Hey, old anons. Really old anons. What was it like to get fansubs before the age of torrents and streaming?

Hey, old anons. Really old anons. What was it like to get fansubs before the age of torrents and streaming?

Other urls found in this thread:

web.archive.org/web/20010902154025/http://www.animeclube.com:80/html/fitas/fitas_ai.mv
web.archive.org/web/20010902154608/http://www.animeclube.com:80/html/fitas/fitas_jp.mvhttp://web.archive.org/web/20010902154312/http://www.animeclube.com:80/html/fitas/fitas_qz.mv
youtube.com/watch?v=aTzYhqPFCQw/watch?v=UPnRMK5hdeE
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

I remember era of IRC as main source of it.

or edonkey/kazaa if you were a filthy casual

I would ask a guy in Canada to send me a VHS with something and he would say "want me to fill up the rest of the tape with hentai?"
And I would say yes

thank you arctic animation

Copying from hdd to hdd.
Getting those disgusting poorly compressed ogg (not sure about extension type anymore) files.
Writing them two-three a piece onto CDs so entire season would take at least a dozen.
Getting errors during/after process so entire CD is rendered unusable and you have to make yet another copy.

And that's after the age of hopeless hunting for VHS and only getting parts of the show.

Literally kill me, those are not the memories i enjoy

Knew a guy in chinatown that would sell VHS tapes of subbed anime. Dragonball, DBZ (after Freeza saga, etc). I had two VCRs so I would copy those tapes and sell them to other kids in school at a crazy markup.

I had a friend that gave me cds with subbed anime from time to time circa 2003.

Also this was around 97-98 or so which makes me realize how old I am and how young everyone else is. I cant even complain about how people are copying VHS tapes in SP mode like newfags to anyone.

I just watched dubbed anime on TV.

Kids willing to watch a foreign show with subtitles? Did you go to some no-normies school?

If anyone is still out there who was a distributor who offered the SASE method, I just want to send my thanks.
You're one of the hidden heroes who helped put us where we are today.

Kazaa. Direct Connect. Not a single video followed the same naming convention anywhere. Sometimes it was "hidden" CP.

I don't miss those days.

nope, public school. waaaay different mentality back then. anime was not mainstream, no one knew what it was really pre-pokemon. people knew sailor moon and speed racer and stuff, but it wasn't super crazy huge. if you had access to tapes of stuff not out yet in america anime fans would want it asap no matter if it was subbed.

are you still in high school? how fucking young are you, newfaggot?

Kareoke all day every day with English translation in a different colour (I honestly miss that)

Insane translators notes but in a good way

Watching a ground breaking show like Eva and dying for your next shipment and getting 4 episodes instead of 2 then next time you're super hyped when you get your tape and it's 8 episodes of All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl NukuNuku because you forgot you also requested that too

>fansubs
You'd go to the Videothek (video rental, like Blockbuster) and if they had some anime, the subtitles were already on it, "hardcoded" so to speak (as there was no ability to turn them on or off).
As for stuff that aired on TV, it was generally dubbed.

So if there was a fansub scene, I wasn't aware of them, and wouldn't know they'd sub and distribute their works.

I'm 22 and when I was in high school literally no one watched anime and only knew about shows like Pokémon, Digimon and Yugioh from watching the English versions on TV as kids. Got my sister to watch Japanese Cardcaptor Sakura with me several years ago but asides from that, nobody I knew enjoyed watching subs. It's only since the last two years that I started meeting other anime fans in person.

Forgot to say, the stuff you rented also was generally dubbed. When it was big enough to be carried in a rental company, it was usually licensed and dubbed over.

How do you know nobody did? Maybe they just kept it private. Like you are supposed to.

>22
Young as fucking hell, figures. Should have learned to draw and joined the art club, thats I found people back in 1993 In fucking middle school

You fuckers are lucky as hell that the internet is as prevalent as it is, you'd have no idea how to get your fix otherwise.

>no ADSL in shithole country
people mailed CD-R with fansubs to each other that they would then copy and send to the next person down the chain

I remember downloading from Kazaa some random Evangelion episodes and The End movie in a quality so horrendous that makes me wonder how I could even get what was going on. Also hentai clips that rarely lasted more than some minutes. I couldn't download too much else since my hard drive was ridiculous.

Besides that there was TV and official VHS. For some reason there was a shit-ton of good anime in TV those years, I remember following 6 or 7 series at the same time, so it wasn't too bad.

life was better without the internet

no it wasn't fuck off

yes it was I want to die and the internet is keeping me alive against my will

I'm not old per se (just 32 years old), but pre-torrent it was, in order of adoption by my local community:
- XDCC (part of IRC), after the internet became more reliable. I'm talking 100KBps here, not anywere MBps. Sometimes you would get lucky and be given access to someone's FTP, but you'd have to be embiggening his e-peen first.
- HDD to HDD copying or burning into data DVD, personally knowing a tech guy with corporate internet was really important back then. someone like that was a god in the community.
- VCD; if you don't know what this is, it's literally poor men's DVD.
- VHS; as anime was very niche, the rental owner must personally know you. you must be in the same trusted list as the people who rent pornos, illegal in my country.

