Stuff about the golden old days you're glad are now gone

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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greg
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Re: Stuff about the golden old days you're glad are now gone

Post by greg »

Those are some pretty good points! Especially the stigma that all anime is Overfiend stuff. Or for me, in high school when everyone just knew about Speed Racer because it was being shown on MTV at the time.

So here's some more things I am glad are gone:

Editing the graphics in games to make them less anime-looking or completely replacing the sprites. I'm thinking of when Langrisser for the Megadrive was ported as Warsong on the Genesis and the character faces were altered, when Assault Suits Valken for the Super Famciom was ported to the SNES and the character in-game faces were removed completely, how the first Ranma 1/2 fighting game for the SFC was completely altered to becoming a generic game called Street Combat or something... stuff like that.

The term "Japanimation." I didn't care for that term, especially when people would derisively put a pause in there to call it "JAP animation" to add a bit of good ol' WWII era racism.
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Re: Stuff about the golden old days you're glad are now gone

Post by _D_ »

One of my friends is still like "all anime is porn anime". But he also likens "The Strain" to it, as the vampires have things coming out of their heads or mouths. He likes the traditional type of vampire and not these new types...
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Re: Stuff about the golden old days you're glad are now gone

Post by usamimi »

greg wrote: Poofy hair. Geometric shapes in loud colors. Floppy, baggy clothes. Grunge music.
Aww, I kinda like some of those! :lol: (Well, to an extent. Even I have my limits!)

Things I do not miss:

Waiting years for something to get licensed for release in English. It still seems to take a long time for certain things to get picked up over here (like manga, for example), but even in those cases, the real popular stuff eventually gets scooped up. We even get anime streamed in English hours after it's aired in Japan! What a time to be alive.

Having to buy everything via mail-order. Shipping for VHS box sets and piles of manga wasn't cheap or easy, esp. in the time before Paypal. Now I can walk into a WAL MART and buy Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon DVDs & blu-rays along with my groceries if I wanted to. XD (Obviously we still buy tons of stuff via online shops, but the process is MUCH more stream-lined and it's not our only option, which is so, so nice.)

Super edited-for-TV-and-children versions of everything. Bless things like Toonami and Adult Swim for opening the doors for anime with very minimal/if at all editing getting aired on TV. Also, it was a pain in the ass to make sure you weren't buying the "Edited for TV" versions of certain VHS tapes...no chances of accidentally buying those now, thankfully.

Dub only releases. I'm glad this is (for the most part) a thing of the past. Now we have some titles that are sub only releases! I'm glad some companies realized that it's literally easier to just slap some subtitles on something and throw it on a disc.

Westernizing EVERYTHING. Companies seem to be a lot better at translating things (esp. in manga) and just adding a little note about the pun or meaning instead of trying to come up with a lame American pop-culture equivalent. Obviously they still do this in things like dubs where it's much harder to explain stuff in a translation, but it's not nearly as bad as it used to be.

Single VHS/DVD releases of long-running shows. Single-releases were terrible enough as it is, but when you were dealing with longer shows...oh man. WHAT A PAIN, not to mention expensive as fuck. (Which goes along with what others already said, but I don't miss how expensive anime/manga used to be AT ALL, obviously.)

FLOPPED MANGA. This is one of the biggest things I DO NOT MISS. While some editors did fantastic jobs (ie Studio Proteus), it was VERY obvious some publishers were very cheap and sloppy, plus it made some artists' styles look hella weird. I'm so glad this is not the norm anymore and people have embraced reading "backwards". :mrgreen:
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Re: Stuff about the golden old days you're glad are now gone

Post by llj »

_D_ wrote:Sorry to say, the speculators market for comics is alive and well.check out prices for things like the first appearance of Jane Foster as Thor in an early issue of one of Marvel's "What if" books from the 1970s...$400 in mint! This for a book worth under $10 a year ago? Lots more examples of sheer lunacy every week...
There is the odd older title that bumps up in price, but most of the comics made since 2000 have pretty much stayed the same in price. Remember that in the 90s the first issue of McFarlane Spider-Man was already going for $20 only months after it came out because everyone wanted it thinking it would be some collector's item. Now THAT was lunacy.
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Re: Stuff about the golden old days you're glad are now gone

Post by greg »

_D_ wrote:He likes the traditional type of vampire and not these new types...
Yeah, you mean the wussy Vegan sparkly vampires! :roll: :lol:
usamimi wrote:Westernizing EVERYTHING. Companies seem to be a lot better at translating things (esp. in manga) and just adding a little note about the pun or meaning instead of trying to come up with a lame American pop-culture equivalent. Obviously they still do this in things like dubs where it's much harder to explain stuff in a translation, but it's not nearly as bad as it used to be.
While I agree with everything on your list, this point reminds me of the poor attempt at bringing Doraemon over here. They still have that out-of-date, out-of-touch "we must Westernize everything" approach to this. Gian is "Big G," doraiyaki is now "fudgy pudgy snacky-cakes" (or whatever), Nobita is now Billy Joe-Bob or some BS like that. All it takes is for some cartoonist to make a joke about Mohammad and all the pea-brained Muslim terrorists are up in arms, but I'd rather have people up in arms over the way Doraemon is getting dicked around. It's absurd.
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Re: Stuff about the golden old days you're glad are now gone

Post by mbanu »

As an anime middle-schooler, it's hard to say how many of my frustrations were due to being young rather than the era, but the things that frustrated me the most were knowledge dead-ends.

