In a general sense, or for anime specifically?ABED wrote:Kunzait often brings up bootlegging, but how big was that market? I have a hard time believing it was ever all that big, and certainly nowhere near mainstream. I'm sure DB was known in the US, but it was a very small number of people.
Generally speaking? Bootleg VHS trading had almost always been a massive, massive underground market throughout the entirety of the 1980s and 90s. It was not "mainstream" in the sense that you generally of course weren't going to find any of these tapes sitting in a chain video store (though you'd certainly see them popping up in mom & pop stores quite often).
But... the black market for VHS bootlegs was MASSIVE during those 20 or so years. To degrees that I'm still shocked that anyone who was alive back then was somehow unaware of.
People had all kinds of outlets for trading these tapes. There were basement sales. Of the literal sort: if you lived in any kind of urban or inner-city environment, it was not hard at all to come across some rundown old Church or abandoned building where sellers would regularly set up shop a few times a year and people would generally know to come looking on X or Y day and month by word of mouth. Or small stalls from street vendors, who sold tapes right out in broad daylight on particularly busy streets. Or local grocery stores (especially ones in Little Tokyo or Chinatown areas) which would have them all up on racks. Head shops were also fairly common places to look: generally speaking if you knew and were cool with the people who worked there, they'd sell you bootleg tapes of all kinds of obscure lost or foreign oddities.
There were tapes of anything and everything from unaired Television pilots, to unreleased films (I was a huge horror buff, so Italian giallo as well as Mexican, French, and Southeast Asian horror were things I collected on bootleg VHS in robust quantities growing up), to foreign movies and TV shows never released in the U.S., and even sometimes actual security cam footage taken from stores and office buildings showing all kinds of weird, sick, and otherwise humorous real life incidents that became the pre-internet equivalent of "memes".
My dad was friends with someone who was an active seller himself. When I was little, my dad owned literally hundreds and hundreds of tapes that were filled to capacity with sometimes as much as almost half a dozen movies each (since tapes back then could hold as much as 6 to 8 hours or so worth of footage). His old apartment was literally filled with stacks upon stacks upon stacks of the fucking things, most of them filled up with classic Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest kung fu and Wuxia films (which was one of the earliest ways that I got into the genre growing up), along with some fairly fucked up grindhouse films (rape movies like Forced Entry weren't uncommon amongst his collection).
Kung Fu bootleg tapes in particular were ever present almost everywhere in most inner-city neighborhoods in general. My dad's personal collection was by no means even CLOSE to the end of my collecting of those during those years: all you had to do was go down to the right street corner, or get to know the right people (be they people who worked behind the counter of the local mom & pop video store, or just the right friend of a friend of a friend's cousin, etc).
I've talked about this a bunch in the Wuxia thread, but there's a reason that hip hop and black culture has such a massive, massive connection to classic Kung Fu films and Wuxia: grindhouse theater showings and bootleg VHS tapes of those things were an almost intrinsic part of growing up in "the hood" so to speak. Lots and lots of people from those kinds of poorer inner-city areas, especially dorks like me and my friends, had a collection and were always on the hunt for more. The weirder and more bizarre, the better.
Superstar rap groups like the Wu Tang Clan didn't just miraculously all of a sudden become famous and have instant magical access to these films out of nowhere within a vacuum: they were at one point just regular guys growing up in the projects, no different than a hundred people I'd known my whole life from places like where I grew up, who got into these sorts of films because bootleg tapes of them just came with the neighborhood and were a part of daily life there, and would later incorporate their iconography into their own music (as did tons of other rap artists at the time).
But while bootleg VHS tapes were definitely more readily visible and easily available in more "ghetto" areas, they were by no means totally isolated away from higher class areas. College campuses in particular would see oceans of these things make their way across dorm rooms all across the country. I lived not too terribly far from two of the most prestigious colleges in the country (Yale and NYU): tons of guys I hung out with as a kid were students in both those schools who'd come into all kinds of unique and weird films and shows from around the world through tape trading among different dorm houses.
And all that's not even getting into the Tokusatsu/Kaiju end of things, particularly Godzilla. Godzilla bootleg VHS tapes were SO utterly and indescribably available for just about anyone to find, that you'd literally have to have been encased in stone at the bottom of the ocean to not know that those were things that people owned and passed around among their friends. Most ANY non-chain video store or any comic book shop during the latter half of the 80s and entirety of the 90s carried them. In bulk. Godzilla was a film franchise that was without question WAY more known through its bootleg tapes than it was from almost any sort of official release it had gotten back then. Odds were overwhelming that if you knew someone who was into Godzilla, they were into it specifically through bootleg VHS tapes.
