCR and overlaid Atari-level graphics on top of the videotape you could play with like a video game. The ones I do want to keep the most are commercials. You can weait long enough, and eventually, more likely than not a given TV show or movie, if the originals still exist, will be given a home video release. Commercials, not so much. Once they're gone, they're gone. And the companies that made them will issue you copyright strikes if you put them up on YouTube, ensuring NO ONE can watch them. We probably have at least one rare anime, but it'd be the Japanese raw. My father, who was an electrical engineer, was somehow able to use his big 25-foot dish in our backyard to pick up satellite broadcast signals from other countries, and Japan was one of them. We got this channel that mostly showed news from Sapporo, though my father didn't record any of those. Before I drift off further, I'll just say that there's no way I'm getting rid of these. Who knows how many there are left of these recordings.
A lot of the anime fans at school really, really liked those fansubs, and they were certain that it's DBZ the way it was supposed to be. I don't know if Anime Labs deliberately cultivated that thought, however.
Of course, the actual answer is that people got increasingly spoiled and/or the bar got higher. The "eye cancer" people must not watch a lot of official DVDs of Hollywood movies either, because DVD players during then could only really display things in basic colors, yellow being the second most common one behind white.
Heh, that sounds a lot like the artist vs. businessman conflict that plays out in more professional circles. Figures it would happen at the amateur level too.
Well, provided the VCR has output outlets at all. Our VCR, which has them, broke down after a transformer blew out near our neighborhood, and I tried going through thrift stores to find secondhand VCRs that had them, but they're rare. Most of them only have input. I don't know if that means VCRs with both input and output were vastly outnumbered by ones with only input, or if people only ever donated VCRs with input only. I know about the daisy-chain VCR setup, but that's because (as I mentioned above) my father was a dedicated archivist of movies and TV shows he watched on TV. They were strictly for his own re-watching, but he had backups of backups of some of his favorite stuff. We have at least three tapes with one of the Star Trek films, for instance. (I think it's The Undiscovered Country.)
Maybe I had a different experience back in the 90's and early 00's, but my impression of fansub viewers was that it WAS this cool counterculture thing, where you're sticking it to the man by watching translations by non-professionals. Certainly, you couldn't ignore the hatred people had towards the likes of 4Kids, FUNimation, Nelvana, Viz, and whatever else there was at the time. (That being said, 4Kids actually initially was quite well liked for keeping all of the violence and brutality of the first season of Pokémon.) One of my classmates arrived in school in tears, and was crying all day (so much so that she was brought to a private room to be by herself, then escorted home by her parents) when she discovered Sailor Uranus and Neptune were adapted into cousins in the official dub. If you didn't know better, you'd think her parents were killed in a car crash or something. She was that much of an emotional wreck. [quote="DeTroyes"]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./quote] Maybe it was after that era, but by the time anime caught on in school for me, NO ONE bought the official stuff, either because they hated the dubbing companies, or they'd quickly move from one series to the next, and by the time something was announced for an official English-language adaptation, they'd have moved on to the next thing. I guess it WAS after that time, as by then it was the era of the torrent, and that's how they could move from one thing to the next so quickly. These people didn't really have a high opinion of those who'd stop when the legal stuff came out, since they were considered dogs of the industry. I mainly watched my anime through Toonami, so I was even lower than them. |
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mangamuscle
Posts: 2658 Location: Mexico |
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You remind me of a Bloom County strip where (as a background joke) a social worker is speaking with a corner drug dealer "So could you please tell me why you are doing this instead of flipping fries at a mcdonald all day". The guy shifts his gaze and says "I am allergic to fries" but the social worker quickly answers "Oh, we have a program for that". So the list would go, for as long as: 1) There are countries region-locked out of streams. 2) Streamers insist in hardcoding subtitles. 3) Netflix thinks everybody wants to wait for the final episode to air to binge a series. 4) Amazon insist on the strike tax (because anime fans are young therefore a source of revenue they have to exploit). 5) Streams are censored while there is an uncensored version is being broadcast at the same time. Of course, suits will bitch that all the above are not the problem and insist in building walls instead. There is the added bonus of songs getting subtitles in fansubs,but that is a personal pet peeve of mine not worth adding to the list, just the same as all those posers arguing about what translation is better or correct; real fans can tell the difference by ear, bitching about the subtitles is like a blind man kicking his dog IMO. |
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Chiibi
 Posts: 4829 |
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O_O OMG. THANKS FOR ALL YOUR HARD WORK, SIR. BIG FAN HERE. 
