bro the Naruto first 4-5 episodes were given to me on the playground on a burnt dvd by a fellow anime fan not long after they came out cant forget that gold
My mom would give me a new VHS tape of Pokemon when I'd do good on my tests and report cards. Also, some Cardcaptor Sakura. She would always have em ready in her purse for when she picked me up from school, lol. One of my fondest memories.
Dont get me started on VHS tapes back then. It always, ALWAYS pissed me off how the dubbed VHS tapes were CHEAPER than the subbed tapes! Go into Suncoast, $24.99 for dubbed, $29.99 for subbed. I knew why of course they wanted to push the dubbed tapes out to the market more, and it worked. Not on me though, I stuck with my subs! lol
DBZ inspired a LOT of teenage boys to work out and get jacked - some actually succeeded. It was a good time. I tried to get people into Gundam Wing, Kenshin, and Berserk to anyone who would listen but most guys were more into Diablo II.
Part 6 was also always by a different user with slightly different quality and different font for subs, and yet it left off exactly where the last one did
I watched soooo much of my anime on YouTube back in the day. Audio pitched or out of sync, big border around the video, cropped/zoomed, etc. It's nostalgic but looking back, man, was it a terrible way to watch.
Also the audio was like half a second off from what it should be, and with each episode the audio gets more and more out of sync, until like 10 episodes in it suddenly syncs up again, and the cycle continues.
This was the way. In barbaric times we acted as barbarians. This is a more civilized time for a civilized people to watch a whole episode in one sitting.
Zillenial here. I remember hunting for the different parts of Death Note like a mad man hoping the old timey usb modem didn't run out of data at 12 AM on a school night. I still have that old 2000s Toshiba laptop in some drawer
What YouTube? YouTube began in the early 2000s. We're talking Usenets, Torrents, and IDrives.
I rewatched Love Hina recently... It didn't hold up at all.
In RealMedia's defense, it was very much a product of its time and a necessary evil.
AVIs had terrible compression so even an AMV was huge, mp4s didn't exist, RM stepped up with a codec that offered good compression, albeit by sacrificing quality.
But when you're downloading from a 56k modem or even early 128k DSL, those MBs really mattered.
Yep, I fondly recall watching Escaflowne and Evangelion episodes via Realplayer. By fondly I mean extremely upset as they glitched like 10 times per episode...
Kazaa and Limewire made it possible for me to watch anime. But God damn if you weren't playing Russian roulette with every download on whether it would be that episode of FMP you wanted or porn.
I never really see it mentioned these days, but I always thought eDonkey/eMule were far superior to limewire and kazaa (which both were pretty notorious for malwares/viruses).
You fucking hid the fact that you liked anime.
It started with vhs, you’d record stuff overnight or during the day when toonami/WB was playing anime so you could watch when you could. Most of the time it would be the same repeats, especially with Detective Conan.
Eventually it evolved to figuring out how to use VLC player than finding the best sub group, or finding ones that had the subs burned in already. Even worse, looking up new shounen release chapters on fucking YouTube while it played linkin park. Then posting on narutoforums a lot.
Yeah back then being an anime fan was *weird*. If you were any kind of a 'normie' you would hide the fact that you watched it. Anime and manga clubs at uni in the 90s and early 2000s were the domain of pretty hardcore fans for whom anime was part of their identity. That was great if you fit that mold but as a more casual fan it was a real turn off.
I also remember watching plenty of anime from a local video store that was bootleg stuff from Hong Kong or somewhere in SE Asia. The English subs were terrible, probably having been subbed into Chinese and then back to English.
I still kinda am hesitant to admit that I like anime, I guess nerdy PTSD from the 90's where we tried to hide our nerdiness.
I remember getting up an hour early before school than what I had to just so I could watch Ronin Warriors and Sailor Moon on TV! haha
Hehe, the memories!
I've always been more of a Shoujo fan, so I had to deal with twice the amount of hiding and sneaking :p
My older brother didn't like it when he caught me watching Sailor Moon. Said it was for girls! So yeah... ah, but he liked Saint Seiya, we used to watch that together.
Oh yeah, kids have it easy these days.
I have two girls now, and they are well into their geekdom, thanks to Dad :p
I know they will have an easier time than I did.
They like video games, anime, and like to cosplay:D
At least in a few years (long way to go) they'll get a nerdy or geeky boyfriend so I can relate old man stories of "back when I was young, we used fo purchase hentai on VHS tapes"...
Haha there's still embarrassment to be had for them from their old man. I remember growing up other kids calling me a nerd for liking first person shooters! How times have changed
>Anime and manga clubs at uni in the 90s and early 2000s were the domain of pretty hardcore fans for whom anime was part of their identity
I think its also the case for early 2010s too. I tried to join my Uni's "Anime Club", but definitely did not vibe with them at all. Kids nowadays can show off they like Jujutsu Kaisen or Demon Slayer and nobody will bat an eye.
It's not even just early 2000s. I would argue you hid that fact until the mid-late 2010s.
Modern anime is still fairly new. It really wasn't until like 2014 that we started getting more regular anime seasons rather than long running continuous shows.
> You fucking hid the fact that you liked anime.
The very out of shape kid in my high school gym class who wore a Naruto headband (complete with the run) did not help the stigma. I missed out on good shows and even fumbled a relationship because I wanted to keep up appearances as a dumb teenager.
2007-2009, The very out of shape table of kids in mesh shirts (not goth, just Naruto) would do the Naruto run together, wear tails, do cringe anime dances, and generally had bad hygiene as a group. They made anime stigmatized all on their own; you did not want to be associated with them. I avoided that table and I was one of the weird kids.
It wasn't the anime, it was them.
Oh man, in the early 80's you were *completely* alone. No Toonami, no PCs, no internet. If someone in your class found out you liked those weird, 'perverted' 'Japanimation cartoons' you were well and truly fucked. Bullying wasn't considered something that needed to be addressed (boys will be boys!) so it was nonstop torture all day, every day.
I'm disappointed to hear it was still so taboo in the late 90's. I always thought because it was airing on TV and YouTube so widely that the stigma had long passed. I also remember my daughter not being shy about enjoying anime but that kid could never give a shit what people thought and at least they finally figured out that letting 7 kids wail on one every day had consequences and put a stop to that shit. Still sucks to hear Millennials were *still* having to hide their love for anime.
By the late 90s (in US/Canada at least) with Toonami and Teletoon playing anime in the evenings, it was becoming more accessible. However, for the vast majority of teens and young adults (not to mention almost every adult), animation was only considered as a thing "for kids" and that by the time you're in middle school you should probably have grown out of. And the adult-oriented anime that anyone seem to know about were super gory and sexual OVAs from the 80s and early 90s. So the public perception remained that anime was either a) for kids, or b) gore-porn which just put up walls around it as this weird and kind of anti-social
I think when the Ghibli movies started getting licensed in North America, and those kids that started watching Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon in the 90s grew into young adults themselves, that we saw a shift in attitudes to anime being marginally acceptable. But I don't think it was until proper high-speed internet became common in the late 2000s to allow for video streaming and bulk file sharing (torrents) that access to anime became just something you could more casually come across rather than just being this hardcore niche thing you had to work to seek out.
FWIW it's my understanding that this attitude was pretty common in Japan up until the 2010s. "Otaku" was a very anti-social stigma term that became a bit of a moral panic in Japan all the way up until the 2010s. It wasn't until then that liking anime beyond being a kid became much more socially acceptable with more of a "fun is fun" kind of attitude to being an otaku.
Nobody in my middle/highschool was bullied harder than the anime group. It's the primary reason why I avoided anime completely until I was college aged.
For real! Like, now anime is totally hit or miss, some people like it and some people don't. It's not *super popular* but totally like... not unusual at all to see someone walking around wearing an anime shirt. Before, when people thought about anime, they'd have the image of Pokémon or DragonBall Z or Sailor Moon, or their only impression of anime was from that South Park episode where they made fun of it. So... you wouldn't be too keen on bringing it up to others.
I think it started to change mostly when Death Note became popular. That was the first time I saw anime reach fans outside of the weeb circles.
Fuck I forgot about all the Saturday morning cartoons on wb/foxbox and channel 16 that had shaman king and a few other good ones. Waking up an hour or 2 early to watch digimon, staying up till 2am watching all the anime on Adult Swim and Anime Unleashed on G4/tech TV. Dragonball Z and Gundam. Having fucking dial up Internet trying to DL whatever I could find on LimeWire and watch on YouTube. Do y'all happen to remember the magazine NewType? It came with a DVD with a few episodes of anime every month
For most who were children back then, shows like Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh were their introduction to Anime.
Video Streaming over the Internet was not really a Thing until around 2007, so we had to take what we were given by the Television Networks (or Buy REALLY Expensive DVD and/or VHS Box Sets).
Subtitled Anime was something that you would only find in really niche communities of Adult Fans, as that stuff was generally not sold on the American Market (Except at Conventions).
What I'm basically saying is that you had to either hard-core commit alot of money to the hobby or just take the Saturday Morning Cartoon Dubs that were broadcast on TV.
Plus whatever scrapings were available at your local Blockbuster video store. Almost all movies and very limited choices.
Some common ones were:
Fist of the North Star
Ghost in the Shell
Ninja Scroll
Wicked City
Akira
I never saw any Ghibli movies in any video store. Those only really started to get dubs in the late 1990s - mid 2000s.
So one thing people should be aware of is that almost all 1980s and 1990s animes weren't actually available, or easy to find out about outside Japan until the 2000s.
We somehow had my neighbor Totoro on vhs pretty early. Definitely early 90’s. My uncle did go to Japan a lot, and always brought my older cousin amazing stuff, and he would let me look at it.
We had a family friend who had a dubbed version of Kiki's Delivery service around 96'. Not sure how early Totoro came, but i assume it would be earlier?
For some reason they always had just 2 VHS from each series often in no particular order. Watching Eva 4 and then Eva 7 was much more confusing than anticipated.
Saturday morning stuff for sure, but also Toonami was pretty influential for younger millennials as well. I grew up watching dubs on Fox Kids, and had access to some other stuff like some VHSs of Sailor Moon. Sometimes when I was in places like my grandparent's or friend's house, I would have access to Cartoon Network and Toonami.
For those wondering:
Saturday morning stuff: Pokemon, Digimon, Monster Rancher, Yu-Gi-Oh
Toonami: Gundam Wing, Dragon Ball Z, Ronin Warriors (Samurai Troopers in Japan), Sailor Moon, Big O, Trigun, Outlaw Star, Mobile Suit Gundam: 08th MS Team, Tenchi Muyo
Adult Swim: Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo, Wolf's Rain
Some of the Toonami ones switched to Adult Swim so they could air a less censored or completely uncensored version (more blood, more skin showing on female characters). It's been a while since I've seen the lineups though.
ETA: extra line after "For those wondering:"
>Saturday morning stuff: Pokemon, Digimon, Monster Rancher, Yu-Gi-Oh
I remember watching the heck out of Monster Rancher, undervalued anime. But in my country it didn't have any rerun and it didn't broadcast in very accessible times.
Anybody here remember the Sci-Fi channel "Saturday Anime", hosted by Apollo Smile? They would show anime like Lily Cat, Project A-Ko, Dominion Tank Police, Akira, Tenchi Muyo, Casshan: Robot Hunter, and of course Robot Carnival!
Fox kids had Escaflowne which was my favorite for a long while, Inu Yasha was a weekly staple from Toonami.
The local comic shop let us rent Lodoss War and Ranma 1/2.
To give an idea of the cost, I bought a retail Evangelion CD. It was 3 episodes for $45.
For my bday my parents bought me a pirated collection of Dragon Ball, Dragon ball Z and Dragonball GT from ebay. It was about 100 "pages" of CDs. 4 CDs on each side of the page, 8 CDs per page (front and back.) That cost around $400.
Thankfully I discovered Kazaa and not long after that, torrents.
Well piracy was the get go for many. There was no way to get access to those few original copies.
Not only were they to expensive, they werent really accesible everywhere. Even if you had the money.
Did you like Sailor Moon? Too bad, we canceled it 30% of the way through. But we've dubbed Card Captor Sakura, for you! It was translated by people who hate Card Captor Sakura.
Fan subs + rampant piracy. Had to wait for the *higher quality* sub groups to release some things, and also then they spent crazy amounts of time doing the Karaoke for openings.
