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Answerman - Is It Worth Collecting Anime On VHS?

Actually my DBZ tape with episodes 68-70 (Japanese numbering) has some dubbed scenes at the very beginning not available anywhere else (they were cut/paste from ep. 67, and completely rescripted and redubbed in 2006 for the uncut release). It was FUNi's very first DBZ tape.

Actually, I have a soft spot in my heart for VHS-era anime trailers in general.

Still, there are some diamonds in the rough worth hunting down since VHS is the only means to view them here in the states. Titles that come to mind for me are Leiji Matsumoto's The Cockpit, Ultimate Teacher, several Rumic Theater shorts (Mermaid's Scar and Laughing Target), and Spirit of Wonder: Miss China's Ring.

Optical discs got rid of many of those problems. DVDs were good (even Video CDs were better than VHS!), but Blurays are much better.

classicalzawa wrote:

Anyway, here's a fun one from Media Blasters, where the first 30 seconds of CGI are so eye-bleedingly bad it makes Food Fight look acceptable (the rest of the promo vid is funny in other ways though)

How wonderfully nostalgic and I've never even heard of those anime titles before.

CandisWhite wrote:

VHS does not deteriorate "just sitting there on the shelf."

Actually it does. It's just as prone to degradation if poorly stored as any other media. Books get bookworm and mould, vinyl gets warped, laserdiscs get rot, DVDs get delaminated, and I'm sure Blu-ray will show up some new horror. Magnetic tape if stored poorly will degrade. But kept in proper conditions, it will last for decades and more. They're remastering vinyl again, in some case from master tapes over 60 or 70 years old, and cinema audio used to be recorded magnetically for much of the analogue era.

But magnetic media throws up another path of failure that discs don't; the cassette, which is of particular relevance to VHS, and also to audio cassette. This is one instance where the media is reliant on the quality of moving parts, the reels and rollers and so on. Cassettes rely on dry lubricant to keep the parts moving, and that lubricant can evaporate. The trouble is that studios and distributors opted for the lowest bidder to manufacture the video and audio cassettes that they released movies and TV, and albums on.

I've recently had some negative experiences with both audio and video. I've long since divested myself of most of my VHS collection, but I still had that one Star Trek series that I had no intention of double dipping on. I found myself in need of storage space, and decided to give Voyager one final watch before throwing the tapes out. Pulled out my old VCR, hooked it up to my late, lamented CRT TV (it died last week and I still feel the pain), and started watching my way through 80 tapes. Of the 80, over half now squeaked their way through playback, about ten stretched and distorted playback, losing colour, losing stereo, introducing tape artefacts or roll, and two just stuck.

And last year, I got the urge to play some audio cassettes, all those mixtapes I'd meticulously made as a teenager, all those albums I bought on tape when my universe consisted of what I could see, and what I could drown out with my walkman, tapes that I never bothered double-dipping to CD. Same deal, all those store bought, pre-recorded albums were released on cassettes made by the lowest bidder. About thirty of them ground to a halt in my tape deck, or distorted playback. However, every blank tape that I bought, paid a wodge for the quality, plays now as they did 30 years ago.

You, then, go on to talk about your own things stuffed in boxes. 80 tapes is a lot to watch in one go, especially for recently out of storage tapes on a recently out of storage VCR. I've had some audio cassettes crap out but they've been of the Disney Afternoon variety (i.e. kid me played the hell out of them); Plus, my cassette player has never sat completely idle. When I say "left on the shelf", I mean left on the rec room shelf where they've been for years, right alongside the DVDs and Blu-rays that have joined them. Same with cassettes on the stereo shelf.