Forum - View topicHow To Spot An Anime Bootleg
|
Goto page 1, 2 Next Note: this is the discussion thread for this article |
| Author | Message | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
mdo7
 Posts: 8229 Location: Katy, Texas, USA |
|
|||||
|
I have never spotted or encountered a bootleg anime during my 20+ year tenure as part of the fandom. So thank goodness, but I welcome this guide on how to spot a bootleg anime.
|
||||||
|
||||||
Zendervai
 Posts: 263 |
|
|||||
|
I’ve run into this once, when I was trying to figure out if I could get a copy of Steam Detectives, I found what was very obviously a bootleg (didn’t buy it).
There’s also a crazy proliferation of bootlegs of western animated stuff, because the trend has generally been that home video releases are rare. That being said, you do run into the occasional legitimate company that kinda looks like they’re bootlegs because they do something unusual. There’s an Australian company called Via Vision that’s like that? Their stuff is all region free even if it’s marked as being region 4, they get a lot of stuff no one else has the licenses to and they’re really casual about global shipping. But they’re fully legitimate, they just mostly get away with it because Australia’s considered a pretty unimportant market so the big companies don’t pay that much attention to them. Note, though, that they don’t really license anime at all, probably because anime companies tend to be a lot stricter and pickier about releases. But the bootleg problem overlaps with the piracy problem. Hey, you want to watch Infinity Train? Well, you can find legit DVDs of the first two seasons but if you want to watch anything past that, there are no legal options at all and a lot of companies right now really don’t want to seem to acknowledge the implications of that. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
loveliver
Posts: 210 |
|
|||||
|
There are still game shops around that sell anime, even if they initially got it through suspicious means. My local game shop is still selling bootleg DVDs of Love Live! and Kamisama Kiss at a rather expensive price for a bootleg.
Plus, I've seen some people on r/animecollectors that have bootleg DVDs in their collections and say they were gifted to them by loved ones and can't just simply throw it away. I don't mind you keeping it for that reason, but you can tell the one who gifted it to you about this article here and you like your anime to look pretty. 
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
Lord Geo
Posts: 2999 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
|
|||||
|
The bit about how Fullmetal Alchemist 2003 has been long out-of-print & Brotherhood is notoriously bootlegged due to the official release being extremely expensive is hilarious to read about in hindsight, since back in 2016 Anime Herald managed to interview Hideki "Henry" Goto, former Geneon USA head honcho who later moved to Aniplex of America (who only left Sony entirely this past March, apparently)... and what did Goto have to say about FMA? Well, here are some choice quotes from the article:
Well, today FMA 2003 isn't just out of print physically but it's not even streaming anywhere in English (the TV series, at least, because the movie sequel actually is streaming, despite requiring one to watch the show first), & while Brotherhood is streaming there's no way for anyone to get it for a reasonable price unless they buy a bootleg of it. So, despite everything Goto said in the interview, Aniplex has indeed turned its "greatest success" & "most important shows" into something that people can't watch 26 times, made it so utterly unreasonable to purchase that it might as well be devalued, and is arguably now known more as a bootleg purchase than an Aniplex property, let alone a FUNimation product. Great job, Henry Goto! You sure showed us anime fans!! |
||||||
|
||||||
Greed1914
 Posts: 5358 |
|
|||||
Yeah, it's the same problem as the article gives with OOP anime. Initially, streaming was touted as a way to watch what you wanted, when you wanted, without needing those discs. But that was all based on the assumption that entertainment companies would want to maintain it. When word got around that Aniplex wasn't going to renew various licenses, I bought the limited edition FMA 03 blu ray since it is my favorite, and I expected that whatever AoA did with it would be expensive for not as much. I didn't expect that Aniplex would decide to essentially hide everything away that wasn't Brotherhood. Declining to license those series, and then doing little-to-nothing with them, served no function. As we've seen with how Warner's content was handled after Discovery took over, even a company's own shows are not safe from going poof. Bootlegs are not good, but the current state is an example of how not meeting customer demand results in them going elsewhere. If the show never saw a physical release, and was pulled from streaming, it's hard to blame someone for finding alternatives. The options of either exorbitantly priced second-hand copies or bootlegs is indicative of a market that is not being fed because companies determined that "nobody wants old thing." It makes me miss things like how Funimation would do an initial home video release, and then those Anime Classics or SAVE versions (sometimes both). Early buyers got the nicer versions and more price conscious customers got something affordable. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Zendervai
Posts: 263 |
|
|||||
I'm a pretty notorious collector of physical media and I don't have a single Aniplex release in my collection. I even have a couple of the overpriced NISA releases and I have the recent Macross Plus release but Aniplex's pricing was so bad that I never really managed to work up the money for any of them, especially because they tended to let a lot of them go out of print way too quickly. Some of them being extremely limited (to the point of directly stating how many copies there were) would make a specific amount of profit, yeah, but it also limits how many people can actually see a thing. And there was also stuff like how it took them forever to actually stream some of their licenses, most notoriously Garden of Sinners. |
||||||
|
||||||
Vanadise
 Posts: 599 |
|
|||||
|
I'm a little surprised this article didn't mention the #1 method I've always relied on to identify bootleg merch, which is to look for copyright & trademark notices on the packaging. Officially releases will always have copyright and trademark notices on them, and bootlegs almost always do not. There are a few bootlegs that will go so far as to copy those notices, but the ones who are willing to do that are usually so close to the originals that you won't be able to tell them apart unless you're comparing them side-by-side.