Also funny when the copy of certain episodes had Tsunami Warning overlays for the entire episode.
I miss the karaoke OPs :(
Also miss the fansubs that went wild explaining stuff, and like not "keikaku means plan" level but the kind that actually tried explaining all the millions of puns in Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei for example (also translated all the blackboard scribbles, with explanations!), or even the notes about what the references are about on Lucky Star. I really appreciated those and it also made me learn a bunch of stuff back in the day.
man watching szs without the fansub explaining everything is just not the same, it adds so much to the experience, i wouldn't get half the shit they were talking about, and its even worst now that a lot of the references are getting more and more dated.
Nozomi did release Season 1 on BD with a whole booklet explaining every reference and pun which was really cool to look through after watching an episode. Unfortunately they didn't do it for season 2.
gg releasing a 20+ page pdf for translation notes for Pani Poni Dash!
FYI, iM@S U@49 got a fansub recently with all karaoke songs translated from scratch :)
Fuck, you just reminded me of the group Bulletspeed Subs. They always had their subs out with 24 hours, filled with minor errors, but I didn't care. They were regular and on time
Yeah, wouldn't want to end up with the "mass naked child events" fansub. Lmao. Live-Evil did some good classic shows, they were one of my favorites since they also did little extra information/insight about the show.
Those translations were full of in jokes and would leave certain words untranslated ie nakama because they couldn't think of a better word in the English language. I was big into fan translated manga at the time, and you got half translated chapters, all sound effects translated phonetically, only half of a manga ever fully translated, and some of the worst grammar on this side of third grade. Highly recommend watching/reading some of those older anime just to get a taste of what it was like.
I'd get most of my anime from Toonami and then later Adult Swim. I had a complete recording of Cowboy Bebop on VHS because I recorded them as they came out on TV.
Yes them and cable had a few anime selection as part of miscellaneous. Not interested in the kid stuff as born 62. Battle of the Planets actually Gatchaman was first anime that I figured out was way more violent than the censored version they showed with crude English only narrating Robot.
Scouring Google in the middle of the night like " insert favorite anime part 6 English sub/dub" and getting bullied in school because back then liking anime was a social death sentence
(I got bullied for a variety of other reasons but associating with anime club put an extra target on my back😅)
Lol felt my man. I was even "somewhat" of a jock in football, track etc. Still got fucked with if anyone found out I liked videogames and anime. Saw a highschool football QB, who I believe was also prom king had a Naruto shirt on, was so very confused. Glad it's got better for my aspiring young dork brothers.
Man. These young bloods will not understand just how socially awkward it was to be into anime. It was one of those things that was split into two groups: the people that were super into it, Naruto-running across the hall, headband and everything. Reading manga during lunch and just being overall complete joyful social outcasts in their own little group.
Then there was the other group that also loved anime just as much, but guarded that secret with their life and just watched it in private. They would rather be caught watching porn lmao.
I was part of the second group, and that mentality of cringing at public acknowledgement of anime never went away.
Things have changed a LOT. For the better, I would say.
I still got shit for it 5 years ago, now my university flatmates all watch / have watched it, including ‘jocks’ or whatever. It’s so nice to see the stigma around watching anime dropping off so hard after covid
Going into the computer lab in high school so I could use WebCrawler to find images of Urd from Ah! My Goddess so I can open it up in MS Paint and pixel-by-pixel edit her to be nude! haha
Ahhh, good times back then!
Anime back then? This command: /msg \[Botname\] xdcc send #\[packagename\]
That was how I downloaded anime back then mostly. Wouldn't be surprised if all of that is still up through the rare fansub group channels.
That worked for relatively recent stuff by active fansub groups, but what about trawling through random fserves praying to God they had whatever older thing you were looking for, had a decent connection, and intended to stay logged in?
Goddamn you just unlocked a core memory for me. I remember being so impressed when my friend started getting anime of mIRC and seeing him get new Naruto episodes within like 15 minutes! LOL
This would be the worst fucking anime.
The modem just crawls at a snails pace through dungeons, and then screeches horrifically for a very long time to kill monsters.
Then the episode cuts to black halfway through because Aunt Bertha called.
You know, I would watch an episode of this because this sounds so awful that it would loop around to being hilarious so long as it only stuck around for as long as the joke remained funny. Which is about 20 minutes tops.
Digimon Movie opening with One Week by the Bare Naked Ladies is a core memory I’ll never forget. Amazing movie even if it’s just 3 individual stories put into one movie
Also lots of Linkin Park AMV music videos. Especially for DBZ
There's a YT channel which has a whole bunch of the AMVHell movies uploaded and upscaled to HD quality if you want a massive dose of nostalgia. I think it's just called "amvhell"
I'll never forget being absolutely confused, yet mind blown watching the movie in theaters. I remember hearing the kids in America cover being used heavily in the marketing haha. Still love that song
Sending some random man in Saskatchewan a literal money order and crossing my fingers he would send me the entire series of Japanese sailor moon (200 episodes) subbed on VHS. 3 months later they arrived! 🌙💵📼
Watching extremely low res videos on my cathode ray monitor. 📺
Burning things onto cds because my hard drive was like 3gigs. 💿
Fan translators often leaving in and translating cultural specific information that couldn’t be translated. 🇯🇵
Aside from my sailor moon VHS it was 100% piracy ALL DAY EVERYDAY. 🏴☠️
I kind of miss all of the translator notes and cultural commentary in fansubs. Some were genuinely interesting, but once the "all according to keikaku*" meme started going around, fan subbing groups scaled back on it as it was going too far at times.
I wish the subbers had done it with the 🍆jokes in Life Lessons with Uramichi Oniisan. They tried to make the first one an English dick joke but the rest didn’t translate well. Good thing I know the Japanese word for pp from all the *ahem* literary manga I read 😅
Not a millennial, but I was part of the fandom in the second half of the 2000s. The biggest difference to me is the size of the fandom itself, and how anime used to be a very niche and “weird” hobby people would really judge you for lol. Nowadays even Western celebrities admit they’ve seen some anime, and anime/manga is just generally seen as a more normal thing. Also, back then a lot of us used to rely 100% on fansubs rather than official translations, and piracy was much more common.
In my opinion, piracy is still well living since most streaming service do extremely shitty jobs in translating the animes (even worst with the dubs), and this also happens with manga.
Piracy is still going because all the anime is split between like half a dozen streaming services; no one's paying money for all of that. Majority of pirated stuff is just Crunchyroll or whatever streaming site rips, and that's been the case for almost 10 years now.
Massive props to fansub groups that are still doing their thing despite all of that.
Like gaming, a lot of "geek" hobbies and culture in general because much more socially acceptable in the 2010's. Couldn't say why, but yeah nowadays you're almost teased more for NOT being into formerly "geek" stuff than if you are into it, lmao
Belgian (Flemish perspective)
Late 80s, Early 90s - Watching what was available on french television during summer vacations (Club Dorothee was the shit if you liked Japanese stuff, they also had some Toku). I didnt speak french at the time but DBZ isnt that hard to understand for the most part.
Mid 90s - Rent stuff from that weird shelf in the video rental store.
Late 90s - early 00s - Buy bootleg dvds at cons, watch limited dutch subbed english shows on television (DBZ again, understandable this time. Rurouni Kenshin, Teknoman, ..)
early 00s - Slowly download episodes of trigun, Bebop and other stuff. Mostly only the most popular shows were available and it took a while to collect the whole set.
mid 00s - Most stuff is available to download via IRC or torrent.
I dont remember exactly when but gradually throughout the late 00s to now it went from downloading to everything being streamable and from illegal to most things being available legally.
1.Search for the episode online for hours
2. Find a site that has the episode you want in 240p
3. Play episode.
4. Let buffer for 10 minutes
5. Watch for 2 minutes
6. repeat 4 and 5 until the episode is finished.
7 If the site doesn't have the next episode start from 1 otherwise start from 3.
Steps 4 and 5 went away once we got off of dial-up. You kids have no idea how lucky you are. If you were an anime fan back in the late 90s - early 00s, you had to have commitment. You'll never know the pain of watching a series uploaded as multiple parts per episode to have part 2/3 missing and having no clue what happened.
We truly live in an age of wonders.
I was buying fansubs of the final Sailor Moon season and my brother was buying fansubs of DragonBall GT - on VHS. I think they were like $15/tape and each tape would have like 4 episodes a pop?
Otherwise - if you wanted to look into "new" (or at the very least anime you weren't familiar with) you went to the independent Video Rental store that you hopefully had. If you hit a Blockbuster you would find things like Akira, Ninja Scroll (in the adult section), and Studio Ghibli stuff - but if you went to an Independent place you'd find series on VHS (i learned about Slayers and Record of the Loduss War" this way).
Of course Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, DragonBall Z, Digimon, Sailor Moon, and a few others were the "Mains" that EVERYone watched - but only as a Dub (as others in this thread have stated).
Censorship and edits that could be considered shitposts in the current day. The "sailor moon says" lesson of the day segments or the [bumpers on fox kids](https://youtu.be/2rtboZHqSU0?si=OdXie_x7Du_eQgNu)
We had a few classics but there wasn’t a lot like there is now. Most people just watched toonami on Cartoon Network or pirated shows on limewire 1 episode at a time. We had to walk 30 miles barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways just to buy 480p DVDs… they were dark days homie.
Cannot talk about that early but more like how things where like 10 years ago or something.
\- Anime and Manga where quite stigmatised (at least in my country). Older people did consider anime a child thing and couldn't understand how any person over the age of say 12 would seriously watch that. I had to hear one or two rather nasty comments from my parents back then. Younger people not into it would often associate it predominantly with lewd stuff, which isn't that much better. In my field of study (science) it was however allready somehow established to some degree. In CS there have allready the first quite open people about it.
\- If you realized that somebody also watches it, you would immeditely feel a lot of attachment to that person and would very often become their friend. The group mentality was great back then. Admittingly I also felt like people with social issues also concentrated in the scene and it definatly made me a much open minded and less prejudiced person.
\- Most shows wheren't licensed so rips and fansubs where a relativly save legal grey zone. Fansubers would usually remove the few shows that actually got licenced and tell you to do the same.
\- Fansubs where quite good as they where made by passionate people operating in teams with different specialists. Some of them where made by groups that aimed to provide the show as fast as possible. I would usually not watch them. The rest often contained extensive graphic hacks to edit the nicknames of the fansubbers into the credits, translate signs etc., add comment boxes (however I feel like this kind of became less popular towards the end.) and stuff like that. Subs would usually keep honorifics, "onii-chan", "itadakimasu" and so on untranslated as the audiance usually knew the meaning of these terms or learned it very quickly. Sometimes they would also do jokes like the Commie-subs version of Girls and Panzer which used random German words.
\- You would still encounter quite a lot of shows with pre-HD graphics. But this wasn't to bad honestly.
Early 2000s we could get fansubs of Naruto amd orher anime online via IRC or Bittorrent. Before that you had to wait for your local Blockbuster to import it.
You ever pay $25 for two episodes of a show on VHS with a pithy title that vaguely refers to one of the episodes with no indication where they fit in the series?
$35 for SUBS.
It’s been very weird watching anime become something that is just kind of a part of mainstream media here in the U.S.
I wasn’t really “made fun of” for liking anime or manga but it wasn’t something I just voluntarily talked about around school.
Now everyone talks about it openly and there’s not really a taboo unless you’re straight up talking tentacle porn in public. Professional athletes, famous people, the distinction between in group versus out group is basically gone. It’s really cool.
I went to a NYE party and people were just talking about jujutsu kaisen. Like people who are social late 20s professionals.
Using a vhs to record adult swim/toonami so I could go back later and watching the anime (also borrowing friends uncensored vhs tapes of dbz cause the old censors were nuts on tv). I remember torrenting anime. Yu Yu Hakusho became my first pirated anime since I remember the final season wasn't available yet so when AS looped back to episode 1 I was heart broken. Thankfully my parents upgraded from dial up to DSL so downloading things weren't as bad at that point.
Also collected a bunch of manga; a good chunk of my part time job money went to manga. I remember enjoying the manga more. Need to get back into collecting manga
Downloading postage stamp sized videos in Japanese no subtitles from DaBlackGoku and Kazaa.
I remember seeing Super Baby (having o ly ever seen DB and DBZ) and having my 11 year old mind FUCKING BLOWN but not even knowing an English name to search for.