There wouldn't be anything about E.Y.E.S. of Mars at the local library (I had the presence of mind to record it off the Sci-Fi channel, so I had the title at least); if I had been clever enough at the time to put two and two together, I could have tried asking about it on rec.arts.anime, but in my day-to-day life there wasn't really any way to go from question to answer in an obvious way. Nobody I knew knew anything about this stuff... Today I can get the director's name from the ANN Encyclopedia, then read his Japanese Wikipedia article courtesy of Google Translate in a couple minutes. Back then it would have been impossible for me, and I suspect would have been a lot of legwork for an older fan to get that kind of information.
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Re: Stuff about the golden old days you're glad are now gone

Post by DKop »

Paying $30 for 4 episodes of an anime on DVD/VHS I was able to go to walmart and get the first two seasons of DBZ for 20 bucks, thats roughly 70 something episodes for that amount of money! I got this for a friend of mine as a secret santa gift, and i'm sure he loves it. Now you can get a whole collection of a series on DVD for under 30 bucks it seems these days.
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Re: Stuff about the golden old days you're glad are now gone

Post by Akage »

Things that I don't miss -

The price and supply of anime VHS tapes - In high school, with the internet still not being more than a dial-up modem and AOL, my only sources for anime were either what was shown on TV (the local PBS channel, KTEH, aired Tenchi Muyo on Sunday nights) and things either found in Suncoast or Chinatown. VHS tapes were about $40 for 1 tape of 3-4 episodes, which was really out of my budget. Tapes were about 1/3 the price in Chinatown, but would either be dubbed in Cantonese or subbed in Chinese. If you think the US dubs of the time were bad, you should watch Cantonese dubs. I still have nightmares of Cantonese Sailor Moon episodes, all of which sound like they were recorded in a bathroom and feature a nasally Usagi calling her purple cat "Loo-laah".

Anime Merchandise prices - I guess I should have considered myself fortunate to have lived in the Bay Area before the real rise of anime in the US towards the late 1990s, but all the imported merchandise was pricey. Gashapon keychains hovered in the $10+ range, packs of Japanese Pokémon cards were roughly $10/each because they always had one holograph card and non-bootleg trading cards were easily 2-5x the price of the bootleg versions. When I think about how expensive these items were in comparison to the prices I can find using deputy services to import items from Yahoo Japan now, it makes my head spin.

Lack of Competition Among Deputies- More of a early-mid 2000s thing, but there was a time when your deputy service choices were between Rinkya, ShoppingMallJapan (formerly AnimeChaos) and Celga. Prices to use all three services, even for a small, less than 1000 yen item, were astronomically high. Now, with the variety of deputy services out there, prices to use these services have really leveled out to the point that, regardless of the final cost of an item, I pay no more than a $4 flat fee.

Buying things off E-bay - When E-bay first began in 1998, the usual method for paying for an auction involved getting a money order from the bank or post office for international transactions. This was easier said than done when you lived at college and all you had was a bike to get around. I made a lot of trips to the post office for money orders while in college.

Having to explain that not all cartoons are for children (and the subsequent judgment behind it) - This is probably the biggest thing that I don't miss. While I still get some odd faces from people from my parents' generation or older, it seems like most younger people have accepted the fact that not all cartoons are meant for children. While this is largely due to hits like "Family Guy", it feels nice to not have to explain that I enjoy watching animated programs that are clearly meant for adults. And if worst comes to worst, I just dial up a pic of Rem from Re:Zero (or whatever 'boob of the month' anime is out) and ask the annoying individual if they'd let a 5 year old watch this. That usually gets the point across. Thank you, smartphones.
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Re: Stuff about the golden old days you're glad are now gone

Post by SteveH »

I have to say, I don't regret THAT much the evolution of physical media.

Nostalgic memories of hauling a 42 pound top-loading VHS machine plus a couple of milk crates of VHS tapes (plus luggage, sleeping bag and supplies!) across a very large and ice covered parking lot to get to the hotel where I would either be hosting 'room parties' or a compensated hosting of Japanimation in a con viewing room (usually one large CRT TV on an A/V cart) aside, it was a pain in the BUTT dealing with all that. The whole "wait for the VCR to reach room temp before plugging it in" deal, the fear of cold affecting the video tapes, keeping TRACK of the tapes so nothing 'wanders' off, and the endless, eternal duping sessions. oy.

Yeah, the times were fun but if I could have traded all that for a 5 pound DVD player and a bunch of DVDs on a nice, large flatscreen I would have in a heartbeat.

I dearly loved my 42 pound beast of a VCR (and still wish I had gotten it back into running shape. Thing was solid as stone with recording and playback) but I sure don't miss lugging it around. :)
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