>>1986817>pushing fiftyyes, and?
Television. Do you know what television is? At no point did I say I was trading tapes in the 70s. I started watching anime with Battle of the Planets, Starblazers, and Speed Racer. Later Tranzor Z, Voltron, and Sylvanian Families in the early 80s. I don't think I'd consider Jace and the Wheeled Warriors anime but it was damned close. Then Robotech started my collecting. I bought the old set of tapes when they were coming out but got canceled because Carl Macek was sued. Then he tried selling tapes again and got sued again so the series was never finished until the 2000s when it was released on DVD. I was in jr high and spending my paper route money (remember newspapers?) which made my mother angry.
I used the Robotech I had to trade by then for raw tapes of series. There was an asian guy who's name escapes me at the comic book store who got a few raw shows out of Japan for my brother and I. It's how we watched the original Macross, Bubblegum Crisis, and Unico but since the 90s Streamline Pictures debuted and there was no need to trade anymore. Anime was sort of popular in California by then and you could rent it at Tower Records across town so there was no need to trade with asian guy direct from Japan.
Fansubs went mainstream with the invention of the internet. You could find sites and email people who would dub tapes for you. I would take their tapes and redub them in college in the health department because they had two VCRs nobody was paying attention to then trade them to friends for official releases of shows like Ranma 1/2 and F3. I remember in 2000 counting up how much I'd spent on anime over the years and realizing it was over $10,000 by that point. We used to joke that crack cocaine was cheaper than a hobby in anime.