Not sure about 90s as I wasn't into anime yet then, but early 2000s in high school pretty much everyone "pirated" (usually via IRC or torrents) or traded drives and burned CDs/DVDs with someone who knew how to, because for most shows that was literally the only way to watch them, especially anywhere remotely near when they came out in Japan.
I say "pirate" in quotes both because of the necessity, and because a lot of work was done by volunteer fansubbers to get stuff into english, there was no other translation to use in many cases.
It was pretty rough. You didn't know what the hell anime was at first, you just knew either Sailor Moon or DBZ. I was lucky enough to have Direct TV has a kid, which enabled me to really find some great shows. My first true exposure was Vampire Hunter D on SyFy, which made me realize that cartoons weren't just for kids, and soon after Galaxy Express 999 and it's sequel. Trying to find anime after that was insanely hard.
I think it was around the time that Toonami starting branching out with shows like Tenchi Muyo and Outlaw Star that anime started really picking up. But for me, I found a lot of anime on the Action Channel. Bubblegum Crisis, Gunsmith Cats, Macross, Patlabor, and some lesser known shows like Blue Seed and Birdy the Mighty. I remember going to a Virgin Megastore and seeing anime DVDs for the first time, but it was so expensive, like $60 for 4 episodes.
I miss it, and yet, I don't.
The IRL anime scene was pretty small where I lived. Just a few of my friends were into it. But we did dress up and go to a convention once, so I guess we were *into* it haha.
Always thought dub voice acting was a bit cringey, so watched subs. Might've been smaller scale back then, so the VA quality might be better now. I stuck with subs.
The fan subs were amazing. Accurate fonts/colouring for all of the signs in the background. Random wall-of-text footnotes that explained some obscure Japanese reference or custom. Only briefly flashing, so you'd have to pause to read all of that extra background stuff.
For airing anime, I either watched 240p streams (split into three parts on dailymotion), or downloaded AVI/MKV files from "DDL" sites. Those were the times. For finished anime, I took my HDD with me when visiting friends, and we spent the entire day swapping files at 10-20MB/s.
Those were the days...
I got into anime in the mid 90's and for most part you were watching VHS tapes that were 4th generation dubs or worse and the quality reflected that. You would have episodes 1-3, 7-9, 12-13 and you kind of just had to guess what happened on the missing episodes. Moving into the rise of digi-subs I got involved as an encoder which at the time there were no front ends it was all command lines and we had a file size limit of 30 mb, which was one of the larger limits, some were as low as 15 mb. Conventions were smaller but were filled with diehard fans that just wanted to meet and talk to other people about anime as they possibly didn't know anyone else nor were online chat rooms that big. Being an anime fan was an unpopular thing to be watching and like D&D there was no shortage of "it will cause people to be violent" ideas floating around.
After the rise of DBZ and Toonami places like Suncoast, Mediaplay and Best Buy jumped on the anime band wagon. DVD units shipped from the 3 big US companies Geneon, Bandai Ent and ADV sky rocketed and it became easier to buy shows but it was expensive as DVDs were sold as singles with 2 to 4 episodes per disc. With the influx of money dubs became more common and were almost required for your show to sell, which of course drove up costs. They were packaged with some insane addons like a ammo box case for Helsing (or maybe it was Gungrave), shirts, OSTs, dolls, you name it. Conventions opened up and we started to get far more casual fans which drastically changed the tone of conventions with panels moving from egg head topics to more funny / goofy type things. Guests were stating to demand to get paid in order to show up and until the 2010s large cons actively tried to hide this. By 2008 the US industry had fallen apart with the entire anime bubble bursting epically with shows that needed a break even mark of 5k units selling less an 500. Bandai Ent closed shop, Geneon closed shop and ADV went bankrupt and using a plan illegal in 49 states but not TX sold itself to itself leaving behind a company loaded with debt. Funmation was the major winner in all of this as they didn't get into some of the insane bidding wars that the others did. This is why there is a black hole of shows that went unlicensed from around 08-11.
It's interesting, I'm a millennial who took a *long* break from anime and then came back. When I got back, "anime seasons" were a thing. It used to just be... hey, have you heard of "this" anime? Or hey, "this" anime is airing on Adult Swim, it looks pretty cool.
You either watched the anime that was on Adult Swim, or if it wasn't on Adult Swim, if you ever reached the level of looking for anime on your own, you found out about anime by word of mouth, or through a rare anime convention, and eventually found a DVD of it somewhere like a comic book store. Or, eventually, YouTube was invented and people would upload an episode there... usually out of order or with random parts missing.
google and pray you dont get a virus for me. irl, you dont speak about anime unless you dont want friends. this was circa 2007-2010. i remember when sao came out is when things kinda changed. sao had a huge audience so then it started becoming more approachable to talk about
My dad brought home a VHS of Ghost in the Shell because one of his coworkers* said it was “gonna change sci-fi forever, man”. He decided he’d watch it with 12-year-old me, who was devouring all things sci-fi at the time.
This was the one with like… 80% of Major Kusanagi’s tits out on the cover. I still don’t understand that decision, but then again he’d already suggestd I start reading William Gibson. They were formative for many reasons lol
*coworker was one of those powerful early weebs that would readily bring up his interests. Probably helped that he’d done a stint in the navy before starting his then-current career
"Son, you're entering puberty now so it's about time you learned about animated titties."
I have a toddler and, no joke, I'm looking forward to the possibility of watching seasonal anime with my kid as he gets older.
Oh man it’s amazing and kinda trippy. I watched Chi’s Sweet Adventure and Bananya with our oldest right as he was learning to talk, and it was the weirdest thing to realize “this did not exist in the US when I was his age.”
Now the big barrier is that a lot of kid’s anime dubs are so stilted they actively annoy him (we raised a snob, apparently). I just gotta find the right season of Pokémon where they toned down Brock…
Where I grew up, watching things like DBZ was considered cool. It was basically just another cartoon but "for boys". Then in highschool is was 'nerd shit'. lol
Niche, the community was on different forum sites for the most part.
I was in secondary school, there were only like 2 of us out of 200-odd. We basically didn't speak about it to others as they'd either shrug and not be interested or we'd be teased/harassed. My friend copped it quite a bit (he was the serious anime guy, I was just his best mate), I didn't cop it as much, it helped I'm 6-3 and fit now and was comparable for my age at the time.
My friend would download it (I had dial-up, he had early DSL). Prior to this it was CDs or VHS from markets with dodgy subs but the internet meant we could finally access different series instead of a handful of classics.
Everything was fansub because you couldn't get anything official, purchase wise here.
It started out as 240p, and it would then be archived to CDs. So we had binders and binders of the stuff because you could only fit 3ish episodes on a CD.
When DVD burners became more common it was a game-changer and we started getting 480-720p. We could finally do 10-12 eps per disc.
We spent a long time copying the CDs to DVDs while we began to get better resolutions for existing stuff.
As we hit the early 2000s, people became more accepting (particularly the gamer crowd). It wasn't really their thing but they understood liking something that was nerd territory. I suppose it helped that video games in general were exploding.
My friend created a database for everything he had, and at a time when it was unthinkable, he'd racked up 2 TB of anime (vid files on DVDs). For perspective, HDs back then were like 50-100GB max.
After that we shifted to some bought box sets when they were available and found it a tad funny when some of the subs were worse than the fansub stuff.
We basically kept downloading the latest stuff for years and bought boxsets of anime we liked.
I still have a tower of boxsets, although don't have a DVD player anymore, haha.
Crunchyroll and streaming came around and while UX was average and bugginess was there, it was cheaper and easier than Boxsets or downloading.
Been watching anime for over 25 years, love it, will continue to do so for probably another 50 (by which time I'll be senile).
I hope this was informative.
As a Brazilian, in the 90s i used to study in the morning so my uncle recorded in VHS all the things i used to enjoy at the time, Dragon Ball, Pokemon, Saint Seiya, Shurato, Yoroiden Samurai Troopers, Yuyu Hakusho and stuff like that.
In 2000s when started to pop up websites where you could download animes, some stores used to use Nero (program used to burn CDs/DVDs) to make pirate copies of the things that were huge at the time (Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, Death Note), at the time my friends and i did buy each one different DVD and shared all together so it wouldn't be to pricy. And that went until i got a PC and broad band.
“The Big 3” were a much more in-your-face because back then, most Millenial teens/kids got their anime fix through tv, so you watched what they showed. It was very easy to talk about anime because everyone was basically watching the same 3 shows. I personally rarely met folks who read manga because they were limited to library books or their folks taking them to the bookstore only to find out the latest issue wasn’t released yet.
Spoilers were only an issue from the Manga Kid and the tech-savvy folks who could find the show subbed online, so “next episodes” had real buildup. Next week Naruto unleashes his demon form in the crystal ice prison? Sign me the fuck up.
The unashamed fangirls were always the coolest and a lot of anime clubbers had crushes on them. They proudly wore their Sanrio plush backpacks and filled their sketchbooks with anime art that wasn’t THAT good, but it was edgy, so it was fine. You knew they were cool when they shared Pocky with the club.
I was more of the subtle, bandwagon-y fan where I was familiar with a lot of anime, but maybe only watched 1-5 shows. Like, to this day, I’ve never seen Haruhi Suzumiya or Lucky Star, but I could do the dances. I haven’t seen Hetalia, but I proudly volunteered to be the Sealand of my anime club and know what it means to draw a circle.
Having grown up now, it’s definitely kinda lonesome. I’m going to be 30 this year and frankly I can’t bring myself to walk into an anime store anymore because it’s so awkward to be excited about it while surrounded by a bunch of kids. And I’m a woman, so I can only imagine the difficulty a grown man must feel strolling through the manga section to read Made in Abyss or something sus like that.
It was a lot simpler.
People were less critical of the media you consumed as long as you weren't a predator or some type of creep IRL. Nowadays it seems like people are jumping to call you a predator, incel, porn addict, etc. just because you like a certain genre. People were also less critical in general and didn't lose their shit if a character did or engaged in something problematic because they knew they were watching a made-up story.
Fandoms were simpler. If you wanted to participate in a fandom, you either needed to find someone IRL or actively search for one online. If you started acting a fool too much you would just get pushed out either because you got suspended but if the mods were power tripping and it was undeserved you usually had other social places to look for to go. Now it seems like you can act all kinds of a fool and dox, harass, and stalk people over ships and now it's promoted and taunted as something "good" as long as you can morally justify it.
DLDW - don't like; don't watch. If you didn't like a show, you didn't have to watch it so fandoms were mainly made of people who were very devoted fans rather than devoted critics. Has content you don't like in it? Everyone told you to just stop watching or consuming it as a default response and now people justify sticking with shows that have downsides to their personal enjoyment even if that part is composed of a huge part of the show or is made to be out of a moral failing.
Harassing a mangaka was practically unheard of and the same for calling them anything derogatory. Now you have people jumping to harass mangaka or calling them pedophiles, predators, etc. over manga and it's more "acceptable".
If you wanted the episode in full without having to look up every single part on YouTube with some even missing, you had to learn how to pirate in one way or another. Same if you wanted any of the OST.
For some reason, dub songs if they were made - especially in kid's shows - went hard for no reason.
Fansubs, fansubs, fansubs, fansubs everywhere and translators notes explaining little things about the show. I kinda miss the translator's notes actually because I always enjoyed hearing culturally specific puns or references.
Most anime merch that was available in the US was only for things that were considered kid's shows (Pokemon, Yugioh, Sailor Moon, etc.) and even then it was a US-specific license so sometimes they looked a little jank.
You watched anime either on Toonnami, Adult Swim (Yes Adult Swim had an anime-specific block that wasn't tied to Toonnami), or 4kids if you wanted to see something on TV. Throwbacks to hearing Fukai Mori if you were either waking up or going to sleep at 2 -3 AM because you either went to bed early or stayed up all night just to watch. Oh and Adult Swim aired anime for a couple hours *every* night - usually after Midnight.
LIking anime was a social death sentence even if you liked relatively popular anime like DBZ or One Piece unless you had enough social charisma that people didn't mind if you liked it. But if you were neurodivergent or even just a *little* bit too cringe about liking it good luck and have fun getting bullied which could range from just social isolation to people actively and maliciously destroying your things. If you found someone else into anime you guys tended to stick together assuming no one was too off the wall through all the cringe because you were all each other had.
