Battle of the Fansubbers
May 13, 2017 12:07 PM   Subscribe

But in early 1997, a competing group, Central Anime, allegedly made copies of Tomodachi's subs and released them under their own name. This was seen as bad form and a sort of dishonour among thieves. Tomodachi retaliated by refusing to release the show's final 20 episodes, which they had already finished subtitling, to anyone.
How VHS Tapes and Bootleg Translations Started an Anime Fan War in the 90s
posted by Sokka shot first (20 comments total)

This post was deleted for the following reason: Poster's Request -- Brandon Blatcher



 
I vaguely remember central amine vs tomodachi, but I mostly remember kodocha fansubs for their happy purple tapes.
posted by yeolcoatl at 12:24 PM on May 13, 2017 [5 favorites]


SUBS > DUBS. what what
posted by Fizz at 12:53 PM on May 13, 2017 [2 favorites]


Punchline: Fushigi Yuugi is terrible. Which was probably why Tomodachi was the only one subbing it. There were many other subbing groups at the time.
posted by Slithy_Tove at 1:09 PM on May 13, 2017 [4 favorites]


Back in the 80's, the only anime club I could join didn't even have subbed stuff. Good thing my buddy Fox could speak Japanese...
posted by Samizdata at 1:39 PM on May 13, 2017


In somewhat related news (now that we're past the days of getting our anime on VHS) the biggest anime torrent tracker closed it's doors in the past month. Evidently the owner was either served cease and desist or was sued, I'm not sure which. Rumor has it he made the source code available so a new site can rise from the ashes. Given how.. persistent anime fans can be, I won't be surprised if one does!

Crunchyroll is perfectly adequate and legal, though! Hell, most of the fansubbers now-a-days just use rips straight from Crunchyroll instead of translating it on their own.
posted by INFJ at 2:06 PM on May 13, 2017


In Ann Arbor, basically the only way to see anything like a full run of a series was the annual Animania con held by U-M students (apparently now called Con Ja Nai, but I don't remember it having any name aside from Animania in the '90s), and it was basically an endless primordial soup of drama. It was loose on things like tickets or reservations, with organizers routinely making decisions on scene nepotism. I remember camping out through like six hours of Ranma 1/2 to see a season of Bubblegum Crisis because even if you had a reservation to later shows, you weren't guaranteed a spot. Your best choice was to figure out what screen was showing stuff that you wanted to see, then hunker down.

It was a time when nerdery was strangely undifferentiated — there were no single-minded Otaku. If you wanted to play RPGs or see industrial bands or get on local BBSes or smoke cloves at Denny's at 3am, you were going to see all the same people.
posted by klangklangston at 2:51 PM on May 13, 2017 [16 favorites]


Crunchyroll is perfectly adequate and legal, though!

For things that are actually TV shows, for one, but more notably, right now, for things that are actually licensed by Crunchyroll. I'm new to this whole thing at the moment, but right now you have to maintain paid subscriptions to three different services to get reasonable coverage of what's coming out. And one of them, Anime Strike, requires a separate subscription to Amazon Prime before you can add it on.

And then you get, for example, how the Yuri on Ice blurays are not yet available legitimately in the US, but they are substantially better quality animation--massively better quality animation--than what's on Crunchyroll. Virtually everyone I know is intending to purchase them, but the only way I've seen any of them so far is piracy. I feel a little guilty about that, but not very, because god knows I am giving them money every way I know how to give them money at this point. I paid $60 for an English-language Bluray of a film called Doukyuusei that I am madly in love with, but I wouldn't have known about it to buy it if I hadn't found it on a pirate streaming site. Only the first volume of the manga that movie is based on is available licensed; I've read the rest of it because of fan translations. The Samurai Flamenco companion manga, also unlicensed. There are a lot of visual novels that only get fan translations, which isn't my bag but is a big thing for some of my friends.

Things are better than they were but there's still a fair number of delays and places where you have to pay through the nose to do things the right way, or just places that're flat out impossible without importing things and personally learning Japanese. The people who do fan translation put in a ton of effort for free or very little money, and I feel conflicted about the piracy part, but I so appreciate everybody who pitches in to make certain niche stuff available for a wider audience. (Especially good queer love stories, if my tastes aren't showing well enough.)
posted by Sequence at 3:57 PM on May 13, 2017 [5 favorites]


I mostly remember kodocha fansubs for their happy purple tapes.