How does it feel knowing that you live in the golden age of private trackers and that you can get everything at AB?

I was too depressed and introverted to join a club while in high school or even uni. Don't feel too bad about it though since most anime fans I've met in the past few years are obnoxious redditor types with shit taste. I might be a miserable loner but I'm glad I didn't turn out like that.

I ordered VHS tapes in Brazil. I would visit the homepage of the fansub group named BAC (Brasil Anime Fanclub) on weekends due to being cheaper to access the internet with my dial-up modem. This was they had back then:
web.archive.org/web/20010902154025/http://www.animeclube.com:80/html/fitas/fitas_ai.mv
web.archive.org/web/20010902154608/http://www.animeclube.com:80/html/fitas/fitas_jp.mvhttp://web.archive.org/web/20010902154312/http://www.animeclube.com:80/html/fitas/fitas_qz.mv

From that catalog I got Bastard, Cowboy Bebop, Gunbuster, I Can Hear the Ocean + Slam Dunk movie, Kare Kano, Macross Plus, Maho Tsukai Tai, Ninja Scroll, Otaku no Video, Perfect Blue, Kenshin OVAs, Spriggan, Lain, and Wind Named Amnesia (which I remember because of how disappointed I was with that boring movie). FLCL I got from another group.

Someone would download it at school or at work, then that person would make copies for a friend and so on.
Sometimes you even got to meet strangers in public spots to give you the disks, kind of like drugs.

As a boy, my country was a literal hell due to civil war and I have to hop mines to watch Eva in an electrical store. Luckily my older brother knew well how to avoid mines and bullets and I followed him loyally.

Šta imaa?

And GitS and Eva. The biggest impact among my friends back then was probably caused by Bebop and Eva. For those two series, I would take the tapes to the big house of one of my friends where we would watch together. We were all beginning our university courses so we still had plenty of free time.

You bought them in Chinatown, or over ebay.
Street vendors had them too.

I was only around before torrents and streaming were popular even in weeb circles.
There was:
>buyfagging
>renting videos from a mom and pop place since blockbuster never ordered in anything interesting
>early p2p like morpheus/kazaa
>xdcc if you had an actually decent connection
And my favorite
>hk bootlegs with translation engine quality that ranged from legible to outright horrendous

The stories I could tell about the fucking bootlegs I bought in chinatown and dealer's pits.

Hey, I know your name.
You're that guy, that one faggot that killed Boss Fang and his clan.
Your name, I believe it was...
F A G I

IRC, Kazaa, eMule and DC++, that's what it was like.

In the early internet era you'd have to leave a single episode downloading overnight and there was no guarantee it would even be playable. Codecs and formats were an ever-changing clusterfuck, and distribution sites were unreliable. When I watched Utena the screen would break into random multicolored blocks all the time. It was standard practice to burn them to CDs for storage and faster sharing with friends. If you wanted rare anime you probably needed to find someone who knew someone with a private FTP server.

Before the internet they'd trade VHS tapes, which usually involved an organized club with meetups to share the costs. "Subtitles" might come in the form of a script printed on paper if you were unlucky. If you were a casual you were limited to dubbed TV shows masquerading as regular cartoons and rentals at the video store. Good times when video stores would put ecchi or even hentai in the kids' section because it looked like cartoons.

The anime itself was pretty much the same except with different art style quirks and the bitching about anime having gone downhill was exactly the same.

Fuck you.

>Considers himself Old fag
>Posts from the internet era
Is this a joke?
There was only a few options before internet really rolled around and you were stuck in the land of clip art and midis over 28k or 56k blazing 4kps blazing speeds.
1: Go to a specialty store that had anime, usually it was VHS copies with subs
2: Order it from abroad
3: Irc, but I couldnt say much about that

>Šta imaa?
nista specijalno, sta ima kod tebe?

>you can get everything at AB
No you can't, they have a lot of things, but far from everything.

I remember getting those shitty 40mb rmvb rips of DBZ from DC++ hubs. After that I realized IRC bots were better than and torrents followed soon after.

Pre-Internet? You rented whatever the local video rental place had, took it to your one friend who had two VHS machines, and made a copy. It was probably a bad dub of something like Battle Angel Alita. If you were hooked in, you went to a science fiction convention (no anime cons yet) and bought some tapes from the one guy with a table full of anime. That's how my dad got his Miyazaki collection, since he was a convention regular.

