Highest Tier Tape Trade List

The roughly mid-90's and earlier (generally pre-Toonami, pre-anime boom) era of anime & manga fandom: early cons, clubs, tape trading, Nth Generation VHS fansubs, old magazines & fanzines, fandubs, ancient merchandise, rec.arts.anime, and more!
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labsenpai
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Highest Tier Tape Trade List

Post by labsenpai »

Long ago when I was a young fan sending art to The Rose, I was contacted by an art buyer in LA. Figuring I was an anime-starved Midwesterner, he offered "tapes from disc" as part of his commissioned illustration payment. I would just have to pick from a list, and he'd mail me a batch of HiFi vhs.
His library, printed on dot matrix, is what you see in the photo. I had to take the photo in my DRIVEWAY, because no room inside is big enough to unfold 35 pages! Close up, you can see each line is a coded laserdisc or commercial VHS import. That is over 2000 items, which I'd casually estimate costing 50k?

I was quite happy to receive hours of raw anime, since as you know, 1st gen copies were pure gold to traders. Even the oddest otaku would join you at the table if you had clean copies of the latest OVAs. I did see the collection in person when I flew out for AX96 (plus an equally large cel folio). Sadly, after my college clubs faded and boxes of vhs became a burden, our funny business deal reached an end.
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SteveH
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Re: Highest Tier Tape Trade List

Post by SteveH »

I wonder how much of the offer was true 'disc to tape' work and how much was SVHS/VHS copy to tape' work?

Most folk I knew with LDs did not relish going thru the process of hauling the discs out and babysitting the VCR. ESPECIALLY if a movie was wanted, that's multiple discs and splicing and all that.

I know in the cases, people first hand the usual M.O. was to pull a dupe off LD to either SVHS or standard VHS, but a really high grade tape, in 2 hour mode, then use that as a master for duping (we used to call it 'cloning' which of course isn't truly accurate). Movies were done using a SVHS deck with a flying erase head and jog-shuttle wheel for exact splicing.

It was always much easier to slap a master tape into the cloning VHS setup.
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labsenpai
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Re: Highest Tier Tape Trade List

Post by labsenpai »

SteveH wrote:I wonder how much of the offer was true 'disc to tape' work and how much was SVHS/VHS copy to tape' work?
I did see firsthand at his condo the closets and furniture full of LDs. The editing wasn't super fastidious, a lot of blue-screen blips made it on to what was normally a 4-6 hour compilation. Getting SVHS masters would've been perfect, since my club cohorts had subtitling equipment. We tried to sub a series from a standard tape (the anime my avatar is from) but the result was barely presentable. The printed list above was maybe the second to last he sent, before the shift to buying DVD format.
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Drew_Sutton
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Re: Highest Tier Tape Trade List

Post by Drew_Sutton »

That list is amazing and that collection was probably doubly impressive!
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karageko
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Re: Highest Tier Tape Trade List

Post by karageko »

Yeah that is one hell of a list. I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but is damn impressive how many hoops old school fans had to jump through to get their Japanese cartoons. I honestly don't think I would have that much drive to seek this stuff out, were I to grow up during that time.
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mbanu
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Re: Highest Tier Tape Trade List

Post by mbanu »

Some deep cuts, too. Yukan Club? You can find a dead torrent for a Japanese raw if you're lucky, Did that even make it to DVD in Japan?
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mbanu
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Re: Highest Tier Tape Trade List

Post by mbanu »

I'm probably just not looking hard enough. (^_^;)

Lots of stuff that I doubt has been watched by anyone in a while, though, even if it's still available. (I see all 6 Wolf Guy OVAs, for instance.)
mbanu: What's between Old School and New School?
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labsenpai
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Re: Highest Tier Tape Trade List

Post by labsenpai »

karageko wrote:Yeah that is one hell of a list. I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but is damn impressive how many hoops old school fans had to jump through to get their Japanese cartoons. I honestly don't think I would have that much drive to seek this stuff out, were I to grow up during that time.
Connecting with an 80s generation otaku or senpai-hobbyist could save you a number of hoops. If your college had a club, that was also highly fortunate.

One of the reasons I bought monthly Newtypes was to know what my friend might snag upon release. He passed on a lot of TV, but most hit OVAs or ecchi titles would wind up on the list.
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