For anime in particular, it was largely raw (unsubbed) and genuinely niche and legitimately obscure during the latter end of the 70s (where it was primarily the domain of Sci Fi convention halls) as well as - to a gradually lesser and lesser degree - much of the early half of the 80s.
By the latter end of the 80s though, fansubs very much took off and anime bootleg tapes quickly became exceedingly ubiquitous. During the 90s, the things would show up at ALL the above venues for obtaining tapes, and then some. The video store right across the street from the project I lived in as a kid would have anime fansubs just show up on the racks on a fairly regular basis (that was how I saw the OVA Birth uncut and in Japanese during a time when only the edited dub was available).
There were all kinds of stalls at the local mall that would sell them (one time a friend of mine walked away with the whole Patlabor TV series on a couple of tapes several years before it got licensed for around 30 bucks just because he happened to find it from the right vendor at the mall). This local head shop called Charms that my friends and I always used to hang out at would sell a veritable treasure trove of anime fansubs: one of my closest friends (the one from whom my "Kunzait" handle originally stems from) would go there regularly to buy and follow the series Fushigi Yuugi more or less as it was airing in Japan, and also where I got a bunch of the Yomi/Raizen-era episodes from Yu Yu Hakusho. All of this was during the mid-90s or so.
Fansub bootleg VHS tapes were the original origin and genesis of all kinds of anime fandom pastimes that people now take for granted: the very first ever AMVs started out as "extras" that fansubbers would put together just for fun to bookend "compilation" tapes: tapes that functioned almost like random "mixtapes" that were filled with a sampling of random episodes, movies, and OVAs from all kinds of disparate and diverse anime series (that functioned almost like a sampler buffet of what the subber or seller in question had to offer).
You could get something that would start off with a few episodes of Irresponsible Captain Tylor before moving on to an episode of Maryuu Senki, then to one of the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure OVAs, an episode of Ranma that Viz had yet to get to at the time, the uncut Megazone 23, maybe some Slayers, Kimagure Orange Road, a random Dirty Pair outing, a 3x3 Eyes ep, DBZ Movie 8 (because that thing showed up on damn near every other anime mixtape out there to the point where it felt almost mandatory), and finally end off on something arty and odd like Take the X Train or Memories... before capping itself off with maybe a Devil Hunter Yokho AMV set to Phil Collins "In the Air Tonight" or something random like that.
Fandubs were also something that got their start on these tapes: they were fairly rare (like genuinely rare: I can't imagine there were more than a dozen or so attempts, probably less than that, across 20 someodd years since the effort to create those back then was obviously monumental). Decades before the first Abridged series, there was an infamous fan parody dub of Macross from the very early 90s. Fairly sure there was a stab at one of the Ranma OVAs as well. People would even do things like take bits and monologues from standup comedians' like Bill Hicks or David Cross and dub them over onto various scenes from different anime that matched up (as closely as possible anyway) to whatever they were talking about.
Come the mainstreaming of the internet around '94 or so, and forget it: you could join all kinds of different mailing lists from different subbers across various Usenet forums and some of the earliest ever anime websites and get regular (or semi-regular) updates on different available series. Or just order out whatever individual tapes directly. This was how I'd gotten a ton of my latter episodes of Fist of the North Star (stuff from the Hokuto no Ken 2 era), as well as some of the bits of original Dragon Ball I was missing, among other things.
An anecdote I've shared a few times on here is how by the mid 90s Dragon Ball had become so widely well known and recognized among anime fans through years and years of being a fixture in the fansubbing community, that there were even a few video and comic book stores here in the U.S. that would put up Japanese banners and marquee ads for GT during the lead up to and first few months or so of its original Japanese airing (so this would be early-ish '96 or so) in an effort to attract anime buffs to check out the store's general anime and manga selection. Some American arcades had even imported the three DBZ arcade games, because there was enough of a "cult" interest in the franchise as early as '93/'94 or so (especially among import-savvy gamers).
One of the more unusual and unique outlets that I remember getting raw anime episodes from: the earlier mentioned close friend (who I got my username here from) wound up enrolling in a "penpal" service around '95/'96 or so. Basically it was a mailing service who's goal was to better "connect" different kids from around the world (again, in very much a "pre-internet" sense). She made friends with a Japanese girl her age through it who was living in I think Shibuya or some such area. One of the things that the penpal service allowed you to do was send each other packages filled with all kinds of knick knacks and artifacts that were somehow "representative" of your home country and culture.
My friend would send this girl things like American music CDs (usually from underground hardcore punk or riot grrrl bands who had material that was harder to come across in Japan) and in return the Japanese girl would tape various anime shows off of Japanese TV and send them back my friend's way. This was how her, and by extension me and the rest of our little clique, wound up seeing and following (albeit raw) Neon Genesis Evangelion AS it was airing week to week/month to month on Japanese TV. Which, gotta say, was pretty damn sweet. Show definitely blew our minds, even raw.
