neon genesis evangelion

For me it was a mix of official VHS (which was crazily expensive - $20 for two episodes on VHS was my experience) and really shitty low-quality VHS dupes. I definitely had at least half of Eva in those sweet-looking ADV VHS tapes, lined up on my shelf, next to the one great indulgence of that era for me, the complete Escaflowne ($100 at the time, now available on Amazon for $18, or $45 for the DVDs). Most of the anime I saw was fan-subbed, ranging wildly in quality from tapes packed out in EP with nth generation, washed-out dupes (but: sixteen episodes on one tape!) to really gorgeous labors of love (can still remember one fansubber by name: VKLL, who did immaculate work on key chunks of Sailor Moon continuity when they were not available in the US).

There were certain things I would buy official releases of and certain things where that was just not ever going to be realistic... DVD changed all this just as I was getting out of the hobby. Back in the 90s there were all these huge, huge shows that you just couldn't believe would ever get finished being released, and couldn't imagine anybody actually buying each and every tape of - so why even bother buying tape #1 out of 100? It's a shame because there were these shockingly dedicated, and probably insane, small American operations that were slowly, steadily putting out these expensive but wonderful tapes. AnimEigo did Urusei Yatsura with all these annotations and stuff explaining the puns and mythological references, everything. That show has 195 episodes! The watershed here was probably Dragonball Z, which had daily television building its audience, and was coming out on tape for a while but I believe switched over to DVD just before it would have gotten totally crazy.

soyokaze fansubs is the one I remember to this day. their tapes were blue!

and yeah, those animeigo inserts were special. and particularly fascinating to me for something like otaku no video, which had all these layers of references and in-jokes I couldn't possibly get otherwise.

still have regrets about not signing up for that macross box they did but I just didn't have the money then :-/

how was anyone seeing this in the 90s?

there was an anime review section in the back of this import video game magazine i read that led to me asking for (and getting) a bunch of the vhs tapes for my birthday in like '96 or '97 and i remember most my parents like complete puzzlement about any of this stuff but they also bought me a pretty sweet record of lodoss war box for the same bday

i do remember how expensive/difficult to acquire this stuff was in the 90s so i was sort of saddened to see that the entire series is (was?) available to stream on youtube three or four summers ago when i rewatched it

hey, it's a great thing that it's 100x easier to watch anime compared to when we young

i too remember the pain of buying those $30 VHS tapes. i was so happy when my local comic shop or video store picked up some rentable anime

My high school also had an anime club, where seniors could introduce sophomores (previously versed only in Akira and Sailor Moon) to the wonders of the first two episodes of any number of random shows. At at a certain point, the sophomores learned enough to no longer settle for whatever was being offered, and the club split into rival factions, which required inventing a dubious new title, the Eastern Film Appreciation Society in order to convince the school officials that this needed to be its own club. The EFAS leadership (including yours truly) also cast an open invitation to anybody who wanted to appear in an extra yearbook photo, so it (apparently) possessed close to a hundred members, versus the rump anime club's near-dozen.

Usenet was also key in getting up to speed on the shows that were out there, learning how to get fansubs, etc.

there was always something potent and fulfilling about how obscure and rare anime felt to me in the 90s. i dont wish anime was still hard to find and expensive to acquire but that was def part of the appeal of it to me as a kid, the idea that i was watching something secret and different from the stuff my friends and classmates and people at tennis camp were into, something they hadnt even heard of. its still slightly surprising to me when i talk to people who were into it at the same time i was so strongly do i associate this stuff (less eva than some of the other series i was fanatical about) with a kind of private obsession

TOTALLY, no question. It was so great to have this hobby with a world of undiscovered treasure - which also made it really satisfying to commiserate with the small number of other people who would get the jokes, be stoked about the same release news, whatever. My first couple of anime conventions, though exhausting, had a similar "wow, I'm among my people!" kinda feel that faded by the time I went to my third in 2000 or so. This is obviously independent of the quality of the shows but I do think it's significant that my interest waned as more and more shows were becoming available. Part of this was the sheer tidal wave of product though - it got really hard to tell shows apart, for me, though it's kinda obvious I probably woulda dug the big 'college hits' of the early 2000s (Trigun, Cowboy Bebop, etc.) if I'd given them the time. But I also was in college vs. high school, I wasn't in touch with any anime people there and there was other stuff going on, political clubs to join, rock bands to go see, girls to meet, etc.

