How hard was it to acquire good anime in the early 90s? (or pre-internet torrents I guess)

How hard was it to acquire good anime in the early 90s? (or pre-internet torrents I guess)

t. babby

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there was a video game store in my town that got a small corner with animu. akira. legend of the overfiend. ghost in the shell. la blue girl.

dragon ball z was imported from a friend from spain in black and white VHS. dubbed in spanish. but i enjoyed the action anyway.

I do remember going in to blockbuster and they had Akira and a few other titles.

I watched evangelion on a 700 mb CD, it had all the episodes inside of it in real player format and every episode was like 25 mb each, they looked like thumbnails

Very. All that was available were a handful of Streamline English dub VHS tapes at the sketchy local video store.

VHS and backstreet shops here in the UK

VHS rental.

That's how my dad got hooked with DBZ, city hunters and golgo 13

>got hooked with golgo 13
But the show is more recent than that.
How do you get "hooked on" a couple of movies?

He's saying that his dad got hooked on anime because he watched those movies.

Depends in what country you lived in.

>not raiding the local anime subbing cartel with your operator buddies for a bootleg vhs of Record of the Lodoss War translated from Chinese

Do your dad still watches anime?

OVAs were easiest to get ahold of, hench the popularity and success of those mediums. I actually ended up watching the cowboy bebop movie before I saw anything to do with the main franchise. Then, if you go back further you have stuff like Akira and GitS.

DvD Rentals mostly. We also had a Game X-Change that is filled with rows of anime, and still is.

It's the movie

Yeah, but mostly older anime. It's something he picked up from his time in Japan.

On tv
t.French

You would rent VHS or Betamax tapes from a local blockbuster or something similar.
There were dedicated importers too of anime (like a typical local but mostly only video), and some of them had fansubbed shit "under the counter".
Some people in fleamarkets would also sell fansub copies, I still sometimes see a dude who sells them from way back in the day, now he just sells DVDs/USBs filled with shitty hardsubs for those who have no idea.
There were also mailing lists, forums, or other shit were someone would fansub tapes and you'd pay like 3 bucks or so and said person would ship you a tape.
A lot of trading, I traded a fuckton of VHS. I watched most DBZ ovas through this method.
Also, usenet and bbs and all that had some form of sharing too in a different way than what we're used to now.
By the mid and late 90s standard internet distribution was already in place though. You could get shit p2p. Filesizes were stupid small, really stupid small, a lot of things were in (by now) forgotten or unused formats (image pre mkv containers). But screen resolutions were small too so it didn't look as terrible as watching 360p in a 1080 screen today.

Also, depending on where you lived, (outside the US) the rights to air warner/disney and other stuff was expensive (or inaccessible due to whatever regulation), so many stations paid for cheap anime air rights instead. That's why anime aired in regular times back in the day. Just ask any german, french, italian, mexican, and most kids shows back in the day were either anime or local stuff (which was usually shit, or a re-edit of some anime).

People socialized more and exchanged chinese cartoons. Also, anime was everywhere. Every saturday and sunday morning you could choose between 4-5 anime airing at the same time, with more "adult" shows in the evening.

flea market that sells pirated dvds and misleading covers is the norm.

i got hentai even though the cover is Ranma

Yo dad is a weeb? How old yo dad is? How old are you?

>How old yo dad is? How old are you?
Why did you mess up the sentence structure in the first question when the second sentence shows that you do know where to put the verb?

people had to seek stuff out
getting access to stuff required a lot of "non legal" methods
funny how modern "legit" companies try to look down and mess with a fanbase that wouldn't exist with fansubs and similar stuff

Kek no. My dad used to work as a banker there. I was born in Japan too.

After a while we moved to singapore and south africa before coming back to england. My dad turns 46 today while I'm 21

Will never forget having stuff like this appear in some of the VHS

youtube.com/watch?v=PrhE4cRFJ7A

But pretty much as everyone said, got anime through local guys that sold the stuff.