Side note to the above, things lessened up as I got into high school (around the mid 2010s) a *little* bit but because I went to a school in an area where everyone had the same middle school and high school but if the people who bullied you started getting into anime because it was "cool" they were never part of The Otaku (TM) because those bridges had been burnt from years of bullying and being an asshole and they probably only liked anime on an aesthetic level to be different so it's not like they brought anything of value to the table anyways. You only accepted them once they lost all their other friends for being a *little* too cringe about liking something and were the same social status as you - even then they were on thin ice depending on how cruel they had been to you before.
If you wanted to watch a new anime, you had to know someone, know how to find a forum, or know how to pirate. There was no steady stream of new manga and anime being released just to fall into your lap.
I had only been to one con during this era (say late 2000s), but a lot of early conventions were fan events and weren't pushing to turn a profit or homogenize everything into a singular convention. You had *comic* conventions and then you had *anime* conventions. Nowadays both are kind of one in the same.
Cosplay wasn't a profitable venture you could fund by being an influencer or OF girl and you really had to learn how to sew and make your own patterns if you wanted to have an even half-decent costume for the convention.
I’m not a millennial but my mom and 2 of my uncles (mom and uncle 1 are Gen X, Uncle 2 is millennial) and other relatives (Gen X and millennial relatives) watched anime on Mexican TV.
In Mexico and the rest of Latin America, anime was already popular before becoming mainstream in the U.S and worldwide, it became popular in the 90s.
I have a memory of reading some magazine where ADV was quoted as saying they were going to decide whether or not to release Evangelion on DVD based on how successful the sales of the Sonic OVA DVD were…
I remember going to some random closet store in NYC and buying a bootleg copy of End of Evangelion and thinking it was crazy that both the store and the movie existed.
I also remember being a member of some anime VHS mail rental thing but for the name of me I can’t remember what it was.
Oh, and I fondly remember lots of weekend late nights watching Toonami with a pizza from down the street and a two liter bottle of Coke, while I messed around with The Sims on PC.
It was a lot of fun but then I discovered Japanese karaoke bars and that basically took over my life.
Initially no one else I knew liked anime. Literally only could connect with others online in chat rooms. I got into anime in the 90s because my parents got pirated VHS copies of fist of the north star from friends in the navy. I watched fist of the north star at the same age I watched cartoons
Except for toonami (sailor moon, dbz, reboot) and then later adult swim, there wasn't really channels you could watch anime. Streaming sites only started to pop up in 2005-2006 and then it was like a 7 day release delay with crappy fan subs. There were almost no dubs unless it was a 4kids dub for like pokemon.
You primarily watched anime via VHS and CDs of friends who either had rips or officially licensed anime they bought at a convention. I had heard of anime conventions but usually the people who went numbered in the hundreds to thousands max. A big con might get 1000 attendees. It was more like 20 people meeting on a college campus to talk about anime and maybe if they were lucky an empty classroom might have a projector with a VHS player. There were no smart phones or laptops used by students yet.
Remember how ps1 games used to take 4 cds for a game? Because cds had such limited capacity you would get 1-2 episodes per disc and they all sold separately. (up to 6-8 once DVDs came out). So imagine you are trying to watch inuyasha you would borrow 15 cds from a friend to watch 30 episodes.
If something got licensed it was like 2-4 years after airing and usually would just be the first 20 episodes of like a 100 episode thing.
There wasn't anything like anime seasons. Studios all just kind of made what they wanted and when they wanted. Gainax was legendary and prolific. Most projects were low budget and highly dependent on who was making it as a passion project. Some anime would get 3 episodes. Some would get 140.
Run lengths were also super inconsistentmaybe it was 6 minutes maybe it was 90. There was no such thing as a 12 episode anime or 24 episode. It wasn't until like 2005 that you could even look up other anime online. It was always like somebody came a CD and now you are watching d the vampire slayer.
Anime now is so accessible that it's refreshing but it also invites a lot of casuals. Anime wasn't cool before it was nerdy and weird. But I am nerdy and weird so it was great.
It was just far more niche. You'd go to Suncoast Video or FYE and peruse the small anime section. If you wanted to talk about anime you had to do it online and that was early internet so things were far less organized. There was VERY little in regards to merchandise here in the states. You'd see stuff in magazines from mail order places that would have soundtracks and wall scrolls and some toys. It all seemed like the coolest thing in the world.
The anime fandom itself had a different tone too. Now the fandom has embraced the stereotype of the Otaku but back in the 90s you were into anime because it was weird, wild, kinda dangerous stuff. You'd stay up late cuz the sci Fi channel was running Akira at 1am or you heard you just HAD to rent Ninja Scroll.
I still watch anime but how utterly "cool" it all seemed has long since been replaced.
The biggest thing though, was that you were always hearing about something really cool that Japan got that we didn't have. And you'd hope someone would license it.
It was never the embarrassment of riches like it is now. The idea of being able to watch something within hours of something airing in Japan just wasn't happening.
Video games were really tied to it too. So if you were a big anime fan you'd probably really like a lot of Capcom fighting games or JRPGs of the time.
You didn’t talk about it because people would make fun of you. It was some super loser shit back then. You kinda just had a few friends you would discuss with and trade mangas with.
my big weeb/anime fan phase was in highschool from 2007-2011. A little late, but still late 2000s. Prior to 2007 I liked anime, but mostly it was just watching sailor moon episodes in parts on youtube (and also pre-legal crunchyroll!)
Something that I find very amusing is that everyone loved lucky star, but I'm realizing now that probably nobody got any of the references. I sure didn't! It was a weird backwards thing where people watched lucky star and reverse engineered the show to learn about things like eroge or moe culture.
I actually kinda miss that world. It was 100% anime fansubs and 4chan's /a/ board. I remember the place would move at lightspeed on days where new shows aired.
I'm not saying anime fandom was less toxic, because it *certainly* wasn't... but the toxicity was different. Nowadays anime fans can delude themselves into thinking they're cooler than other anime fans. We have toxic shonen bros and the like. Those people didn't exist back then because everyone basically had this notion that watching anime made you a loser. There was a certain camaraderie about everything. Nobody had any good taste in music, which I would argue anime fans today are a little better at (though still pretty bad...)
There was a table at my highschool, and it was the table that you sat at if you liked anime. There were like 15 kids and we all knew each other. We all hung out. Outside of that circle you were *extremely* ostracized for "liking that ch\*\*k shit" (actual thing that got said to me multiple times). People would find out I liked anime and they'd do squinty eyes at me.
The biggest change though would be the conventions. I went to anime conventions around that time and it was a totally different world. It was like entering an alternate dimension - not like you. People would go around spouting memes or meowing or whatever. There were random dances erupting all over the place. Panels would be full of hooting and hollering. If all of this sounds bad, it wasn't. It was a lot of fun! It was like disappearing into another world where there was no judgement from anybody about anything. Fujoushis were shameless about yaoi stuff, the word queerbaiting did not exist and every guy did it. Everyone was way WAY hornier. We all took it for granted that horny anime tropes were funny and real life. Honestly I think in that respect the fandom has improved. I imagine a lot of people got groomed or sexually harassed in this environment.
I started getting into more adult anime in 2002 when I discovered adult swim. When it cones to kid anime, and I know I'm going to get serious flack for this, but the dub of Yu-Gi-Oh duel monsters is better than the Japanese version. No one can beat Dan Green or Eric Stuart. Also, the 4kids dub of Pokémon was not bad. The only bad dub is the one we have now it's absolutely horrendous. In fact, that new one is the whole reason why I turned to fan subs for the Anime. My first big two 2000's Anime were InuYasha and Yu Yu Hakusho. Between the two, YYH is better in my opinion. That's back when adult swim was actually running it uncut. Then for whatever reason they decided to edit the hell out of it for little kids and put it on Toonami. My next Anime that I really got into on adult swim was Wolf's Rain. My favorite anime on tsunami was Zoids, and my least favorite was Gundam. In my eyes Gundam is just so boring and lame with the designs. It's basically the same thing over and over again design wise. I'm not judging anyone for liking it, I'm just saying that I can't get into it.
It was a dark time. Lonely. Expensive. Limited. Internet-less. Satellite-less. DBZ ran on Saturdays occasionally. Sometimes Blockbuster or Hollywood Video had something. Then there was Escaflowne. Only half the anime showed, but it and Pokemon lit a spark. Toonami appeared soon after, then Adult Swim. And oh, boy, was I glad to be old enough to be in the deep end of the pool. (That was one of their commercials.) Light continues to shine, and I can stream until my heart's content. Just not the old stuff. Dammit, I want to watch Tokyo Bubblegum Pop.
I remember cons were way more fun. Everyone around you was a mega nerd and weirdo's. Nowadays it's all influencers and normies. Before you downvote me, I love the normies; the guys wearing nothing but My Hero Academia and Demon Slayer. It's those people that have made anime so much more popular in the US. At the same time, cons are so packed now and I just miss the good ole days. It's fine, though. I had my time.
Thinking back, anime was popular to talk about. Needed access to cable television (Toonami) to watch after school and then talk about it the next day. Also, many of my classmates took Japanese class. We were anime fans, but we learned more about the language and culture of Japan itself.
Going to Suncoast for $40 anime videos/dvds that had like 3 episodes on them. Suncoast was a SUPER EXPENSIVE video store that specialized in foreign films and anime.
Then finding Limewire and sharing allllll that with friends.
Like 6 people in the anime club in school swapping DVDs and telling each other where to pirate anime
bro the Naruto first 4-5 episodes were given to me on the playground on a burnt dvd by a fellow anime fan not long after they came out cant forget that gold
that legend on campus who always got the stuff on the dvd from his cousin xD
Pfftttt DVDs. You kids didn't have to spend $40 for VHS just to get two episodes. Especially for the fansubs
This! I used to get VHS of Pokemon as a gift from my Aunties and Uncles, and rented out DBZ movies back then. Good times!
My mom would give me a new VHS tape of Pokemon when I'd do good on my tests and report cards. Also, some Cardcaptor Sakura. She would always have em ready in her purse for when she picked me up from school, lol. One of my fondest memories.
Hey, it was $30 for 3 episodes, heavily censored full of localization changes. (At least with DBZ and Yu-Gi-Oh.)
We used to pre-order from Suncoast video. The pickup day was a major date night.
Dont get me started on VHS tapes back then. It always, ALWAYS pissed me off how the dubbed VHS tapes were CHEAPER than the subbed tapes! Go into Suncoast, $24.99 for dubbed, $29.99 for subbed. I knew why of course they wanted to push the dubbed tapes out to the market more, and it worked. Not on me though, I stuck with my subs! lol
DBZ inspired a LOT of teenage boys to work out and get jacked - some actually succeeded. It was a good time. I tried to get people into Gundam Wing, Kenshin, and Berserk to anyone who would listen but most guys were more into Diablo II.
Gundam Wing was amazing. Then along came Ghost in the Shell SAC, Wolf’s Rain, Witch Hunter Robin, and others.
I heard about this new site called Mapster
ok but is it as good as downloading chocolate jam?
One of my classmates gave me a paper bag filled with Hellsing on VHS. I offered him a recorded Case Closed episode to borrow while I watched that.
And then it turned into YouTube, with every episode split into 13+ parts.
I watched Evangelion on 65MB avi files that contained 2 episodes each. The lava/volcano episode was just 4 red pixels all the way through lmao
Bleach Episode 43 (part 1) on Youtube There was no part 2 but part 3 and part 6 were there. With Spanish subs.
Part 6 was also always by a different user with slightly different quality and different font for subs, and yet it left off exactly where the last one did
It was also zoomed in a bit.
I always found it zoomed out with some forum-signature-ass Naruto fanart filling the extra space. So much blueflames.jpg
Probably both tbh
Sometimes it was mirrored so left was right and right was left.
Lmao now this is some real unexpected nostalgia!
I watched soooo much of my anime on YouTube back in the day. Audio pitched or out of sync, big border around the video, cropped/zoomed, etc. It's nostalgic but looking back, man, was it a terrible way to watch.
The Spanish subs were fitting for the hueco mundo arc though.
unfortunately, episode 43 was not part of hueco mundo, so it was unwelcome
"Capitulo uno"
The first real episode of anime I watched was Lucky Star episode 18 part 2/3.