the difficulty in tracking this stuff down also it also made it kinda mind blowing when you'd start seeing roujin-z or w/e on regular old tv

i do remember how expensive/difficult to acquire this stuff was in the 90s so i was sort of saddened to see that the entire series is (was?) available to stream on youtube three or four summers ago when i rewatched it

felt the same way when I typed "macross do you remember love" into youtube a while ago and there it was, the whole movie. last time I'd watched it (quite a while ago), it was on this nth generation dub of a dub. I'd found someone through a newsgroup, sent them blank tapes, endured an excruciating wait for my stuff to arrive. later on I'd get burned by the same person in another trade and that part sucked hard... but everything else about these weird fan systems made watching this stuff super exciting back then.

According to a document from March of 1998, inevitably titled "Anime Instrumentality Project.doc," my collection included a handful of very motley commercially-available stuff: first OAV of Oh! My Goddess, Macross Plus, the "Dragon Ball: Curse of the Blood something" movie, Eva episodes 13-20, the first Project A-Ko movie (saw this on the street the other day for a buck and was really tempted).

Everything else was fansubs or other bootlegs, but similarly miscellaneous - Battle Angel 1-2, Blue Seed 1-4, Dirty Pair 1-4, Fushigi Yuugi 1-8, Here Is Greenwood 1-4, Irresponsible Captain Tylor 1-4, Kiki and Laputa, Rayearth 1-8 (came out as a dub a year later and I think the fansubs dried up), Marmalade Boy 1-8, Kodomo no Omocha 1-12, Kimagure Orange Road 1-12, Ranma 1-3, Lodoss War 1-13 (all on one tape!) and a ton of Sailor Moon (three movies, one of which I'm not sure I ever watched, nice VKLL subs of 1-15, plus the 'lost episodes' rounding out Sailor Moon R, back when the dub didn't go that far), all of The Mysterious Cities of Gold on ten tapes, Urusei Yatsura 1-16 and movies 1 and 2.... down to a few I have no memory of whatsoever, "Fairy Princess Ren 1," "The Samurai 1."

Man, what a mess. You can see one big problem with the fansub/tape-trading system: it was pretty easy to 'sample' the beginnings of lots of shows for basically the price of a blank tape plus shipping. But lots of things would get started by some fansubber and not continued - or more likely, I would sample them and like them enough to go a certain distance but not farther, or I'd get distracted by the prospect of some other new show. I might be jumbling this up but I think it was customary to order a max of three tapes at one time, so you would have to choose: one more four-episode block of a show I'm halfway following, or TWELVE episodes in a row of something else? I suspect social factors were also at work... it wasn't as fun to be into a show the three other anime fans at school weren't hooked on and didn't want to borrow!

But since we were teenagers with limited income, the real kiss of death was always a show getting picked up for a real release, ironic because the translation, packaging, and especially video/audio quality would be immeasurably better. But Rayearth, lavish though it was, just was not a compelling enough show on an episode-by-episode basis to justify shelling out for it. In the couple years following that list I know I committed a bit more to certain shows - I bought all of that first run of Utena episodes (thirteen episodes, four VHS tapes) and then the release stalled out for years for some reason.

For Eva, 1-12 and 17-24 were each jam-packed on single tapes in super low quality. I didn't see 25-26 until a couple years later I think! My friend had a shot-in-the-theater bootleg of the movie on Video CD, but I see I mentioned that upthread...

Sorry for the super nerdy posts btw, this is just bringing back lots of memories. I actually ran a big Evangelion fanfic site for a while; it was gutted when my dad discovered all the "lemon" fics, and I think I lost some ground to bigger, slicker sites. Still, I got a lot of mail when I closed it in a huff in May of '99, and again when I tentatively reopened a year later, the summer before college (though I never actually updated the thing again).

in the long gap between end of evangelion's japanese release and its american release i got my dad to take me to see it at a japanese cafe/gift shop where i had discovered it was going to be playing. turned out it wasn't even fansubbed—just the unsubbed version playing on a small tv mounted near the ceiling. i made my dad sit through the whole thing with me.

