Forum - View topicAnswerman - What Were VHS Fansubs Like?
|
Goto page Previous 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 Next Note: this is the discussion thread for this article |
| Author | Message | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Heishi
 Posts: 1319 |
|
|||||||
|
I do wonder how difficult was it to find anime in the early to mid 90's?
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
leafy sea dragon
 Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
|
|||||||
If you mean official English-language releases, it varied heavily on the series. Something like Sailor Moon or Dragon Ball Z you could find anywhere (though DBZ didn't get really big until later). Video stores like Suncoast and Sam Goody, as well as music stores like Wherehouse and Virgin, had big home video sections too, and all of them had an anime section where you could find obscure OVAs and whatever else the licensors could scrounge up, but they tended to be very expensive, comparable to the Japanese prices, so sales remained low and it was strictly for those who wanted their anime but didn't want to wait for their fansub tapes to come in (or were morally opposed to fansubs). Occasionally, something would show on TV though, mostly on the Sci-Fi Channel. Not too often, but my father knew exactly when to tune in. If you mean the fansubs themselves, I don't know quite as much on that front, as I didn't really get into anime until the late 90's, and by then, they were going digital. (My father tended towards horror and gore, which really scared me when I was little.) |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
HeeroTX
Posts: 2046 Location: Austin, TX |
|
|||||||
EARLY 90s (and before obviously), it was pretty rough. It was ALL about "who you knew" and fan networking. The internet was not ubiquitous and basically the vast majority of any stateside material was in clubs so you'd borrow tapes from clubs and/or watch shows at meetings. The first few anime cons started in the early 90s and were basically pooling the resources of many clubs/fan-groups into a single event. Mid-90s is when the distribution services mentioned really came to the fore and the plus side was that the weird "anime fan monarchies" started to die. When the few gate-keepers no longer had control, then you saw anime spread much stronger. I think this was still "sustainable" for the fan community when it was tapes because of the combination of degrading material and the amount of effort required to get material. (even considering that it was "more accessible" through distribution services) Up through maybe the VERY early 00s, this was the "golden age" for fandom/fansubs. Reason being that US anime companies were still new and somewhat limited and until internet distribution REALLY took off (needed broadband) in the new millenium anime availability was still "limited" but not "gated". Convention video rooms were a CORE piece of programming because they held a LOT of material that you had probably never seen before and clubs were still viable for the same reason. I think broadband was basically the death knell for all that, since now anyone could grab anything, anytime. Anime went from something you got together to watch as a community to something you watched in private but then talked about with other people later. It's why unless there's a World Premiere or some other "special event", convention video rooms are practically empty and often being considered for removal entirely, and clubs are generally obsolete. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
|
|||||||
Basically--like the early-early days of DVD, back when nobody owned a player--if there was a tape of something, you watched it, raw or subbed. It was hard enough to stumble across anything you did know, and there was enough you didn't, and the same subtitle master was floating across the fan ether like Gutenberg bibles. In the early '90-'94, back when mainstream people giggled and scratched their heads at what the Power Rangers or Sailor Moon their kids watched was supposed to be, much of the mainstream literally didn't know Japan made their own anime, and if you mentioned it, they were guaranteed to reply, "Ohh, I remember Speed Racer!" To say "We were on our own" is putting it MILDLY. 
And being on our own was the whole thrill of it, that made it such an "underground"--Your local non-chain rental might be the coolest place in the world if it suddenly started picking up a few mid-volume copies of Escaflowne or Saber Marionette J, and you watched those because it was the only commercial thing you could find while waiting for your secret Purple Tapes to arrive, unless you were one of those kids thinking Ninja Scroll was a "classic" because Blockbuster stocked it. (And how about if you lived within commuter distance of NY, LA or Harvard Square, and were grateful there was an Anime Crash to rent anything from? "When I was your age, junior, I had to travel FIFTY MILES to get my anime!" and I did.) Once the big ADV's and Pioneers started going commercial, Suncoast became the go-to store and Cowboy Bebop showed up on Cartoon Network, we felt we'd "arrived", and there was less need to go out and do underground work for a secret hit, unless it was a new breakout addiction that needed grass-roots fan exposure, like Card Captor Sakura--The Kemono Friends of its day. 