When I started getting my own stuff in the late 90s? No good anime downloads yet. You could find a few, but we're talking looooow quality. Try to imagine 50 megabytes for a full episode using a bad codec. (Hands up if you remember Realvideo.) So what you did was find a website for a fansubber with the series you wanted, write up a want list, mail the list and a damned money order from the Post Office to them, and a month later you'd get back a package full of VHS tapes. Even this was rare enough that my tape collection let me found the college anime club.

I don't think I saw my first good digital subs till late 2001 with Hellsing. Those were coming off of Kazaa and eDonkey and other proto-torrent services.

irc, winmx, then sites prior to mcanime (I can't remember their names), I also remember downloading anime uploaded to some HP photo server, each chapter was split in 10MB parts, and disguised as jpg files then you would have to joint them.

You forgot 4: joining the local university anime club and borrowing fansubs from their library.

What things are you missing from them?

Evo chillam. Ostao bez posla nekidan, gdje drugdje doc nego opet ovdje.

Buying hand fansubbed Laserdisc to VHS conversions from shady people.

being in south america, we got anime dubbed in iberic spanish, in fucking VHS.
you won't notice but is a pain in the ass.
just to set an example is kinda like american english and a really closed british accent one.
i am grateful for modern shit desu.

...

Mostly music, and some experimental anime.

Mostly I watched what was on TV and rented whatever I could find at Blockbuster.

>pat labor

Those floating tapes though.

lol at this newfaggotry.

In the olden tymes you had to mail order money to dubious addresses you found in paper zines you'd have to subscribe to or pick up in comic shops.

AND WERE LUCKY and THANKFUL, damn whippersnappers, when we got it hand delivered to us by an FBI agent who would sit and silently watch it with us before shooting our dog and leaving with the VHS tape in his lead lined briefcase, rather than having a russian pimp turn up on our doorsteps and sell us into the kazakstani sex trade.

the magnetism used in cassettes and VHS meant you could stick them together like that after a few years of being watched because of how the VHS machine reinforced the magnetism as it was read.

It's why old VHSs are all staticky - the magnetism from the tapes starts to interfere with the circuits in the machine and cables.

Began watching anime in '92, even in those days several hundred fansub groups (who actually translated and subbed) and distros (people who made copies but did not create subtitles) were online.

You would mail these strangers a box full of blank tapes, and a month or two later that box would be returned to you, the tapes filled with episodes of anime.

Video quality varied widely. If your source had a SVHS tape from an LD, your copy is going to look great. Often it was more like a 4th gen copy with worbling sound and fuzzy image.

The community felt closer. People tended to fansub with the goal of popularizing the medium. The availability and ease of access of today was unimaginable.

Before the internet? Watch local TV dub or VHS and LD, what else do you think?

Buy or rent or make a VHS to VHS or LD to VHS copy as some people above already mentioned. The biggest problem back then was my region (HK) used PAL format and Japan used NTSC and that caused fuck-up nightmare in the whole 80's until they started to produce multi-format player & television.

As for subtitle, 95% of time we watched raw and the 5% sub we got were Taiwan bootleg. But that wasn't a really big problem because back then most of the popular titles we watched were manga adapted (DBZ, Hokuto no Ken, Saint Seiya etc.). People already read the manga and know exactly what's going on already. Not manga adapted? there were also unlicensed anime magazine we could read the summary, setting and character introduction first.

>The availability and ease of access of today was unimaginable.

Not to mention the speed. It would be literal years between original broadcast and getting fansub tapes. Up to date information about a new season? Not a chance.

Oh shit, I remember. Those bootlegged 5th or 6th generation VHS, the rent stores, hentai misplaced in kid's alley...

During the 80's, Toei reigned without peer in France, and it was epic. Canal +, a premium channel, started to attack this monopoly with some Cobra, Sherlock Holmes n shit, and it was awesome.

Later, french TV groups were, in the early 90's, lacking domestic productions when it came for animation, so they resorted to either american cartoons (more like publicartoons, since they were obvious ads for action figures) and animes. They dubbed a shitload of them, and hilarity ensued in epic proportions. If you ever understand french, search for the dub of Hokuto no Ken, so bad it's actually fun. We do have a load of memes about this period, but I never saw them here, probably because we suck at english. Then, mass localization was killed for a time by Segolene Royal, a french politician, but in early 2000 Canal + dubbed Evangelion, Escaflowne, Cowboy Bebop and shit like this with dubs so good they are the only ones I can still hear without bleeding (nostalgia is a bitch, and they wera actually good for yesterdays standards).

Then Internet appeared, and I remember searching for anime early 2004 for a good place to speak about it. I'm still here, for fuck's sake.

Does French Asuka have a sexy voice?

>Up to date information about a new season? Not a chance.