That can admittedly be harder to do if you're buying things online, but it's the first thing to check if you're shopping in a store or at a convention. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
TJ_Kat
Posts: 883 Location: Saskatoon, Canada |
|
|||||
|
What further exacerbates the issue is that even if you find a product with the full checklist of red flags, it might still actually be legit.
The one that come to mind was when I was trying to track down a DVD copy of Interstella 5555 (before the blu-ray announcement) there were A LOT of really cheap all-region copies (in addition to the really expensive region 1s). It seemed unusual for there to be so many listings pretty much everywhere. It also seemed unusual that they almost all seemed to be shipping from South America. With a bit of research, I discovered that a distributor in Argentina (who produced an all-region release) massively, MASSIVELY over-printed the discs and just want to get something for them. As a result, legit cheap all-region discs. But it probably took me a hour to find all of that out, and even then it was still a roll of the dice and I wouldn't find out if my gamble paid off until it showed up. (for the record, it is legit. Or if not, it's a really good counterfeit) |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Lord Geo
Posts: 2999 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
|
|||||
Probably the weirdest one I've ever seen was Discotek's DVD release of Message from Space. No, not Discotek's 2019 SD-BD release of Message from Space: Galactic Wars, the TV series spin-off, I'm talking about a DVD release of the original film from back in 2010. It was never announced by Discotek itself, but was a dual-audio anamorphic widescreen DVD with both English & Chinese subs, was an "All Region" disc, and credited production to "Eastern Star HK", with Eastern Star being Discotek's label for anime releases (though I believe Discotek has stopped using that label for a few years now). People started seeing this release for sale online, and even at Discotek's booth at anime cons, and naturally the entire thing looked extremely shady, as it featured all of the telltale signs of being a bootleg. It got to the point where the MediaOCD guys, who had no idea of this DVD themselves, went as far as asking "Mr. Discotek" himself about it. All they got back from the boss was that it was indeed a legit release, but apparently no explanation as to what "Eastern Star HK" was, why it was never released as a traditional Discotek Media DVD over here, & why it looked so much like a bootleg, especially the inclusion of Chinese subs (which Discotek has otherwise never included in any of its other releases). Shout! Factory would later release its own DVD for Message from Space in 2013, too, which just makes the Discotek/"Eastern Star HK" release all the more bizarre. |
||||||
|
||||||
Primus
 Posts: 2909 Location: Toronto |
|
|||||
A lot of modern bootlegs are clones of official releases. They'll scan the packaging, disc art and sometimes even burn proper ISO files to the discs. |
||||||
|
||||||
Takkun4343
 Posts: 1751 Location: Englewood, Ohio |
|
|||||
|
I own a bootleg "complete series" copy of The Big O that was one of the first home video releases I was gifted in my adolescence, and apart from the missing FBI warning and Japanese being the default language, there wasn't anything too iffy about it in practice. Whoever distributed it didn't completely half-ass it; the discs even had the Bandai Entertainment trailers and everything!
Another case of my getting gifted bootlegs was the one year where one uncle each from either side of my family gifted me Cowboy Bebop: The Movie for the same holiday: one was the official Sony release, the other was a bootleg that looked even more half-assed on the cover than the Big O bootleg! I kept the former and let the latter get sent to languish in a Goodwill somewhere. |
||||||
|
||||||
wmderemer
 It...it's not like I post for you or anything! Posts: 326 Location: Stroudsburg, PA |
|
|||||
|
My local 2nd & Charles could use this article's info as I have found a few bootlegs on their shelves that people brought in and they are reselling (after giving the customer, I am sure, the bare minimum cash/store credit for it)
Don't get me wrong, I like shopping at 2nd&C and have gotten some REALLY good deals on used Blu-rays, used CDs and used manga, but it irks me seeing the OBVIOUS bootlegs on their shelves... |
||||||
|
||||||
Triltaison
 Posts: 943 |
|
|||||
|
Something I've found pretty amusing in recent years is that some bootlegs have become rare and in demand themselves because the real product is long out of print and modern bootlegs ALSO don't exist either. Seeing $80+ counterfeit copies of stuff like Katanagatari and Paradise Kiss pop up in second hand stories and end up being purchased shortly afterward boggles my mind.