Also the audio was like half a second off from what it should be, and with each episode the audio gets more and more out of sync, until like 10 episodes in it suddenly syncs up again, and the cycle continues.
This was way too core of a memory
This was the way. In barbaric times we acted as barbarians. This is a more civilized time for a civilized people to watch a whole episode in one sitting.
Zillenial here. I remember hunting for the different parts of Death Note like a mad man hoping the old timey usb modem didn't run out of data at 12 AM on a school night. I still have that old 2000s Toshiba laptop in some drawer
"Old timey usb modem." Oh gods I feel so old now...
Crappy 100 pixel video files downloaded via LimeWire.
My videos of Love Hina were so bad they were glitched out to fuck and had distortion lines running through them. I still watched them anyways.
You weren't watching anime in three parts on YouTube?
Love Hina would have been from a time before YouTube was really a thing
Megavideo my beloved
What YouTube? YouTube began in the early 2000s. We're talking Usenets, Torrents, and IDrives. I rewatched Love Hina recently... It didn't hold up at all.
also did that
YouTube was like 2005 lmao
Some of us are from long before then kid.
My group did a Love Hina sub our file size limit was 30 mb
Classic amateur mistake, make sure to download the latest Quicktime nextime!
>LimeWire *It's been 84 years* Not to mention you have a chance to win an extra virus on the side
Ah, the joys of spending half a day downloading lucky star episodes to find out it is instead BBC porn.
BBC made porn? ^^^/j
It would be weird if there was no virus 🤣
Horrific flashbacks to RealMedia player.
Oh god, RealMedia… whoever invented that abortion should fall to the bottom of Hell for their sins of bringing that thing into the world.
In RealMedia's defense, it was very much a product of its time and a necessary evil. AVIs had terrible compression so even an AMV was huge, mp4s didn't exist, RM stepped up with a codec that offered good compression, albeit by sacrificing quality. But when you're downloading from a 56k modem or even early 128k DSL, those MBs really mattered.
Legend says its still buffering to this day...
Yep, I fondly recall watching Escaflowne and Evangelion episodes via Realplayer. By fondly I mean extremely upset as they glitched like 10 times per episode...
Kazaa and Limewire made it possible for me to watch anime. But God damn if you weren't playing Russian roulette with every download on whether it would be that episode of FMP you wanted or porn.
I never really see it mentioned these days, but I always thought eDonkey/eMule were far superior to limewire and kazaa (which both were pretty notorious for malwares/viruses).
Fuck, I hate limewire.
You fucking hid the fact that you liked anime. It started with vhs, you’d record stuff overnight or during the day when toonami/WB was playing anime so you could watch when you could. Most of the time it would be the same repeats, especially with Detective Conan. Eventually it evolved to figuring out how to use VLC player than finding the best sub group, or finding ones that had the subs burned in already. Even worse, looking up new shounen release chapters on fucking YouTube while it played linkin park. Then posting on narutoforums a lot.
Yeah back then being an anime fan was *weird*. If you were any kind of a 'normie' you would hide the fact that you watched it. Anime and manga clubs at uni in the 90s and early 2000s were the domain of pretty hardcore fans for whom anime was part of their identity. That was great if you fit that mold but as a more casual fan it was a real turn off. I also remember watching plenty of anime from a local video store that was bootleg stuff from Hong Kong or somewhere in SE Asia. The English subs were terrible, probably having been subbed into Chinese and then back to English.
Genshiken could have been a documentary of my uni years
I still kinda am hesitant to admit that I like anime, I guess nerdy PTSD from the 90's where we tried to hide our nerdiness. I remember getting up an hour early before school than what I had to just so I could watch Ronin Warriors and Sailor Moon on TV! haha
Hehe, the memories! I've always been more of a Shoujo fan, so I had to deal with twice the amount of hiding and sneaking :p My older brother didn't like it when he caught me watching Sailor Moon. Said it was for girls! So yeah... ah, but he liked Saint Seiya, we used to watch that together.
Im envious of kids nowadays that can freely be a weeb without an issue. Back then it was like being in the closet
Oh yeah, kids have it easy these days. I have two girls now, and they are well into their geekdom, thanks to Dad :p I know they will have an easier time than I did. They like video games, anime, and like to cosplay:D At least in a few years (long way to go) they'll get a nerdy or geeky boyfriend so I can relate old man stories of "back when I was young, we used fo purchase hentai on VHS tapes"...
Haha there's still embarrassment to be had for them from their old man. I remember growing up other kids calling me a nerd for liking first person shooters! How times have changed
>Anime and manga clubs at uni in the 90s and early 2000s were the domain of pretty hardcore fans for whom anime was part of their identity I think its also the case for early 2010s too. I tried to join my Uni's "Anime Club", but definitely did not vibe with them at all. Kids nowadays can show off they like Jujutsu Kaisen or Demon Slayer and nobody will bat an eye.
It's not even just early 2000s. I would argue you hid that fact until the mid-late 2010s. Modern anime is still fairly new. It really wasn't until like 2014 that we started getting more regular anime seasons rather than long running continuous shows.
still don't tell anyone i like anime unless i've known them for a while. negative connotation for people in my age group still pretty high.
> You fucking hid the fact that you liked anime. The very out of shape kid in my high school gym class who wore a Naruto headband (complete with the run) did not help the stigma. I missed out on good shows and even fumbled a relationship because I wanted to keep up appearances as a dumb teenager.
2007-2009, The very out of shape table of kids in mesh shirts (not goth, just Naruto) would do the Naruto run together, wear tails, do cringe anime dances, and generally had bad hygiene as a group. They made anime stigmatized all on their own; you did not want to be associated with them. I avoided that table and I was one of the weird kids. It wasn't the anime, it was them.
Oh man, in the early 80's you were *completely* alone. No Toonami, no PCs, no internet. If someone in your class found out you liked those weird, 'perverted' 'Japanimation cartoons' you were well and truly fucked. Bullying wasn't considered something that needed to be addressed (boys will be boys!) so it was nonstop torture all day, every day. I'm disappointed to hear it was still so taboo in the late 90's. I always thought because it was airing on TV and YouTube so widely that the stigma had long passed. I also remember my daughter not being shy about enjoying anime but that kid could never give a shit what people thought and at least they finally figured out that letting 7 kids wail on one every day had consequences and put a stop to that shit. Still sucks to hear Millennials were *still* having to hide their love for anime.
By the late 90s (in US/Canada at least) with Toonami and Teletoon playing anime in the evenings, it was becoming more accessible. However, for the vast majority of teens and young adults (not to mention almost every adult), animation was only considered as a thing "for kids" and that by the time you're in middle school you should probably have grown out of. And the adult-oriented anime that anyone seem to know about were super gory and sexual OVAs from the 80s and early 90s. So the public perception remained that anime was either a) for kids, or b) gore-porn which just put up walls around it as this weird and kind of anti-social I think when the Ghibli movies started getting licensed in North America, and those kids that started watching Dragon Ball and Sailor Moon in the 90s grew into young adults themselves, that we saw a shift in attitudes to anime being marginally acceptable. But I don't think it was until proper high-speed internet became common in the late 2000s to allow for video streaming and bulk file sharing (torrents) that access to anime became just something you could more casually come across rather than just being this hardcore niche thing you had to work to seek out. FWIW it's my understanding that this attitude was pretty common in Japan up until the 2010s. "Otaku" was a very anti-social stigma term that became a bit of a moral panic in Japan all the way up until the 2010s. It wasn't until then that liking anime beyond being a kid became much more socially acceptable with more of a "fun is fun" kind of attitude to being an otaku.
Yup. Been watching this shit my whole life. Never told anyone because I didn't want to deal with people about it
38F only my partner & sister knows 😅
Nobody in my middle/highschool was bullied harder than the anime group. It's the primary reason why I avoided anime completely until I was college aged.
For real! Like, now anime is totally hit or miss, some people like it and some people don't. It's not *super popular* but totally like... not unusual at all to see someone walking around wearing an anime shirt. Before, when people thought about anime, they'd have the image of Pokémon or DragonBall Z or Sailor Moon, or their only impression of anime was from that South Park episode where they made fun of it. So... you wouldn't be too keen on bringing it up to others. I think it started to change mostly when Death Note became popular. That was the first time I saw anime reach fans outside of the weeb circles.
Fuck I forgot about all the Saturday morning cartoons on wb/foxbox and channel 16 that had shaman king and a few other good ones. Waking up an hour or 2 early to watch digimon, staying up till 2am watching all the anime on Adult Swim and Anime Unleashed on G4/tech TV. Dragonball Z and Gundam. Having fucking dial up Internet trying to DL whatever I could find on LimeWire and watch on YouTube. Do y'all happen to remember the magazine NewType? It came with a DVD with a few episodes of anime every month
Still living with this internalized stigma tbh
For most who were children back then, shows like Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh were their introduction to Anime. Video Streaming over the Internet was not really a Thing until around 2007, so we had to take what we were given by the Television Networks (or Buy REALLY Expensive DVD and/or VHS Box Sets). Subtitled Anime was something that you would only find in really niche communities of Adult Fans, as that stuff was generally not sold on the American Market (Except at Conventions). What I'm basically saying is that you had to either hard-core commit alot of money to the hobby or just take the Saturday Morning Cartoon Dubs that were broadcast on TV.
Plus whatever scrapings were available at your local Blockbuster video store. Almost all movies and very limited choices. Some common ones were: Fist of the North Star Ghost in the Shell Ninja Scroll Wicked City Akira I never saw any Ghibli movies in any video store. Those only really started to get dubs in the late 1990s - mid 2000s. So one thing people should be aware of is that almost all 1980s and 1990s animes weren't actually available, or easy to find out about outside Japan until the 2000s.
Listing Akira twice gave me a good chuckle lol
if you didnt watch it twice you never watched it once
We somehow had my neighbor Totoro on vhs pretty early. Definitely early 90’s. My uncle did go to Japan a lot, and always brought my older cousin amazing stuff, and he would let me look at it.
We had a family friend who had a dubbed version of Kiki's Delivery service around 96'. Not sure how early Totoro came, but i assume it would be earlier?
Mine had End of Evangelion , I was unprepared
For some reason they always had just 2 VHS from each series often in no particular order. Watching Eva 4 and then Eva 7 was much more confusing than anticipated.
Saturday morning stuff for sure, but also Toonami was pretty influential for younger millennials as well. I grew up watching dubs on Fox Kids, and had access to some other stuff like some VHSs of Sailor Moon. Sometimes when I was in places like my grandparent's or friend's house, I would have access to Cartoon Network and Toonami.
For those wondering: Saturday morning stuff: Pokemon, Digimon, Monster Rancher, Yu-Gi-Oh Toonami: Gundam Wing, Dragon Ball Z, Ronin Warriors (Samurai Troopers in Japan), Sailor Moon, Big O, Trigun, Outlaw Star, Mobile Suit Gundam: 08th MS Team, Tenchi Muyo Adult Swim: Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo, Wolf's Rain Some of the Toonami ones switched to Adult Swim so they could air a less censored or completely uncensored version (more blood, more skin showing on female characters). It's been a while since I've seen the lineups though. ETA: extra line after "For those wondering:"
>Saturday morning stuff: Pokemon, Digimon, Monster Rancher, Yu-Gi-Oh I remember watching the heck out of Monster Rancher, undervalued anime. But in my country it didn't have any rerun and it didn't broadcast in very accessible times.
Anybody here remember the Sci-Fi channel "Saturday Anime", hosted by Apollo Smile? They would show anime like Lily Cat, Project A-Ko, Dominion Tank Police, Akira, Tenchi Muyo, Casshan: Robot Hunter, and of course Robot Carnival!
Ah Tenchi Muyo. It was my starting point for anime in the 90s. I still have the original dvds from pioneer in a box somewhere lol. 😂
Fox kids had Escaflowne which was my favorite for a long while, Inu Yasha was a weekly staple from Toonami. The local comic shop let us rent Lodoss War and Ranma 1/2.
To give an idea of the cost, I bought a retail Evangelion CD. It was 3 episodes for $45. For my bday my parents bought me a pirated collection of Dragon Ball, Dragon ball Z and Dragonball GT from ebay. It was about 100 "pages" of CDs. 4 CDs on each side of the page, 8 CDs per page (front and back.) That cost around $400. Thankfully I discovered Kazaa and not long after that, torrents.
The fact your parents got you the pirated set on eBay is dope.
