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!
zimmerit wrote:
I've always wanted a bit more insight into those HK DVDs. They're rarely mentioned now, but I remember them as being a pretty big deal for a couple of years. For people outside of established fan groups they made watching new-ish anime pretty easy but also offered a lot of older series that would have been a pain, or downright impossible, to track down on VHS.
The only HK DVDs I own are a part of my Patlabor DVD collection. I kinda keep them around because of how interesting they are, and also the subbing for them is atrocious, which makes trying to understand whats going on a fun game of bad grammar and spelling. Others are ok for the most part, and then there are some that you wanna give up after 30 seconds of watching it.
zimmerit wrote:I've always wanted a bit more insight into those HK DVDs. They're rarely mentioned now, but I remember them as being a pretty big deal for a couple of years. For people outside of established fan groups they made watching new-ish anime pretty easy but also offered a lot of older series that would have been a pain, or downright impossible, to track down on VHS.
Likely not helpful anymore, but it looks like someone over in a 2004 ANN thread ran a whois on the website for one of the big Hong Kong DVD producers, Anime Cartoon, and pulled up the contact info for their Singaporean webmaster, Eric Lim:
Guyver I wrote:There was also a brief interlude between VHS and digisubs, that of the Hong Kong DVDs, specifically with the rise of Ebay. Some had fantastic subtitles, and some bordered on complete incoherence, but it was still a way to get titles never released here, then or now.
I've always wanted a bit more insight into those HK DVDs. They're rarely mentioned now, but I remember them as being a pretty big deal for a couple of years. For people outside of established fan groups they made watching new-ish anime pretty easy but also offered a lot of older series that would have been a pain, or downright impossible, to track down on VHS.
(I can't believe it seems like I've missed half of this thread)
When the rental market started to move away from tapes and towards DVDs, rental outlets that rented fansubs, started getting those HK (well, SG, I guess) DVDs. Most of them all erred on the side of "complete incoherence" as far as how the scripts read. I mostly remember them skewing towards newer releases/series. Their most ardent defenders, I remember, were people who had dogshit Internet and could buy the DVDs off eBay for almost next to nothing. Other conversations I remember having about them were from people who saw what R1 Anime DVDs cost at MSRP, and saw the bootlegs online elsewhere for dirt cheap. They did, as far as I can recall, really get the ball rolling on a lot of the bootleg merchandise conversations, more so than bootleg tapes ever did.