I still have a handful of bootlegs hanging around from the early '00s from before I knew how to tell the difference. Some of them had hilarious typos and mistakes in their Hong Kong translations. My copy of Ayashi no Ceres translated everyone's names so I honestly had no idea what anyone's name was for like a year. I knew it as the adventures of Little Fairy and Ten Nights, as they escaped from the Royal Shadow family and met friends like Thousand Cranes until Viz licensed the manga and set me straight. All of my shameful bootlegs have now been replaced with legitimate products in the years since, except for the DiC Sailor Moon dub. I'd love to get a real copy of that one, but that dub is probably never going to get another physical release ever and the old release is like 20 years old now. Still have a couple of beloved old fansubs on VHS, too. All of them have also been upgraded to authentic copies as well, but I hate to throw out such precious artifacts of old fandom. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
AsleepBySunset
Posts: 315 |
|
|||||
|
I'm fairly certain my copy of Serial Experiments Lane is a bootleg because it was packaged with a double thick dvd case (as in the size of two regular dvd cases)
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
BigOnAnime
Encyclopedia Editor
 Posts: 1302 Location: Minnesota, USA |
|
|||||
|
Been buying anime on home video since 2010 (my collection; alternate views), never have gotten a bootleg. Some tips I can leave...
On regions, it should be noted that lots of Central Park Media releases were Region 0 DVDs. Their stuff was released under multiple labels: Anime 18 (hentai), Asia Pulp Cinema, Central Park Media (a few were released under CPM's actual name), Software Sculptors, U.S. Manga Corps The same goes for many hentai releases by NuTech Digital, many of their releases (not all) are also Region 0 DVDs. As for bootlegs that look like official releases, that's been a problem for more than a decade. https://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=895695 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QaEWOC1sBe0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9MMGvza79U https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=262667 https://web.archive.org/web/20141028230322/http://imgur.com/a/vUa04 animenewsnetwork.com/news/2013-11-21/discotek-media-warns-of-samurai-pizza-cats-bootlegs With that MAL post about Bandai Entertainment bootlegs, it should be noted most BEI releases came in black cases. Early on many used clear cases which was usually because there was interior artwork (Ex: Love Hina singles), but most were black, and they never once used a VIVA (4-arrow hub) DVD case. Most BEI bootlegs I've seen use clear VIVA DVD cases. Sometimes reprints came in clear cases. My copy of the Super Legends release of The Vision of Escaflowne came in a clear Scanavo case when earlier prints came in black cases. I bought it from Right Stuf in late 2012 so I know it's 100% legitimate. With FUNimation releases, they almost never put the shrinkwrap over the slipcover. Most of their Blu-ray releases came in VIVA Elite cases, Vortex cases, or the very dark blue cases with the 5-arrow hubs (don't know their name). Also, the cutout on the slipcover for the UPC on the back is never square, it's always rounded. Later on they made the cutout longer for some reason, but it remains rounded on the corners, this continues under the Crunchyroll rebrand (Ex: Date A Live V). There is only one release I know of that goes against this, for some reason Zombie Land Saga: Revenge has a square UPC cutout for the slipcover on the final product (the mockups online are wrong), it matches what Shout! Studios (formerly Shout! Factory) does, it's right at the very end of the corner and is more likely to be able to be ripped into the spine (Ex: A Silent Voice (see slipback image)). I bought it from Right Stuf in January 2023 so I know it's 100% legitimate. What remains a very telltale sign for Blu-rays is BD-R. To my knowledge, even as the format has turned 19 years old, not a single Blu-ray bootleg anywhere has used a pressed disc. It should be noted there are official releases that use BD-Rs, all Ascendent Animation Blu-rays currently use those, so for those things are trickier. Nearly all DVD bootlegs unfortunately use pressed discs, so things aren't as easy there. Speaking of which, keep in mind that later reprints of many Media Blasters releases used DVD-R discs. animenewsnetwork.com/answerman/2015-07-10/.90197 (First question) animenewsnetwork.com/news/2020-11-12/media-blasters-discontinues-dvd-on-demand-system-starting-in-2021/.166257 As for OOP stuff, one should keep in mind sometimes you can find stuff OOP in the US for cheaper in other regions. Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood is still in-print on Blu-ray in the UK and can be imported for less. It's Region B locked, but I would recommend getting a region-free Blu-ray player anyway for this reason, as well as exclusive titles. https://www.anime-on-line.com/Fullmetal-Alchemist/28363-fullmetal-alchemist-brotherhood-collection-15-blu-ray-5022366807340.html If you're having difficulty getting Mobile Suit Gundam titles on Blu-ray, the UK releases are still a viable option. https://www.anime-on-line.com/2784-Mobile-Suit-Gundam https://www.alltheanime.com/search?q=Gundam&options%5Bprefix%5D=last Some good resources for finding info about Australian and United Kingdom anime releases is Blu-ray.com (the flag icon at the top is the region switcher), and aniSearch. The ANN encyclopedia is also good, though it's missing lots of those releases. animenewsnetwork.com/encyclopedia/releases.php?format=video I have been actively trying to adding missing AU and UK releases to here and Blu-ray.com (DVDs is mainly what they're missing for AU and UK releases). The encyclopedia should now be mostly complete for US DVD and Blu-ray releases. You'd be a bit surprised at what was missing for a long time (Ex: Patlabor 2 Manga US DVD, released in 2000, added by me in 2021).
https://879ed873-madman-com-au.akamaized.net/images/slicks/very-large/mmb006.png |
||||||
|
||||||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group