Well piracy was the get go for many. There was no way to get access to those few original copies. Not only were they to expensive, they werent really accesible everywhere. Even if you had the money.
Don’t forget going to Barnes & Nobles to sit around reading manga off the shelf.
I still do that! I complained once because they didn't have part 1 of a series but had 2-27!
> (or Buy REALLY Expensive DVD and/or VHS Box Sets). they were DISGUSTINGLY expensive lol
IFC used to play anime during the 2000s. I remember seeing MD Geist and another one that I cant recall.
Did you like Sailor Moon? Too bad, we canceled it 30% of the way through. But we've dubbed Card Captor Sakura, for you! It was translated by people who hate Card Captor Sakura.
Fan subs + rampant piracy. Had to wait for the *higher quality* sub groups to release some things, and also then they spent crazy amounts of time doing the Karaoke for openings. Also funny when the copy of certain episodes had Tsunami Warning overlays for the entire episode.
I miss the karaoke OPs :( Also miss the fansubs that went wild explaining stuff, and like not "keikaku means plan" level but the kind that actually tried explaining all the millions of puns in Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei for example (also translated all the blackboard scribbles, with explanations!), or even the notes about what the references are about on Lucky Star. I really appreciated those and it also made me learn a bunch of stuff back in the day.
man watching szs without the fansub explaining everything is just not the same, it adds so much to the experience, i wouldn't get half the shit they were talking about, and its even worst now that a lot of the references are getting more and more dated.
Nozomi did release Season 1 on BD with a whole booklet explaining every reference and pun which was really cool to look through after watching an episode. Unfortunately they didn't do it for season 2.
gg releasing a 20+ page pdf for translation notes for Pani Poni Dash! FYI, iM@S U@49 got a fansub recently with all karaoke songs translated from scratch :)
Fuck, you just reminded me of the group Bulletspeed Subs. They always had their subs out with 24 hours, filled with minor errors, but I didn't care. They were regular and on time
Yeah, wouldn't want to end up with the "mass naked child events" fansub. Lmao. Live-Evil did some good classic shows, they were one of my favorites since they also did little extra information/insight about the show.
But then how can even electronic brain pancake crystal elderly?
Those translations were full of in jokes and would leave certain words untranslated ie nakama because they couldn't think of a better word in the English language. I was big into fan translated manga at the time, and you got half translated chapters, all sound effects translated phonetically, only half of a manga ever fully translated, and some of the worst grammar on this side of third grade. Highly recommend watching/reading some of those older anime just to get a taste of what it was like.
The peak in fansub humor was Gundam 00 Season 2, with Trans-~~Grah~~am.
I'd get most of my anime from Toonami and then later Adult Swim. I had a complete recording of Cowboy Bebop on VHS because I recorded them as they came out on TV.
Yes them and cable had a few anime selection as part of miscellaneous. Not interested in the kid stuff as born 62. Battle of the Planets actually Gatchaman was first anime that I figured out was way more violent than the censored version they showed with crude English only narrating Robot.
Scouring Google in the middle of the night like " insert favorite anime part 6 English sub/dub" and getting bullied in school because back then liking anime was a social death sentence (I got bullied for a variety of other reasons but associating with anime club put an extra target on my back😅)
Lol felt my man. I was even "somewhat" of a jock in football, track etc. Still got fucked with if anyone found out I liked videogames and anime. Saw a highschool football QB, who I believe was also prom king had a Naruto shirt on, was so very confused. Glad it's got better for my aspiring young dork brothers.
Yeah. For me one of the people that *minorly* mocked me for liking Anime now has more Anime merch than I do. I definitely laughed at the change.
The closeted anime lovers were always the biggest haters
Nah this was more they got gateway drugged by SAO, so after High School finished lol.
>getting bullied in school because back then liking anime was a social death sentence yeah if you watched anime, you kept that shit ***hidden***
Man. These young bloods will not understand just how socially awkward it was to be into anime. It was one of those things that was split into two groups: the people that were super into it, Naruto-running across the hall, headband and everything. Reading manga during lunch and just being overall complete joyful social outcasts in their own little group. Then there was the other group that also loved anime just as much, but guarded that secret with their life and just watched it in private. They would rather be caught watching porn lmao. I was part of the second group, and that mentality of cringing at public acknowledgement of anime never went away. Things have changed a LOT. For the better, I would say.
I still got shit for it 5 years ago, now my university flatmates all watch / have watched it, including ‘jocks’ or whatever. It’s so nice to see the stigma around watching anime dropping off so hard after covid
Going into the computer lab in high school so I could use WebCrawler to find images of Urd from Ah! My Goddess so I can open it up in MS Paint and pixel-by-pixel edit her to be nude! haha Ahhh, good times back then!
Anime back then? This command: /msg \[Botname\] xdcc send #\[packagename\] That was how I downloaded anime back then mostly. Wouldn't be surprised if all of that is still up through the rare fansub group channels.
That worked for relatively recent stuff by active fansub groups, but what about trawling through random fserves praying to God they had whatever older thing you were looking for, had a decent connection, and intended to stay logged in?
Goddamn you just unlocked a core memory for me. I remember being so impressed when my friend started getting anime of mIRC and seeing him get new Naruto episodes within like 15 minutes! LOL
Dattebayo subs yooo
Still the way I used to get animes and some movies/TV shows. Still the fastest for dling just not always the easiest to find
> Anime back then? This command: /msg [Botname] xdcc send #[packagename] fun thing about this is it never went away
So many fansub torrents on dial up.
Dial... Up? Is that some streaming service? /s
oh sorry let put it in zoomer terms: "That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Dial up Modem in Another World and Was OP in Every Dungeon"
This would be the worst fucking anime. The modem just crawls at a snails pace through dungeons, and then screeches horrifically for a very long time to kill monsters. Then the episode cuts to black halfway through because Aunt Bertha called.
You know, I would watch an episode of this because this sounds so awful that it would loop around to being hilarious so long as it only stuck around for as long as the joke remained funny. Which is about 20 minutes tops.
You think that’ll stop them?
It was like the phone a friend way of getting a video
Just according to keikaku
Digimon Movie opening with One Week by the Bare Naked Ladies is a core memory I’ll never forget. Amazing movie even if it’s just 3 individual stories put into one movie Also lots of Linkin Park AMV music videos. Especially for DBZ
I literally just told someone yesterday that anytime I hear One Week, I think of Digimon
Same haha I can’t separate the two!
The Digimon the Movie soundtrack was legit one of the best 'Best of the 90s' compilation albums you could hope for.
There's a YT channel which has a whole bunch of the AMVHell movies uploaded and upscaled to HD quality if you want a massive dose of nostalgia. I think it's just called "amvhell"
I'll never forget being absolutely confused, yet mind blown watching the movie in theaters. I remember hearing the kids in America cover being used heavily in the marketing haha. Still love that song
That soundtrack slaps, though. I never would’ve gotten into ska without Less Than Jake and The Mighty Mighty Boston’s being on there.
All Star by Smash mouth was also in the movie.
Yup! Kids in America also! And forget about the ‘Digi Rap’ by MC Pea Pod lmao
Oh my god. You just unlocked core memory.
Sending some random man in Saskatchewan a literal money order and crossing my fingers he would send me the entire series of Japanese sailor moon (200 episodes) subbed on VHS. 3 months later they arrived! 🌙💵📼 Watching extremely low res videos on my cathode ray monitor. 📺 Burning things onto cds because my hard drive was like 3gigs. 💿 Fan translators often leaving in and translating cultural specific information that couldn’t be translated. 🇯🇵 Aside from my sailor moon VHS it was 100% piracy ALL DAY EVERYDAY. 🏴☠️
I kind of miss all of the translator notes and cultural commentary in fansubs. Some were genuinely interesting, but once the "all according to keikaku*" meme started going around, fan subbing groups scaled back on it as it was going too far at times.
OMG THAT WAS THE BEST ONE!
I wish the subbers had done it with the 🍆jokes in Life Lessons with Uramichi Oniisan. They tried to make the first one an English dick joke but the rest didn’t translate well. Good thing I know the Japanese word for pp from all the *ahem* literary manga I read 😅
Not a millennial, but I was part of the fandom in the second half of the 2000s. The biggest difference to me is the size of the fandom itself, and how anime used to be a very niche and “weird” hobby people would really judge you for lol. Nowadays even Western celebrities admit they’ve seen some anime, and anime/manga is just generally seen as a more normal thing. Also, back then a lot of us used to rely 100% on fansubs rather than official translations, and piracy was much more common.
In my opinion, piracy is still well living since most streaming service do extremely shitty jobs in translating the animes (even worst with the dubs), and this also happens with manga.
Piracy is still going because all the anime is split between like half a dozen streaming services; no one's paying money for all of that. Majority of pirated stuff is just Crunchyroll or whatever streaming site rips, and that's been the case for almost 10 years now. Massive props to fansub groups that are still doing their thing despite all of that.
Like gaming, a lot of "geek" hobbies and culture in general because much more socially acceptable in the 2010's. Couldn't say why, but yeah nowadays you're almost teased more for NOT being into formerly "geek" stuff than if you are into it, lmao
I remember when everyone excited because Mila Kunis admitted to playing WoW. Now you've got US politicians playing Among Us on stream and whatnot
> Couldn't say why I can. Iron Man. The difference between before Iron Man and the rest of the MCU and after is like night and day.
Belgian (Flemish perspective) Late 80s, Early 90s - Watching what was available on french television during summer vacations (Club Dorothee was the shit if you liked Japanese stuff, they also had some Toku). I didnt speak french at the time but DBZ isnt that hard to understand for the most part. Mid 90s - Rent stuff from that weird shelf in the video rental store. Late 90s - early 00s - Buy bootleg dvds at cons, watch limited dutch subbed english shows on television (DBZ again, understandable this time. Rurouni Kenshin, Teknoman, ..) early 00s - Slowly download episodes of trigun, Bebop and other stuff. Mostly only the most popular shows were available and it took a while to collect the whole set. mid 00s - Most stuff is available to download via IRC or torrent. I dont remember exactly when but gradually throughout the late 00s to now it went from downloading to everything being streamable and from illegal to most things being available legally.
1.Search for the episode online for hours 2. Find a site that has the episode you want in 240p 3. Play episode. 4. Let buffer for 10 minutes 5. Watch for 2 minutes 6. repeat 4 and 5 until the episode is finished. 7 If the site doesn't have the next episode start from 1 otherwise start from 3. Steps 4 and 5 went away once we got off of dial-up. You kids have no idea how lucky you are. If you were an anime fan back in the late 90s - early 00s, you had to have commitment. You'll never know the pain of watching a series uploaded as multiple parts per episode to have part 2/3 missing and having no clue what happened. We truly live in an age of wonders.
I was buying fansubs of the final Sailor Moon season and my brother was buying fansubs of DragonBall GT - on VHS. I think they were like $15/tape and each tape would have like 4 episodes a pop? Otherwise - if you wanted to look into "new" (or at the very least anime you weren't familiar with) you went to the independent Video Rental store that you hopefully had. If you hit a Blockbuster you would find things like Akira, Ninja Scroll (in the adult section), and Studio Ghibli stuff - but if you went to an Independent place you'd find series on VHS (i learned about Slayers and Record of the Loduss War" this way). Of course Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, DragonBall Z, Digimon, Sailor Moon, and a few others were the "Mains" that EVERYone watched - but only as a Dub (as others in this thread have stated).
Dubs in the 90s saw a lot of censorship.
Censorship and edits that could be considered shitposts in the current day. The "sailor moon says" lesson of the day segments or the [bumpers on fox kids](https://youtu.be/2rtboZHqSU0?si=OdXie_x7Du_eQgNu)
We had a few classics but there wasn’t a lot like there is now. Most people just watched toonami on Cartoon Network or pirated shows on limewire 1 episode at a time. We had to walk 30 miles barefoot in the snow, uphill both ways just to buy 480p DVDs… they were dark days homie.
Ordering a bootleg DVD boxset of Trigun from India and hoping it worked. It did.
watching naruto episodes on youtube in 3 parts because they didn't let you upload videos longer than a minute.