Oh man, flashback! yeah, had some of those. I kept my tapes around for the longest time, but eventually I got realistic with myself and admitted I was never going to bother digging the VCR out of storage to rewatch anything and they went to the curb.
posted by tavella at 4:29 PM on May 13, 2017


but right now you have to maintain paid subscriptions to three different services to get reasonable coverage of what's coming out

I soothe my ethics by paying for one of those services and pirating the rest.
posted by INFJ at 4:47 PM on May 13, 2017


Hell, most of the fansubbers now-a-days just use rips straight from Crunchyroll instead of translating it on their own.

Wouldn't this just make them pirates instead of fansubbers, if they aren't actually doing any fansubbing?
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:26 PM on May 13, 2017 [5 favorites]


(I say this as someone who has watched the odd TV show that fell off the back of a truck, so no judgment intended)
posted by DoctorFedora at 5:27 PM on May 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


just in case anyone doesn't know, if there happened to be some anime that got dubbed for American release, the dubs were always and without exception phenomenally horrible.
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 6:13 PM on May 13, 2017 [3 favorites]


Amazon.jp allows you to pre-order BD with a reduced shipping costs compared to other retailers. Ofc you need to be able to understand JPN in the 1st place but it's better than nothing.

Nowadays fansubbing pretty much is dead since CR started picking up all the shows and have the most accurate/fastest release schedule. Also, people growing up and having to deal with jobs, kids, and life getting in their way of hobbies.
posted by chrono_rabbit at 6:22 PM on May 13, 2017


OTOH, I have noticed some fan subs which went the extra miles and then some, like translating signs and the inevitable cell phone chat/post screens and all.
posted by Samizdata at 6:26 PM on May 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


I mostly remember kodocha fansubs for their happy purple tapes.

More on those happy purple tapes from a member of kodocha who got into the anime business.

posted by zabuni at 6:31 AM on May 14, 2017 [1 favorite]


Dang, when I was a kid I had no ability to find anything like this to go to, because I was literally a kid. I downloaded subbed anime from ppl on anime channels on DALnet (primarily #anime_paradise) in the late 90's, and I would have been so excited to have met anyone in Mission Viejo, CA who liked anime when I was in 5th/6th grade.
posted by gucci mane at 9:53 AM on May 14, 2017


90s anime fandom was SOME GOOD TIMES.

You speak the truth. I lived in San Francisco from 87 to 95, and it was where I discovered anime, Hobby Japan, Bandai, Kinokuniya books, udon and soba noodles, The Red Lion Inn in San Jose, and many other wonderful things.
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon at 11:36 AM on May 14, 2017


I know some fansub distributors continued well into 2000, probably even 2001, because I didn't discover fansubs until I moved in with an anime fan in late summer/early fall 2000, and I remember ordering copies of things like Future Boy Conan. It's marginally possible that the purple tapes I had were second-hand, as I can't remember which series they were, so I can't be sure that Kodacha was one of them, but it was still a thing for at least a while after the 90s.
posted by tavella at 11:59 AM on May 14, 2017


A few comments, from someone who was sorta near the middle of this mess (I probably have a post in that rec.arts.anime.misc thread):

One thing to remember is that Central Anime did not distribute any tapes. They may have made a few copies for friends, but nothing on a large scale. They were big proponents of sharing their scripts for free so that other people could distribute. Tomodachi didn't want to do that and that's the basis of the argument.

Thus Central Anime transcribed (and at times fixed) the translation, and released the script. It's been 20 years, but I am almost positive that they credited Tomodachi for the original translation (contrary to what the quoted text in the OP says.)

In hindsight it was all bad. Tomodachi's selling tapes was a lame thing to do, and Central Anime's copying without permission was lame.
posted by IAmDrWorm at 12:13 PM on May 14, 2017 [2 favorites]


OTOH, I have noticed some fan subs which went the extra miles and then some, like translating signs and the inevitable cell phone chat/post screens and all.
posted by Samizdata


Yes! The thing I miss about the really dedicated fansubbers is the cultural translations: they'd point out idioms, explain wordplay, explain concepts that a dub or a direct sub would miss or neglect. I learned a lot of neat little things from watching something like Marmalade Boy or, yeah, Fushigi Yuugi.
posted by fiercecupcake at 7:54 AM on May 15, 2017 [1 favorite]


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