Anime Club no Densetsu: The Tale of the Buzzing Fansub Tape

People seemed to enjoy my previous reflection on my time in anime club, even though it became more a stealth examination of the complicated emotions that come from wanting to belong to a group. I hope folks didn’t mind a little bit of a bait-and-switch. This time, though, I’d like to talk about something a little bit lighter, though I can’t promise that my musings won’t wander a little before the end.

I’m sure most of you reading have encountered fansubs in some form or another. For the few of you pure souls who haven’t, though, fansubs are versions of anime releases that are subtitled by fans of the show, rather than by professional translators working for an official media licensing company. Nowadays, fansubs are created using digital tools and the subtitled files are distributed via the internet, but things weren’t always this way. Back in the day, when official English-language releases were hardly a sure thing and official anime streaming services had not even been conceived of, the way people shared fansubs was decidedly more analog and required a lot more work. Fansub circles provided mail-order services (I’m not kidding); you, the eager fan, would request the series and episode you wanted and send the group a blank VHS tape along with a return envelope, then some time later (days or weeks), they would return your tape with those episodes copied onto it. I know it seems goofy, but it was a real thing until digital fansubs took over and streamlined both the labor and distribution aspects of the work.

In the early 2000’s when I started attending anime club, the fansub landscape was still an awkward blend of these VHS tapes and digisubs, although the former was quickly fading away due to the convenience and obvious quality differences and ease-of-duplication of the latter. The series we watched in anime club were an awkward blend of official DVD/VHS releases, digital fansubs, and VHS fansubs, and this included the series Revolutionary Girl Utena. As I mentioned previously, this is one of the first series I saw after joining the club in Autumn 2001 and for various reasons has held onto its place as one of the most memorable anime series I’ve ever seen. At that time, the show was partially released on DVD by Central Park Media, and the club was using these discs to facilitate the showings. But whereas nowadays we generally expect our official releases to contain at least 1-cour of anime at a pop, back then it was common for single discs to come out with 3 or 4 episodes apiece, and at a pace would likely make a snail blush. The first two DVDs were fairly generous in that they contained 7 and 6 episodes, comprising the first 1/3^rd of the series, but it was clear that CPM was not in a hurry to release the remainder of the series on a schedule that would map to how quickly we were watching the series in anime club. The solution? A club member’s VHS fansubs of the other 26 episodes.

For those of you unfamiliar with Utena, I will again implore you to go check out the series – it’s streaming on Funimation and is also available in a very nice remastered Blu-ray release. I consider it a near-masterpiece, and if you’re a fan of Kunihiko Ikuhara’s other works (Penguindrum, Yurikuma Arashi, Sarazanmai), you will likely get a kick out of seeing some similar themes and structures from those stories in their earlier forms. I’ll refrain from giving away any plot details here, but the second cour of the series begins a story arc called the “Black Rose Arc,” which contains material appreciably darker than what’s contained in the previous 13 episodes. It’s where things really start feeling real and there’s a lot of heavily symbolic elements that are unsettling. Imagine reaching this part in the story and feeling really excited about and invested in it. And then, as the opening credits begin to roll… bzzt.

One of the reasons that, despite my partner’s joking proclamations that it’s the clearly superior video format, we as a society moved on from VHS as the preferred way of viewing visual entertainment is that its analog nature opens it up to a lot of weird, physical problems that don’t affect more recent optical and digital video formats. VHS tapes are literally a physical magnetic tape, spooled inside a plastic casing. As you can imagine, this makes them vulnerable to all manner of issues, up to and including physical breakage. One issue that plagued the VHS fansub distribution chain, however, was that, while it was fairly easy to copy video from one tape to another, continuing to do this (in order to share the wealth with your friends, naturally) would start to cause degradation in the video quality after a couple of generations. I saw an interesting YouTube video one time a few years ago where an individual had taken a short segment of video and copied it again and again and again (side note: I find this video extremely creepy, like representation memories that you can’t quite hold onto); it was a strikingly short amount of time before the poor quality made elements of the video difficult to parse. In any case, it was sometimes a guessing game as to whether that anime tape your friend was raving about was a first or second generation fansub straight from the source, or whether that copy might be from somewhere later down the chain and therefore riddled with visual and audio issues.

Needless to say, wherever these VHS tapes came from, whatever happened to them during their troubled life, they were cursed to emit a short “bzzt” every few seconds, for the entire length of every episode.

I think folks that have never attended an anime club or been in a group viewing environment that existed for the sake of “long-haul” viewing (as opposed to a movie screening at a theater, where if something goes mildly wrong people instantly complain about it), aren’t aware of the resilience that manifests among the viewers. I think this is especially true when you know what you’re watching is sourced through ill-gotten means, time is limited, and there’s not option to replace and re-watch the material. I recall one time, several years later, where a bulb blew out on the projector we were using and we watched the last episode-and-a-half of Xam’d: Lost Memories at about ¼ brightness. Some of the impact may have been deadened by the lack of light, but I like to think that the club pulled together in this moment of adversity and got as much out of watching the series finale as they could. And so too it was with these intermittently buzzing fansub tapes. While there was always a little bit of complaining, and a few giggles escaped the mouths of some, it was amazing how little the annoying sound actually impacted the reception of the show. We still kept the tradition of stomping our feet every time “Zettai, Unmei, Mokushiroku” would play, and I’m sure everyone who watched the show at that time still gets a twinge when they hear “fukaku… motto fukaku” (assuming they’re still re-watching it in Japanese… which they should because the dub for Utena is not the best). Sometimes little annoyances don’t matter that much when the group has a collective investment in the bigger picture.

This brings me to the situation we’ve been experiencing the past year or so. Last year, mid-march, one of the very, very last in-person events I attended before everything shut down was the anime club’s annual Spring Break Anime Marathon, where folks literally gather from 10am to 10pm and anime episodes are randomly drawn from what members nominate. I’m glad I took the day off of work to attend, because it was the last time I saw most of those folks face-to-face; the world simply stopped after that. But anime club and its members proved their resiliency, because meetings immediately moved online without really skipping a beat. I would hate to suggest that there’s been anything “good” about this pandemic; thousands of people have died and to suggest it was for some kind of greater good would be gross. But I do know for a fact that my comfort with video conferencing technology and my ability to gain some benefit from interacting virtually would not be where it was right now if I hadn’t been forced to adapt to daily life in such a way. By the time things are all said and done we’ll have spent over a year doing virtual anime club, and I thank my lucky stars that the younger members were tech-savvy enough to keep things going in the face of an unprecedented threat to every in-person organization in existence. But even now, we have our little blips; video streaming has introduced its share of technical difficulties that we frequently have to manage and sometimes you just have to throw your arms up and let them happen. I’m reminded time and time again, though, that when you get a group of like-minded people together for a reason, in general they tend not to sweat the small stuff.

As we entered 2002 and fired up the final cour of Utena, we left behind those noisy VHS tapes for, well, VHS tapes that didn’t make a buzzing noise every 6 seconds. It was a relief to the ears and we could now focus on the incredibly dramatic final story arcs. Ultimately it was a win, but I can’t help but think about how memorable an experience it was having to suffer through each and every episode on those tapes. I mean, I’m still laughing about it nearly 20 years later, so it clearly left an impression on me. I think most of my nostalgia comes from knowing that it’s an experience that pinpoints such a time and place in my own anime fandom, and which can never really be recreated in any appreciable way. You really did have to be there, I suppose.