Oh the zines had that stuff in them (really hard to explain how manga/anime zines were basically the glue that bound any sort of cohesion to the anime communities outside of japan), but it was kinda irrelevent without supply, which dampened demand for it, but you'd hear about popular directors or studios seasonal announcements of new shows and their releases and that would often drive the fansub groups to have weeaboos in japan tape japanese shows off the TV and send it to them at the end of the season... which of course is why the tape quality was often fucking atrocious, and it often left fansub groups who relied on that sort of "fast" (anime within a month or two of a season ending!) bucketchain also reliant on the taste in anime of the weeaboos in japan, which could be terrible.

Also why weeaboo anime culture of the 80s and 90s was 90% otaku aimed shonen or edgy shit, it was what the fansub groups could get.

jebiga user-e, nije lako. Mozes malo i da uzivas kao neet

I oću.

vhs tapes was all we had
I remember getting a lot of poorly subbed buu saga stuff loaded with cursing.

youtube.com/watch?v=aTzYhqPFCQw/watch?v=UPnRMK5hdeE

I sold Dragonball Z subs on burned CD-Rom at my school. Shit was liquid.

I was lucky and lived in a weaboo state that had a store that would rent fansubs for a buck.

It fucking sucked.

Convention, mostly. But in France as soon as the early 80s we had a lot of anime, mazinger, saint seiya, hokuto no ken (in a slot for 7-11 years old), lot of shoujo as well. Then in the 90s we started to get vhs of ova, lodoss war, iria zeiram, ect.

An older guy hooked (about 30) me up when I was young. He also hooked people on porno VHS and organized masturbation sessions with other kids from the block.
In retrospect, I realized the guy was likely a pedo luckily it seems I wasn't attractive enough and always thought this masturbation sessions were kind of gay.

You bought them from Hong Kong and used your imagination.

>CD-Rom
Leave. We're talking abot the 90's not the 00's kiddo.

Don't forget about the sentai and henshin subgenres. We got all, from San Ku Kai to Kamen Rider, from Bioman to VR Troopers. For a moment in it's shitty existence, french TV was good.

You would copy tapes and trade them with your friends. I miss those days a lot.

Yeah, because CDs were not a thing in the mid 90's

Burnable CD-ROMs and media players weren't.

>hokuto no ken (in a slot for 7-11 years old)
My mom fucking hated that I was watching it but my dad didn't give a shit, sometimes even watched with me.

Got em from a friend who got em from his cousin who got em from his brother who got em from etc...

Based Dorothée

I still have the Tenchi Movies on VHS.
Outside of that I recorded some of the DBZ ones to VHS too, i think it was Dead Zone and World's Strongest.

A local market thing always had a group of Asians that sold Pokemon cards back in the day, always wanted to grab some of their anime but kid me aint got no money.

Well my friend, let me tell you about something called Kazaa

I wonder how many people remember Megaupload before Mega.nz became a thing and how entire seasons of anime used to be there

>Kids these days will never know the pain of dubtitles

Or 5, trading VHS' at small conventions

Got VHS sub rips of Evangelion from Kazaa. I'll never forget the neon green subtitles over a tiny resolution image

>Blue Seed
>DNA2
>Original Ushio and Tora
>OG Macross
>DRAGONAR AH SHIT I LOVE THAT ONE

I still have a mountain of purple VHS tapes from Kodocha subs. I think I miss the parody subbed commercials the most.

I knew what anime was for years but only watched a handful of things outside of the standard kids shit until the beginning of last year.

Mfw I will never experience being a part of an underground anime culture.

Modern anons don't realize how lucky they are that simulcasts, like Crunchyroll, exist. Even a decade ago, it could take a a few days for the latest episode the most popular shows, like FMA, to get decent subs. For less popular shows it could take weeks between episodes. And sometimes the only group subbing a show would just drop it half way and you might wait years for an official release or a new group to pick it up.

Dumb Frogposter, leave.

Being in from the beginning had it's downside. I accidentally anally-destroyed the first elitist hipster I ran into trying to setup a trade. It turned out he didn't have much. Then I was invited to an anime club meeting and learned A LOT about the fan base was becoming. I've hid my love for anime since.

>What was it like to get fansubs before the age of internet
Expensive postage, and I rarely got a completed series

>I would ask a guy in Canada to send me a VHS with something
I wish I knew about him. I sent blank VHS cassettes to a guy in California. The return postage costs from Calgary to San Diego and back killed me.

Dumb Frogposter

I really cringe when people complain when an episode isn't up and subbed in like 2 hours or something. Like they just don't get it

>And sometimes the only group subbing a show would just drop it half way and you might wait years for an official release or a new group to pick it up.
This happened more often than not.
The delay was usually 4-6 days, but it was almost standard practice by most groups to sub the last episode no earlier than a fortnight after it aired.
I was convinced only sadists subbed anime.

>remember Megaupload
Rapidshare it.

-Also: Carl Macek can still suck a dick for charging $40 for single tv episodes of Nadia.