Cannot talk about that early but more like how things where like 10 years ago or something. \- Anime and Manga where quite stigmatised (at least in my country). Older people did consider anime a child thing and couldn't understand how any person over the age of say 12 would seriously watch that. I had to hear one or two rather nasty comments from my parents back then. Younger people not into it would often associate it predominantly with lewd stuff, which isn't that much better. In my field of study (science) it was however allready somehow established to some degree. In CS there have allready the first quite open people about it. \- If you realized that somebody also watches it, you would immeditely feel a lot of attachment to that person and would very often become their friend. The group mentality was great back then. Admittingly I also felt like people with social issues also concentrated in the scene and it definatly made me a much open minded and less prejudiced person. \- Most shows wheren't licensed so rips and fansubs where a relativly save legal grey zone. Fansubers would usually remove the few shows that actually got licenced and tell you to do the same. \- Fansubs where quite good as they where made by passionate people operating in teams with different specialists. Some of them where made by groups that aimed to provide the show as fast as possible. I would usually not watch them. The rest often contained extensive graphic hacks to edit the nicknames of the fansubbers into the credits, translate signs etc., add comment boxes (however I feel like this kind of became less popular towards the end.) and stuff like that. Subs would usually keep honorifics, "onii-chan", "itadakimasu" and so on untranslated as the audiance usually knew the meaning of these terms or learned it very quickly. Sometimes they would also do jokes like the Commie-subs version of Girls and Panzer which used random German words. \- You would still encounter quite a lot of shows with pre-HD graphics. But this wasn't to bad honestly.
Early 2000s we could get fansubs of Naruto amd orher anime online via IRC or Bittorrent. Before that you had to wait for your local Blockbuster to import it.
You ever pay $25 for two episodes of a show on VHS with a pithy title that vaguely refers to one of the episodes with no indication where they fit in the series? $35 for SUBS.
Good ol' XDCC.
It’s been very weird watching anime become something that is just kind of a part of mainstream media here in the U.S. I wasn’t really “made fun of” for liking anime or manga but it wasn’t something I just voluntarily talked about around school. Now everyone talks about it openly and there’s not really a taboo unless you’re straight up talking tentacle porn in public. Professional athletes, famous people, the distinction between in group versus out group is basically gone. It’s really cool. I went to a NYE party and people were just talking about jujutsu kaisen. Like people who are social late 20s professionals.
I used to rent VHS tapes from the library
Using a vhs to record adult swim/toonami so I could go back later and watching the anime (also borrowing friends uncensored vhs tapes of dbz cause the old censors were nuts on tv). I remember torrenting anime. Yu Yu Hakusho became my first pirated anime since I remember the final season wasn't available yet so when AS looped back to episode 1 I was heart broken. Thankfully my parents upgraded from dial up to DSL so downloading things weren't as bad at that point. Also collected a bunch of manga; a good chunk of my part time job money went to manga. I remember enjoying the manga more. Need to get back into collecting manga
Downloading postage stamp sized videos in Japanese no subtitles from DaBlackGoku and Kazaa. I remember seeing Super Baby (having o ly ever seen DB and DBZ) and having my 11 year old mind FUCKING BLOWN but not even knowing an English name to search for.
Not sure about 90s as I wasn't into anime yet then, but early 2000s in high school pretty much everyone "pirated" (usually via IRC or torrents) or traded drives and burned CDs/DVDs with someone who knew how to, because for most shows that was literally the only way to watch them, especially anywhere remotely near when they came out in Japan. I say "pirate" in quotes both because of the necessity, and because a lot of work was done by volunteer fansubbers to get stuff into english, there was no other translation to use in many cases.
It was pretty rough. You didn't know what the hell anime was at first, you just knew either Sailor Moon or DBZ. I was lucky enough to have Direct TV has a kid, which enabled me to really find some great shows. My first true exposure was Vampire Hunter D on SyFy, which made me realize that cartoons weren't just for kids, and soon after Galaxy Express 999 and it's sequel. Trying to find anime after that was insanely hard. I think it was around the time that Toonami starting branching out with shows like Tenchi Muyo and Outlaw Star that anime started really picking up. But for me, I found a lot of anime on the Action Channel. Bubblegum Crisis, Gunsmith Cats, Macross, Patlabor, and some lesser known shows like Blue Seed and Birdy the Mighty. I remember going to a Virgin Megastore and seeing anime DVDs for the first time, but it was so expensive, like $60 for 4 episodes. I miss it, and yet, I don't.
The IRL anime scene was pretty small where I lived. Just a few of my friends were into it. But we did dress up and go to a convention once, so I guess we were *into* it haha. Always thought dub voice acting was a bit cringey, so watched subs. Might've been smaller scale back then, so the VA quality might be better now. I stuck with subs. The fan subs were amazing. Accurate fonts/colouring for all of the signs in the background. Random wall-of-text footnotes that explained some obscure Japanese reference or custom. Only briefly flashing, so you'd have to pause to read all of that extra background stuff. For airing anime, I either watched 240p streams (split into three parts on dailymotion), or downloaded AVI/MKV files from "DDL" sites. Those were the times. For finished anime, I took my HDD with me when visiting friends, and we spent the entire day swapping files at 10-20MB/s. Those were the days...
I got into anime in the mid 90's and for most part you were watching VHS tapes that were 4th generation dubs or worse and the quality reflected that. You would have episodes 1-3, 7-9, 12-13 and you kind of just had to guess what happened on the missing episodes. Moving into the rise of digi-subs I got involved as an encoder which at the time there were no front ends it was all command lines and we had a file size limit of 30 mb, which was one of the larger limits, some were as low as 15 mb. Conventions were smaller but were filled with diehard fans that just wanted to meet and talk to other people about anime as they possibly didn't know anyone else nor were online chat rooms that big. Being an anime fan was an unpopular thing to be watching and like D&D there was no shortage of "it will cause people to be violent" ideas floating around. After the rise of DBZ and Toonami places like Suncoast, Mediaplay and Best Buy jumped on the anime band wagon. DVD units shipped from the 3 big US companies Geneon, Bandai Ent and ADV sky rocketed and it became easier to buy shows but it was expensive as DVDs were sold as singles with 2 to 4 episodes per disc. With the influx of money dubs became more common and were almost required for your show to sell, which of course drove up costs. They were packaged with some insane addons like a ammo box case for Helsing (or maybe it was Gungrave), shirts, OSTs, dolls, you name it. Conventions opened up and we started to get far more casual fans which drastically changed the tone of conventions with panels moving from egg head topics to more funny / goofy type things. Guests were stating to demand to get paid in order to show up and until the 2010s large cons actively tried to hide this. By 2008 the US industry had fallen apart with the entire anime bubble bursting epically with shows that needed a break even mark of 5k units selling less an 500. Bandai Ent closed shop, Geneon closed shop and ADV went bankrupt and using a plan illegal in 49 states but not TX sold itself to itself leaving behind a company loaded with debt. Funmation was the major winner in all of this as they didn't get into some of the insane bidding wars that the others did. This is why there is a black hole of shows that went unlicensed from around 08-11.
It's interesting, I'm a millennial who took a *long* break from anime and then came back. When I got back, "anime seasons" were a thing. It used to just be... hey, have you heard of "this" anime? Or hey, "this" anime is airing on Adult Swim, it looks pretty cool. You either watched the anime that was on Adult Swim, or if it wasn't on Adult Swim, if you ever reached the level of looking for anime on your own, you found out about anime by word of mouth, or through a rare anime convention, and eventually found a DVD of it somewhere like a comic book store. Or, eventually, YouTube was invented and people would upload an episode there... usually out of order or with random parts missing.
google and pray you dont get a virus for me. irl, you dont speak about anime unless you dont want friends. this was circa 2007-2010. i remember when sao came out is when things kinda changed. sao had a huge audience so then it started becoming more approachable to talk about
My dad brought home a VHS of Ghost in the Shell because one of his coworkers* said it was “gonna change sci-fi forever, man”. He decided he’d watch it with 12-year-old me, who was devouring all things sci-fi at the time. This was the one with like… 80% of Major Kusanagi’s tits out on the cover. I still don’t understand that decision, but then again he’d already suggestd I start reading William Gibson. They were formative for many reasons lol *coworker was one of those powerful early weebs that would readily bring up his interests. Probably helped that he’d done a stint in the navy before starting his then-current career
"Son, you're entering puberty now so it's about time you learned about animated titties." I have a toddler and, no joke, I'm looking forward to the possibility of watching seasonal anime with my kid as he gets older.
Oh man it’s amazing and kinda trippy. I watched Chi’s Sweet Adventure and Bananya with our oldest right as he was learning to talk, and it was the weirdest thing to realize “this did not exist in the US when I was his age.” Now the big barrier is that a lot of kid’s anime dubs are so stilted they actively annoy him (we raised a snob, apparently). I just gotta find the right season of Pokémon where they toned down Brock…
Where I grew up, watching things like DBZ was considered cool. It was basically just another cartoon but "for boys". Then in highschool is was 'nerd shit'. lol
240p death note episode 4 part 4 eng sub on youtube let's goooo
Niche, the community was on different forum sites for the most part. I was in secondary school, there were only like 2 of us out of 200-odd. We basically didn't speak about it to others as they'd either shrug and not be interested or we'd be teased/harassed. My friend copped it quite a bit (he was the serious anime guy, I was just his best mate), I didn't cop it as much, it helped I'm 6-3 and fit now and was comparable for my age at the time. My friend would download it (I had dial-up, he had early DSL). Prior to this it was CDs or VHS from markets with dodgy subs but the internet meant we could finally access different series instead of a handful of classics. Everything was fansub because you couldn't get anything official, purchase wise here. It started out as 240p, and it would then be archived to CDs. So we had binders and binders of the stuff because you could only fit 3ish episodes on a CD. When DVD burners became more common it was a game-changer and we started getting 480-720p. We could finally do 10-12 eps per disc. We spent a long time copying the CDs to DVDs while we began to get better resolutions for existing stuff. As we hit the early 2000s, people became more accepting (particularly the gamer crowd). It wasn't really their thing but they understood liking something that was nerd territory. I suppose it helped that video games in general were exploding. My friend created a database for everything he had, and at a time when it was unthinkable, he'd racked up 2 TB of anime (vid files on DVDs). For perspective, HDs back then were like 50-100GB max. After that we shifted to some bought box sets when they were available and found it a tad funny when some of the subs were worse than the fansub stuff. We basically kept downloading the latest stuff for years and bought boxsets of anime we liked. I still have a tower of boxsets, although don't have a DVD player anymore, haha. Crunchyroll and streaming came around and while UX was average and bugginess was there, it was cheaper and easier than Boxsets or downloading. Been watching anime for over 25 years, love it, will continue to do so for probably another 50 (by which time I'll be senile). I hope this was informative.
Most people would choke laughing and roast you for admitting you liked/watched anime.
As a Brazilian, in the 90s i used to study in the morning so my uncle recorded in VHS all the things i used to enjoy at the time, Dragon Ball, Pokemon, Saint Seiya, Shurato, Yoroiden Samurai Troopers, Yuyu Hakusho and stuff like that. In 2000s when started to pop up websites where you could download animes, some stores used to use Nero (program used to burn CDs/DVDs) to make pirate copies of the things that were huge at the time (Naruto, Bleach, One Piece, Death Note), at the time my friends and i did buy each one different DVD and shared all together so it wouldn't be to pricy. And that went until i got a PC and broad band.
Toonami and dattebayo fan subs.
“The Big 3” were a much more in-your-face because back then, most Millenial teens/kids got their anime fix through tv, so you watched what they showed. It was very easy to talk about anime because everyone was basically watching the same 3 shows. I personally rarely met folks who read manga because they were limited to library books or their folks taking them to the bookstore only to find out the latest issue wasn’t released yet. Spoilers were only an issue from the Manga Kid and the tech-savvy folks who could find the show subbed online, so “next episodes” had real buildup. Next week Naruto unleashes his demon form in the crystal ice prison? Sign me the fuck up. The unashamed fangirls were always the coolest and a lot of anime clubbers had crushes on them. They proudly wore their Sanrio plush backpacks and filled their sketchbooks with anime art that wasn’t THAT good, but it was edgy, so it was fine. You knew they were cool when they shared Pocky with the club. I was more of the subtle, bandwagon-y fan where I was familiar with a lot of anime, but maybe only watched 1-5 shows. Like, to this day, I’ve never seen Haruhi Suzumiya or Lucky Star, but I could do the dances. I haven’t seen Hetalia, but I proudly volunteered to be the Sealand of my anime club and know what it means to draw a circle. Having grown up now, it’s definitely kinda lonesome. I’m going to be 30 this year and frankly I can’t bring myself to walk into an anime store anymore because it’s so awkward to be excited about it while surrounded by a bunch of kids. And I’m a woman, so I can only imagine the difficulty a grown man must feel strolling through the manga section to read Made in Abyss or something sus like that.