We gained a lot of technical polish and exposure, and we lost a little thrill, but we also lost the problems that went with the thrill, like Nth-generation static or the "forbidden" window-on-the-world aspect of seeing a Japan-taped copy of a show with network ID's and crazy commercials. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
zarzam
Posts: 19 |
|
|||||||
Pretty hard. A lot of asian grocery stores in places with a significant asian population had tapes for rental of japanese soaps (mostly recorded broadcasts), and you could find some anime in there. The anime clubs in colleges were THE place to go. Some had contacts in Japan and would exchange anime tapes for western movies and shows. I also saw some bootleg tapes and CD's from places like Hong Kong and Indonesia on sale in LA and San Francisco. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
Spawn29
Posts: 551 |
|
|||||||
You had collector shops and local video stores that had anime. CPM, Manga Entertainment, ADV, Pioneer, Streamline and many others release the current hot anime back then too. You had to pay $25-40 for a two episode VHS tape (maybe three if you are lucky), but it was still worth it. For fan subs, any fee market or comic book shops had them. You had to know the right place to get them. Fansubs weren't THAT hard to find. Harder than today sure, but far from anything close to ridiculously impossible or whatnot. It wasn't like trying to track down the Ark of the Covenant (You don't have to be alive during that era to know that). The oldest VHS fan subbed record is from 1985 with Lupin the Third and the last VHS fan subbed anime I remember was Chobits in 2002. So VHS fan subs had a nice 17 year run before the Internet and DVD fully killed it. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
mbanu
 Posts: 159 |
|
|||||||
|
One thing that's fascinating to me is how the relationship between fansubs and bootlegs has changed over time. When I first came into anime, there was a distinct ideological divide between fansubbers distributing a show for free on a temporary basis to raise awareness for a legal release (and maybe give a chance to poor fans to do something useful in a hobby that normally cost a dollar a minute by letting them volunteer their time and labor to make, distribute, and promote these things), and the comic book shop owners who sold physical copies of digital fansubs and pirated Hong Kong DVDs.
Illegal streamers don't seem to make a distinction between whether something is already available in English or not, and it seems like a lot of newer fans will refer to everything on those sites as "fansubs". Maybe this was more of a "what people said" rather than "what they did" though... did people really make a distinction between the two back in the VHS era, or were they more, "If it's anime, I don't care where it's from"? |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
|
|||||||
Do you know when it became blurred? By the time I got into anime (I think around 1996 to 1998), most of the people I knew who was into anime saw fansubbers and the official companies as competition, and if any fansubbing group stopped translating something because the official release came out, they'd just look for another fansubbing group that didn't. Those ones that didn't tended to have an "F you, I can do whatever I want; try to stop us" attitude. There was a stick-it-to-the-man mindset that I think still deeply permeates English-speaking anime fandoms to this day. I don't think anyone ever actually BOUGHT VHS tapes though--they had tapes, but they were copied secondhand, thirdhand, fourthhand, or even further than that. I take it someone I didn't know bought one, and it was then distributed and spread among each other. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
Alan45
 Village Elder Posts: 9839 Location: Virginia |
|
|||||||
|
@leafy sea dragon
By mid 1997 when I got into anime it was perfectly possible to enjoy anime as a hobby without ever seeing a fansub or a boot leg. Granted you had to wait a year or two before something made it from Japanese TV to US VHS but there was enough legal stuff already available to keep you occupied. The slide from committed enthusiast to entitled whiner probably didn't have a specific tipping point, it was likely just like any other slippery slope. You don't notice how far you have gone until you look back. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
|
|||||||
Good point. By the time I got in, I'm certain it was already pretty far down. My high school's anime club's president was the sort to use anime as a status of prestige (such as his refusal to call the Pokémon TV show an anime because it was aimed at kids and he didn't like it), and you have to be pretty deep in to do that. (We all got a good laugh when he screened Brain Powerd though.) Being on the side of the fansubbers must've been a lot easier when it was on the committed enthusiast side, an era I was never really a part of. I was the only person I knew at school who actually bought the official US home video, by the way. I was part of that Goldilocks zone in the range of casual to hardcore. The people I knew who were more casual than me got their anime strictly through nationwide TV, like Toonami and Kids' WB!, and the people more hardcore than me were militant about their refusal to support any US localization companies. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
EricJ2
Posts: 4016 |
|
|||||||
Back during the Underground days, there were no US anime studios worrying about "competition"--What few anime companies like Streamline, AnimEigo and US Renditions were offering in '88-'92, you didn't want, and if they did offer it, you were glad to have that instead...Translated was always better than raw-with-synopses, especially static-free. Club fans and fansubbers would try to "get the word out" on a hit fan-breakout show, but once ADV would actually release a surprise fan-favorite out of the blue like Dragon Half, Viz's Video Girl Ai, Pioneer(?)'s Record of Lodoss Wars, or CPM's Dominion or Beautiful Dreamer, whoa, THAT was surprising!--Okay, guys, take five, our work is done! 
It's only when we had the rise of entrepreneurs like ADV, CPM and Viz's first Ranma 1/2 dubs on sale at Suncoast/Media Play that we had the moral division of people who just wanted to watch things you couldn't see anywhere else and were wiling to share them pro bono, and the cheap image of fans coming up with corporate-paranoid reasons to "stick it" to the "overpriced" companies when they just couldn't afford a dollar a minute, and told themselves they were doing the fandom a service by showing those greedy fatcats a thing or three. The latter got much of the demonized press, and when Hollywood movie studios started grabbing the new 90's-Internet buzzword and blamed "pirates" for why their movies didn't sell enough, anime companies jumped on the scapegoat too. The early-00's pre-Bubble "gray-market" digisubbers, who followed their own more honorable code, would remove their subs once a title was licensed--after all, if it was, who wanted cheap homemade translations anyway, when you could probably get a nice dub too?--and the cheap bootleg fans started getting into "Digisub does it better, their titles aren't yellow and they karaoke song lyrics!" whines as an excuse not to support the commercial industry.