I loved that the tapes were purple because I could easily find them among the mess of normal black tapes we had. I still have some.
Chiibi's Fansub Tape List Ayashi No Ceres Kaitou Saint Tail Kodomo No Omocha Sailor Stars VKLL did Tail and Stars and they were THE BEST cause they actually used the original laserdisc Japanese covers for the tape cases; they looked like REAL anime tapes. :'D
Man, I TRIED but I just couldn't with that anime.
I did end up reading all the manga though. It was pretty good. |
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EricJ2
Posts: 4016 |
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It gets a little better, in that her one magical-gimmick item becomes three or four more to liven up the story, and the character was cute-- But it was just so nice and safe and bland, that once Card Captor Sakura started CLAMP-ing up the similar act, there was no comparison. Not a bad show, it just ended up being blown away by the competition.
Agreed: Honor your place in fan history. 
Nowadays, when you hear kids whine about Crunchyroll not letting them stream shows in Canada, or their favorite show on Amazon where they don't want to pay for it, it helps to teach them about the days when you couldn't count on the mainstream to translate your show at ALL, and it didn't come into your home over Wifi for "free". In the 90's, translated anime was a cause you had to fight for with all of your spare time, even if it became a sort of Sherwood Forest of noble outlaws banding together, evading the Copyright Sheriff, to steal from the rich Japanese and give to the poor Americans. And as noted, there were many subbers on the tape-trading ether, but Big Purple was the BMW of fan-VHS. |
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CatSword
 Posts: 1489 |
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Even though I'm fortunate enough to have been born/got into anime in the digital age of instant access to any anime I could ever want, something in me really desires to own some fansub tapes.
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FLCLGainax
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Back in those days, usually titles that had an LD release were easier to find good copies of. For stuff that just circulated from off-TV copies, like the Dragon Ball/Z TV series, sometimes the quality was very hit and miss. It took me a couple of years to find the original Dragon Ball TV series uncut in watchable quality. Even then, sometimes an episode would have bad video glitches recorded on the copy from a few generations earlier. I don't miss those days.
Last edited by FLCLGainax on Mon Apr 24, 2017 12:11 am; edited 1 time in total |
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zarzam
Posts: 19 |
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...and E. Monsoon. I saw an awful lot of 'them. never saw a first-gen of them however. I've always wondered who they were and how did people ordered the tapes. I never found a contact. |
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fathergoat
Posts: 90 |
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I would love to see more people with tapes digitize them for posterity. The quality may be terrible but the nostalgia would be top notch.
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Shokara
Posts: 7 |
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Funny you should mention that. I actually did this wtih some of the title sequences for the various Gundam shows. The reason I did this was because I was committed to buying the official releases from Bandai Entertainment, but most of the time back then the original Japanese text credits and title cards were replaced with English text video overlays. Also, in the case of Zeta Gundam, the original opening theme music was completely replaced with different music. So for archival purposes I would dust off my old VHS (and sometimes bootleg DVD) fansubs and make copies of the original unaltered title sequences. Often the video and sound quality were abysmal (I can't believe I got by just fine on such murky picture and sound), but at least it was preserved for myself. |
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zarzam
Posts: 19 |
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I have a few files that look like a laserdisc source to a good video capture board. They were the transition format to digisubs. |
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