DKop wrote: ↑Sat Sep 19, 2020 5:03 am
Fireminer wrote: ↑Sat Sep 19, 2020 3:49 am
(On a related question, I have seen in films set in the 1980s America roadside motels that openly promoted they they had porn to show. Was this a thing?)
There still adult stores here and there. There is one for example in between Charlotte NC and Greenville SC on I-85 that only has a billboard up on what exit to take to get there, and the rundown shack of a building off to the side of the road that has their sign at the top. You can promote your business, but you can't really show the "content" of what you carry if your business is in porn. Same with strip clubs and gentlemen clubs. Showing too much would cross decentcy laws. In terms of hotels they don't promote it, but very little channel browsing on the hotel tv's and you can order and preview porn films they offer. I think the furthest hotels will promote that they have porn would be "We Offer HBO" or "We Offer Cinemax" because a normal person will associate that they will get porn with those stations if they stay at that particular hotel.
Another thing to add onto it, specifically during the time period that the movies Fireminer is watching, is that cable television was still expanding in the US, so many residences didn't have access to cable, let alone premium channels like HBO, Cinemax and the like. Advertising that a hotel/motel had HBO (or Cienmax, etc) showed that they not only had cable (that a lot of people may not already) but they had the premium services, it makes it more attractive to a lot of travelers. While the premium channels would show softcore (at most) porn late at night (to some extent), it was more about just having premium entertainment in your room, that you may not have access to at home. To a business traveler especially, one might pick a place like this for a business trip because when the work day is done, you can at least watch a cool movie or two before going to bed.
About ten years ago, I worked for a company that did pay-per-view of the in-room entertainment services for hotels. Sometime in the 80s, too, in addition to being wired for cable TV, a lot of hotels did in-room rentals/pay-per-view/on-demand movies (usually much newer than either HBO/Cinemax/Showtime and much, much newer than the rest of cable and local broadcast TV), which also included porn. I didn't work on the TV side of the business but from what I heard, a lot of these systems involved manually putting in tapes/DVDs into players that had switches to room circuits. It is probably more computerized now but there were a few hotels that still had these manual systems when I worked there. By the 90s though, these offerings were pretty standard for most major hotels and hotel chains, so not having any of these put your facility at a major disadvantage.
Fireminer wrote:
Oh, wow, so it was dubbed. I've just read an article on how professional anime voice actors are stepping into the field of dubbing hentai and adult visual novels. If only they know people have been doing this for decades.
Chances are, they do know. Hentai's had dub options, at least for the last 25 years when there were hentai labels from major publishers like CPM, Media Blasters, etc. I think there is a cultural shift that doing porn as a voice actor, isn't career suicide. Those 90s and 2000s dubs had actors whose names we'd recognize, but they were usually credited under an alias because the US market is weird that there is a perception that folks who do adult work wouldn't be able to work mainstream titles. Same was true in Japan (probably still is). Famously, I think it was Inoue Kikuko (Ah! My Goddess, Ranma 1/2) who was asked at a convention about her role as the lead in Ogenki Clinic, to some embarrassment.
Fireminer wrote:
I also wonder if anyone would go to such length to preserve these hentai OVAs? Some records I've read talked about the later 1980s and early 1990s as the halcyon days of hentai in both written and animated forms. Maybe there is some worth in preserving these tapes?
This is a really good question - I think a lot of anime preservation stuff seems to avoid adult work that doesn't have some tie to a more mainstream thing (like the Cream Lemon episode that is supposed to be a precursor to Project A-ko). It is probably a general reflection of fandom, while I've met or seen online fans of all sorts of genres, fans of hentai as an artform seem to be kinda far between and I've never really heard them talk about preserving older works in that genre. I'll admit, that I probably have a bit of confirmation bias in this observation.