VHS tapes in Japan were insanely expensive: Japan's corporate meddling made sure that its domestic VHS trade was for the big storefront-rental business only, which was big, but there were very few mass-market $29.95 copies of Disney hits to take home, as we eventually got--Almost all of Japanese VHS was industry "rental priced", ie. $95-100, while laser was overlooked and still sold at popular prices, which is the reason that Laserdisc and Pioneer laser players continued to be a big seller in Japanese households, all the way up to the '99-'00 birth of DVD. (Qv. the problems with Disney's Princess Mononoke DVD, when Japan didn't see any reason to adopt DVD yet, and didn't want reverse importation.) The other advantage was that Japanese LD was in the same region and could play on North American players, the small niche of "forgotten" US 80's-90's laser fans bought pretty much all their disks on import, the laser-underground niche and anime-underground niche started making converts of each other, and if you had a "Video room" showing anime at a gaming or fan con, it was probably from your friendly neighborhood anime-hooked laser collector. The other advantage to laser fans becoming anime-underground fans was that laserdisc couldn't use Macrovision copy-protection, and could be VHS-copied more readily. Before DVD, if you wanted a nice, clean, pristine source from which to bootleg a hit movie, OVA or anime-episode collection, laser couldn't give you a better one, but if you wanted the genuine article on imported VHS, you had to pay what the home country was charging...Most didn't. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
Redbeard 101
Oscar the Grouch
Forums Superstar  Posts: 16935 |
|
|||||||
I guess I'm nobody then cause I bought plenty of vhs tapes. Hell those early DBZ tapes came in a nice box and when the spines lined up made a nice scene from the show. I bought a lot of early big series on vhs. Which is why I never bothered to upgrade them to dvd and my patience payed off for most with BR releases. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
mangamuscle
Posts: 2658 Location: Mexico |
|
|||||||
Albeit I never was part of the equation (at least I do not remember any profesionnal releases of anime in VHS dubbed or translated to spanish for sale*, if there were any in Spain those were not compatible with our TV sets). I think this was the moment of the schism for clear reasons. For most media people get to see it for free (with commercials) on TV, pay for access to cable channels or for a ticket/rent to see a movie. All of the relatively easy to jump hurdles. In japan it was no different back then (Ranma 1/2 was shown in daytime tv, OVAs might be shown on tv or rented at a video club and anime movies where shown right next to american or local live action flicks). But suddenly people that were interested into seeing anime had to buy them (at pretty high prices) if they wanted to see them. It would take years for local video clubs to stock on anime, same for cable cable/cinema. So either you were hard core (I can't call anyone paying those prices just to see a one or two episodes anything else) or you were casual (or poor enough) to be interested in seeing it but not into buying tapes. For better or worse that business model crashed (was it in 2008?) and IMO what we have know is more stable, people wanting to see it can stream it (most of the time) and most series get a disc release at pretty standard prices (for the USA market). There still is the unsolved deal of some unaired episodes, OVAs and movies not being streamed at all, but I call that "room for improvement". * OK, there were rare exceptions like the cut version of nausicaa (Warriors of the Wind) and the Kamui TV series which I rented asap at a local video club back then. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
leafy sea dragon
Posts: 7163 Location: Another Kingdom |
|
|||||||
I should've been more specific--nobody I knew bought the tapes. Everyone I knew who had anime tapes had copied it from someone else they knew. As in they were fansub tapes someone got, then other people copied it, then other people copied the copies, and so forth. The result was that at my middle school and high school, you could have anime fans in the tape fansub system where they could voraciously consume series after series. It followed trends of particular shows being popular for a week, which would be duplicated among everyone at the local level, then everyone dropped it like a hot potato and moved to the next one. It was annoying, also, in that you couldn't talk about a series they consumed in the past, because it was so last week. To do so would instantly label you as an outsider. (It didn't follow any chronological order of original release, just what people could get their hands on that hadn't been seen before.)
Ah, so that came about later. I can definitely see why there'd be such a strong fansub, well, fanbase with that kind of background then, and I guess by the time I got in, a lot of people had kind of lost their way.
I should point out I was actually referring to the fansub tapes mentioned in the article where people would mail cash and a blank tape over, or a higher amount without the tape, and they'd send the copy back to you by mail. I actually didn't know that was a thing until long after fansubbers stopped doing it. Somehow, people I knew in school who had fansub tapes just managed to find someone else they could copy it from. Whoever the original source was, I never figured out. I was one of those aforementioned outsiders, so of course they wouldn't tell me. |
||||||||
|
||||||||
Chiibi
 Posts: 4829 |
|
|||||||
Same; I had quite a lot! Though when I switched to DVD, I got rid of most of them. Kept a few because nostalgia. 
Viz loved to rape you with $30 per tape with THREE episodes and Pioneer wasn't much better. ADV actually made theirs affordable at $15 a tape with more episodes, dubbed. The original subbed version was more expensive for some reason. o_O |
||||||||
|
||||||||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group