hahahaha awesome

Reminds me of one time my dad tried to watch some anime with me, to keep current with my interests. I had just bought a new Eva tape, and it turned out to be the one where they're all naked for no reason. It was a bit awkward but I think he was more confused and bored than disapproving.

it was p easy to get anime and manga stuff in austin (although i didn't become seriously interested in it until around 1997). for a long time there was a dedicated anime and manga store called animagix where you could buy models, posters, OSTs, videos, etc and they also rented out fansubs (i didn't realize at the time that this was shitty). i also used to go to the university of texas anime club screenings, which were open to the public. my japanese teacher would also show us fansubs in class and sometimes just straight-up tapes of japanese tv that his family had sent him.

reading manga back then was weirder and more difficult, though—i would buy stuff in japanese off the internet (where? i can't even remember) then read along with a fan translation that was just a plain text file

Sorry for the super nerdy posts btw, this is just bringing back lots of memories.

no keep it up, i find this sort of stuff really interesting! i wasn't watching any anime at the time so like reading about the early days of western fandom.

yeah, loving it too

Anime Instrumentality Project.doc

haven't changed my DN in years but I am v tempted right now...

hahaha

Thing was, I was already conscious of being a very late wave of fandom! It felt like the golden age had arrived in terms of stuff being available, when you compared to old-timers who went back to the 70s or early 80s, the people who were now running the cons (and in some cases the official release companies). Also, since the clandestine difficulties of tape trading were part of the appeal, they weren't really obstacles as such.

yeah, it reminds me of when metal guys talk about tape trading in the 80s/early 90s. but even nerdier.

and love that story, 1staethyr. I was soooooo excited for end of eva man. for a lot of reasons, really, but the main one was prob bc the poster for it was so badass that I could barely stand it

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/9e/Eoeposter.JPG

sadly, it all came down to nothing
it just kept letting me down, letting me down, letting me down

hahaha

and that reminds me, I really tried to make myself like the eva osts, but man, the music is p much the one thing about this series I still can't get with

except "cruel angel's thesis" of course

lol. i still know all the lyrics to cruel angel's thesis and have had the occasional singalong when hanging out with my best friend from the 7th grade

i also used to go to the university of texas anime club screenings, which were open to the public

One of my biggest sources of anime in college (~2000) was the private FTP server of someone who either ran the University of Texas Anime Club or provided the anime (I didn't go to the school). God bless her

in the long gap between end of evangelion's japanese release and its american release i got my dad to take me to see it at a japanese cafe/gift shop where i had discovered it was going to be playing. turned out it wasn't even fansubbed—just the unsubbed version playing on a small tv mounted near the ceiling. i made my dad sit through the whole thing with me.

this is incredible

ha, that End of Eva poster, so fucking metal!!! still love the vibe of the show's promos, fonts, title cards, etc.

Anime Instrumentality Project.doc

the music is p much the one thing about this series I still can't get with

i actually get really excited whenever the one battle theme with the tympanis starts up, like something badass is about to happen!

http://i.imgur.com/UQL9jIb.png

Is this canon

Lollll Gendou

hahaha so wrong!!!

i can't accept as canon a stubble-free kaji. everything else abt this is fine tho

just watched "end of evangelion" — has there ever been such a despairing end to a series?

also wish i could get "komm susser töd" out of my head.

i know i've let you down
i've been a fool to myself

crossover

http://ih0.redbubble.net/image.13794286.2799/fig,white,mens,ffffff.u2.jpg

i mustn't run away 94
fig leaves have no place on a pizza 76

i bought a shirt

http://www.redbubble.com/people/ayarti/works/11820802-ramiel?p=t-shirt&ref=shop_grid

nicely obscure

that's the idea

also ramiel is the coolest angel fuiud

That's a pretty cool pokeball

i played that for the first time last winter, fun game

"how disgusting."

http://i.imgur.com/xRwi14C.jpg

rad

http://i.imgur.com/GmUXGKO.jpg

me irl

Bluray box set of TV show & original films coming to Japan in summer 2015. gonna be expensive!
http://www.evangelion.co.jp/ng.html

snap i just tried to start watching this show again today. 1-3 eps in and i might be ready to take the plunge. (it takes me forever with anime series to get into a groove but i have heard lots of recs for this recently.) might help to have access to bluray quality.