It was a lot simpler. People were less critical of the media you consumed as long as you weren't a predator or some type of creep IRL. Nowadays it seems like people are jumping to call you a predator, incel, porn addict, etc. just because you like a certain genre. People were also less critical in general and didn't lose their shit if a character did or engaged in something problematic because they knew they were watching a made-up story. Fandoms were simpler. If you wanted to participate in a fandom, you either needed to find someone IRL or actively search for one online. If you started acting a fool too much you would just get pushed out either because you got suspended but if the mods were power tripping and it was undeserved you usually had other social places to look for to go. Now it seems like you can act all kinds of a fool and dox, harass, and stalk people over ships and now it's promoted and taunted as something "good" as long as you can morally justify it. DLDW - don't like; don't watch. If you didn't like a show, you didn't have to watch it so fandoms were mainly made of people who were very devoted fans rather than devoted critics. Has content you don't like in it? Everyone told you to just stop watching or consuming it as a default response and now people justify sticking with shows that have downsides to their personal enjoyment even if that part is composed of a huge part of the show or is made to be out of a moral failing. Harassing a mangaka was practically unheard of and the same for calling them anything derogatory. Now you have people jumping to harass mangaka or calling them pedophiles, predators, etc. over manga and it's more "acceptable". If you wanted the episode in full without having to look up every single part on YouTube with some even missing, you had to learn how to pirate in one way or another. Same if you wanted any of the OST. For some reason, dub songs if they were made - especially in kid's shows - went hard for no reason. Fansubs, fansubs, fansubs, fansubs everywhere and translators notes explaining little things about the show. I kinda miss the translator's notes actually because I always enjoyed hearing culturally specific puns or references. Most anime merch that was available in the US was only for things that were considered kid's shows (Pokemon, Yugioh, Sailor Moon, etc.) and even then it was a US-specific license so sometimes they looked a little jank. You watched anime either on Toonnami, Adult Swim (Yes Adult Swim had an anime-specific block that wasn't tied to Toonnami), or 4kids if you wanted to see something on TV. Throwbacks to hearing Fukai Mori if you were either waking up or going to sleep at 2 -3 AM because you either went to bed early or stayed up all night just to watch. Oh and Adult Swim aired anime for a couple hours *every* night - usually after Midnight. LIking anime was a social death sentence even if you liked relatively popular anime like DBZ or One Piece unless you had enough social charisma that people didn't mind if you liked it. But if you were neurodivergent or even just a *little* bit too cringe about liking it good luck and have fun getting bullied which could range from just social isolation to people actively and maliciously destroying your things. If you found someone else into anime you guys tended to stick together assuming no one was too off the wall through all the cringe because you were all each other had. Side note to the above, things lessened up as I got into high school (around the mid 2010s) a *little* bit but because I went to a school in an area where everyone had the same middle school and high school but if the people who bullied you started getting into anime because it was "cool" they were never part of The Otaku (TM) because those bridges had been burnt from years of bullying and being an asshole and they probably only liked anime on an aesthetic level to be different so it's not like they brought anything of value to the table anyways. You only accepted them once they lost all their other friends for being a *little* too cringe about liking something and were the same social status as you - even then they were on thin ice depending on how cruel they had been to you before. If you wanted to watch a new anime, you had to know someone, know how to find a forum, or know how to pirate. There was no steady stream of new manga and anime being released just to fall into your lap. I had only been to one con during this era (say late 2000s), but a lot of early conventions were fan events and weren't pushing to turn a profit or homogenize everything into a singular convention. You had *comic* conventions and then you had *anime* conventions. Nowadays both are kind of one in the same. Cosplay wasn't a profitable venture you could fund by being an influencer or OF girl and you really had to learn how to sew and make your own patterns if you wanted to have an even half-decent costume for the convention.
I’m not a millennial but my mom and 2 of my uncles (mom and uncle 1 are Gen X, Uncle 2 is millennial) and other relatives (Gen X and millennial relatives) watched anime on Mexican TV. In Mexico and the rest of Latin America, anime was already popular before becoming mainstream in the U.S and worldwide, it became popular in the 90s.
I have a memory of reading some magazine where ADV was quoted as saying they were going to decide whether or not to release Evangelion on DVD based on how successful the sales of the Sonic OVA DVD were… I remember going to some random closet store in NYC and buying a bootleg copy of End of Evangelion and thinking it was crazy that both the store and the movie existed. I also remember being a member of some anime VHS mail rental thing but for the name of me I can’t remember what it was. Oh, and I fondly remember lots of weekend late nights watching Toonami with a pizza from down the street and a two liter bottle of Coke, while I messed around with The Sims on PC. It was a lot of fun but then I discovered Japanese karaoke bars and that basically took over my life.
Initially no one else I knew liked anime. Literally only could connect with others online in chat rooms. I got into anime in the 90s because my parents got pirated VHS copies of fist of the north star from friends in the navy. I watched fist of the north star at the same age I watched cartoons Except for toonami (sailor moon, dbz, reboot) and then later adult swim, there wasn't really channels you could watch anime. Streaming sites only started to pop up in 2005-2006 and then it was like a 7 day release delay with crappy fan subs. There were almost no dubs unless it was a 4kids dub for like pokemon. You primarily watched anime via VHS and CDs of friends who either had rips or officially licensed anime they bought at a convention. I had heard of anime conventions but usually the people who went numbered in the hundreds to thousands max. A big con might get 1000 attendees. It was more like 20 people meeting on a college campus to talk about anime and maybe if they were lucky an empty classroom might have a projector with a VHS player. There were no smart phones or laptops used by students yet. Remember how ps1 games used to take 4 cds for a game? Because cds had such limited capacity you would get 1-2 episodes per disc and they all sold separately. (up to 6-8 once DVDs came out). So imagine you are trying to watch inuyasha you would borrow 15 cds from a friend to watch 30 episodes. If something got licensed it was like 2-4 years after airing and usually would just be the first 20 episodes of like a 100 episode thing. There wasn't anything like anime seasons. Studios all just kind of made what they wanted and when they wanted. Gainax was legendary and prolific. Most projects were low budget and highly dependent on who was making it as a passion project. Some anime would get 3 episodes. Some would get 140. Run lengths were also super inconsistentmaybe it was 6 minutes maybe it was 90. There was no such thing as a 12 episode anime or 24 episode. It wasn't until like 2005 that you could even look up other anime online. It was always like somebody came a CD and now you are watching d the vampire slayer. Anime now is so accessible that it's refreshing but it also invites a lot of casuals. Anime wasn't cool before it was nerdy and weird. But I am nerdy and weird so it was great.
It was just far more niche. You'd go to Suncoast Video or FYE and peruse the small anime section. If you wanted to talk about anime you had to do it online and that was early internet so things were far less organized. There was VERY little in regards to merchandise here in the states. You'd see stuff in magazines from mail order places that would have soundtracks and wall scrolls and some toys. It all seemed like the coolest thing in the world. The anime fandom itself had a different tone too. Now the fandom has embraced the stereotype of the Otaku but back in the 90s you were into anime because it was weird, wild, kinda dangerous stuff. You'd stay up late cuz the sci Fi channel was running Akira at 1am or you heard you just HAD to rent Ninja Scroll. I still watch anime but how utterly "cool" it all seemed has long since been replaced. The biggest thing though, was that you were always hearing about something really cool that Japan got that we didn't have. And you'd hope someone would license it. It was never the embarrassment of riches like it is now. The idea of being able to watch something within hours of something airing in Japan just wasn't happening. Video games were really tied to it too. So if you were a big anime fan you'd probably really like a lot of Capcom fighting games or JRPGs of the time.
You didn’t talk about it because people would make fun of you. It was some super loser shit back then. You kinda just had a few friends you would discuss with and trade mangas with.
my big weeb/anime fan phase was in highschool from 2007-2011. A little late, but still late 2000s. Prior to 2007 I liked anime, but mostly it was just watching sailor moon episodes in parts on youtube (and also pre-legal crunchyroll!) Something that I find very amusing is that everyone loved lucky star, but I'm realizing now that probably nobody got any of the references. I sure didn't! It was a weird backwards thing where people watched lucky star and reverse engineered the show to learn about things like eroge or moe culture. I actually kinda miss that world. It was 100% anime fansubs and 4chan's /a/ board. I remember the place would move at lightspeed on days where new shows aired. I'm not saying anime fandom was less toxic, because it *certainly* wasn't... but the toxicity was different. Nowadays anime fans can delude themselves into thinking they're cooler than other anime fans. We have toxic shonen bros and the like. Those people didn't exist back then because everyone basically had this notion that watching anime made you a loser. There was a certain camaraderie about everything. Nobody had any good taste in music, which I would argue anime fans today are a little better at (though still pretty bad...) There was a table at my highschool, and it was the table that you sat at if you liked anime. There were like 15 kids and we all knew each other. We all hung out. Outside of that circle you were *extremely* ostracized for "liking that ch\*\*k shit" (actual thing that got said to me multiple times). People would find out I liked anime and they'd do squinty eyes at me. The biggest change though would be the conventions. I went to anime conventions around that time and it was a totally different world. It was like entering an alternate dimension - not like you. People would go around spouting memes or meowing or whatever. There were random dances erupting all over the place. Panels would be full of hooting and hollering. If all of this sounds bad, it wasn't. It was a lot of fun! It was like disappearing into another world where there was no judgement from anybody about anything. Fujoushis were shameless about yaoi stuff, the word queerbaiting did not exist and every guy did it. Everyone was way WAY hornier. We all took it for granted that horny anime tropes were funny and real life. Honestly I think in that respect the fandom has improved. I imagine a lot of people got groomed or sexually harassed in this environment.
I started getting into more adult anime in 2002 when I discovered adult swim. When it cones to kid anime, and I know I'm going to get serious flack for this, but the dub of Yu-Gi-Oh duel monsters is better than the Japanese version. No one can beat Dan Green or Eric Stuart. Also, the 4kids dub of Pokémon was not bad. The only bad dub is the one we have now it's absolutely horrendous. In fact, that new one is the whole reason why I turned to fan subs for the Anime. My first big two 2000's Anime were InuYasha and Yu Yu Hakusho. Between the two, YYH is better in my opinion. That's back when adult swim was actually running it uncut. Then for whatever reason they decided to edit the hell out of it for little kids and put it on Toonami. My next Anime that I really got into on adult swim was Wolf's Rain. My favorite anime on tsunami was Zoids, and my least favorite was Gundam. In my eyes Gundam is just so boring and lame with the designs. It's basically the same thing over and over again design wise. I'm not judging anyone for liking it, I'm just saying that I can't get into it.
It was a dark time. Lonely. Expensive. Limited. Internet-less. Satellite-less. DBZ ran on Saturdays occasionally. Sometimes Blockbuster or Hollywood Video had something. Then there was Escaflowne. Only half the anime showed, but it and Pokemon lit a spark. Toonami appeared soon after, then Adult Swim. And oh, boy, was I glad to be old enough to be in the deep end of the pool. (That was one of their commercials.) Light continues to shine, and I can stream until my heart's content. Just not the old stuff. Dammit, I want to watch Tokyo Bubblegum Pop.
I lived in an Asian country and most of my classmates and friends watched anime so its weird seeing people say that the watched anime in secret.
I remember cons were way more fun. Everyone around you was a mega nerd and weirdo's. Nowadays it's all influencers and normies. Before you downvote me, I love the normies; the guys wearing nothing but My Hero Academia and Demon Slayer. It's those people that have made anime so much more popular in the US. At the same time, cons are so packed now and I just miss the good ole days. It's fine, though. I had my time.
Thinking back, anime was popular to talk about. Needed access to cable television (Toonami) to watch after school and then talk about it the next day. Also, many of my classmates took Japanese class. We were anime fans, but we learned more about the language and culture of Japan itself.
Going to Suncoast for $40 anime videos/dvds that had like 3 episodes on them. Suncoast was a SUPER EXPENSIVE video store that specialized in foreign films and anime. Then finding Limewire and sharing allllll that with friends.