I got into anime when you had to go to shitty distributor conventions, in shitty city limits hotels, and walk through a big room filled with smoke, rifling through boxes of tapes, while greasy guys in cheap suits tried to talk you into buying shit. The other option were shoddily scanned, black and white, prints of distro catalogues you could order from. They would always be companies you never heard of, from buildings in weird places, and you could never know if you were actually going to get something, or just lose that money. The Sci Fi channel would have saturday morning anime, which would play, uncensored, stuff, but generally only the biggest hits. So it would cycle through Akira, Vampire Hunter D, Bubble Gum Crises, and about a dozen others.
It started to get a better at the end of the 90s, when you had a couple larger distros that came on to the scene, and you could reliably get what you paid for. They would also always have previews of other anime they were selling before the movie started, and it was likely set to some KMFDM track. Then in the 2000s is when it sorts hit a sweet spot, it was easy to get, there were multiple options on TV, and it hadn’t quite yet become totally mainstream. Haven’t really bothered with it much since then. Sometimes I will get recommendations from people I know I can trust to not be suggest the millionth iteration of watered down Fist of the North Star, fan service vehicles, or things that are just collages of bad anime tropes turned into a show.
I got into anime when you had to go to shitty distributor conventions, in shitty city limits hotels, and walk through a big room filled with smoke, rifling through boxes of tapes, while greasy guys in cheap suits tried to talk you into buying shit. The other option were shoddily scanned, black and white, prints of distro catalogues you could order from. They would always be companies you never heard of, from buildings in weird places, and you could never know if you were actually going to get something, or just lose that money. The Sci Fi channel would have saturday morning anime, which would play, uncensored, stuff, but generally only the biggest hits. So it would cycle through Akira, Vampire Hunter D, Bubble Gum Crises, and about a dozen others.
It started to get a better at the end of the 90s, when you had a couple larger distros that came on to the scene, and you could reliably get what you paid for. They would also always have previews of other anime they were selling before the movie started, and it was likely set to some KMFDM track. Then in the 2000s is when it sorts hit a sweet spot, it was easy to get, there were multiple options on TV, and it hadn’t quite yet become totally mainstream. Haven’t really bothered with it much since then. Sometimes I will get recommendations from people I know I can trust to not be suggest the millionth iteration of watered down Fist of the North Star, fan service vehicles, or things that are just collages of bad anime tropes turned into a show.