This was also the reason for why (as I've talked about in a bunch of threads, including the Wuxia one) there used to be such a great degree of overlap between anime fans and fans of Hong Kong movies and live action Japanese film: the two would very often share the same groups of sellers or be sold together in many of the same channels and outlets. When you start collecting tapes for one kind of generally strange and odd piece of foreign media, you're gonna find that its a very small hop, skip, and a jump over to delving into another one that's just across the pond. That connection of course went away as both the tape-trading aspect of fansubs died off in favor of digital, as well as the core fabric and makeup for U.S. anime fandom itself radically shifted post-Cartoon Network.
All of this kind of stuff wound up on COUNTLESS tapes that disseminated all across the country from coast to coast. It was without question a fairly massive cottage industry for sure, especially by and throughout the bulk of the 90s (and even for most of the 80s, bootleg VHS was still INSANELY sprawling well outside of anime).
If you lived deep within the thick of someplace like rural middle of nowhere Iowa or Alabama or Kansas or someplace like that, then I can see definitely how something like this might pass you by. But if you were in any sort of metropolitan area or major city or relatively large urban area of some kind, and furthermore if you were fairly socially active and regularly went out and interacted with other extroverted people, and even more so if you and your circle were heavily interested in weird, unusual oddities of film and television media... then this stuff wasn't THAT deeply hidden. You had to basically be living in an underground cave (or under the thumb of wildly overprotective parents) in order to not glom onto the fact that there was an entire, thriving subculture of dorky Gen X slacker-types tooling around places like comic book, record, and video stores passing stuff like this around on the regular.
As far as numbers go, because this was a black market there's almost no way to know for sure. Was Dragon Ball's fansub audience in the millions? Almost undoubtedly not, no way (though it was almost certainly probably much larger than a lot of people on this forum would likely assume, since the average fan these days seems to assume that almost virtually no one knew about this series back then, which isn't even remotely close to accurate).
Was the audience for anime fansubbing as a whole that high? Mmmmmaybe possible? But I can't say that for sure: almost certainly not in the 80s at least, because the audience was still gradually building for it back then from out of the depths of true, genuine obscurity. The 90s though its fairly possible if not incredibly likely: I can attest just from personal experience that any level of difficulty in obtaining anime raws or fansubs was virtually wiped out of existence by at least as early as around 1990/1991 or so. Both Robotech/Macross and Akira made damn certain of that during the late 80s. By that point and onward, you didn't have to even be LOOKING for anime to run across plenty of it within the VHS tape trading realm.
Was the audience for bootleg VHS trading IN GENERAL (beyond anime) that high though? In the 80s or 90s? Oh, almost definitely and without question. Just within major cities like New York, L.A., San Francisco, and Chicago etc. ALONE would probably bump it well into that realm, never mind all the areas that were even relatively closely nearby.
For point of personal reference: I was just a dumb, regular elementary school kid living relatively close to the border between New York and Connecticut. I wasn't some kind of genius child prodigy, I damn sure wasn't rich (I grew up in relative poverty), and I wasn't privy to some super top secret society that had the keys to the vaults of Toei or Toho or Golden Harvest like some kind of dorky Illuminati or whatever.
Seriously, I can't even count now the number of conversations I've gotten into with folks from around here now who would treat me with complete and utter incredulity that I or anyone else could've possibly known about any of this kind of stuff prior to 1999 or 2000 or so (which I would conversely respond with a sentiment of "How does one get to be a nerd with a pulse from before then and somehow NOT know about any of this?").
When really, all that separates me and my experiences from any average regular on a place like this that's relatively close to my age is 1) location and environment (since I know there are a lot of U.S. users here who live or otherwise grew up somewhere in the rural depths of Middle America), and 2) I had a heavily active social life, hung out largely around people way older than I was (most, though not all, of my closest friends growing up in the early part of the 90s were usually in college or around college age - sometimes a bit older - while I was in elementary and middle school: I was the "kid brother" of the group), and had parents who didn't give two shits about or overly monitor what I watched.
That's really all it boils down to: living in or near active civilization, having a relatively active social network of real life friends, and otherwise not being heavily sheltered and overly chained down to things like Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel.
In all honesty, I didn't think that those combination of factors was really all that relatively rare or especially unique and uncommon until I first joined communities like this one a little over ten years ago and started hearing a steady and almost seemingly never-ending stream of stories and testimonials throughout the years since from people - both here and on loads of other similar forums and communities - about how depressingly (sometimes genuinely heartbreakingly so) goddamned socially isolated they were kept by their families (or general life situations) as children growing up, along with how obscenely and ludicrously over-regulated and obsessively monitored and restricted their media viewing was by their respective families.