Inspirational Monday - Evangelion (Patreon)

Probably the #1 question I get about my work is "Have you seen Evangelion?". Short answer; yes. 

Long answer:

Around 1998, I found a small independent video store near my house that would rent tapes for $1 each. As far as I can tell, they might have had the most killer anime collection of any video rental store in the US. Part of the collection was the original release of Evangelion's original TV series, spanned across 12 VHS tapes. I watched those, A LOT.

Evangelion is the single largest inspiration for Angelarium. Not just because there are weird Angels in it, but also because it hit me right at the time in my life when my tastes began to form. The aesthetic of it became the aesthetic I would spend the rest of my life hunting down more of.

Periodically, I'll look around to see if the creators have made any progress on the latest releases but unfortunately they are even worse at releasing sequels on time than I am. The last movie is about 8 years late at this point with no real end in sight.

In the mean time, I'll look up fan made trailers that give me some fresh hype to hold on to. There are a bunch of them but I'll just post the latest one I found. It's fun to imagine getting to make something like this someday.

Ancient History

Back in the day, it cost about $20 to buy 2-3 episodes of anime on VHS, so everyone I knew owned 2 VCRs and got really good at dubbing tapes.

Collecting and copying tapes of anime was my whole life when I was 16. My friends and I would get most of our stuff by ordering "fansubs" in bulk from shady websites. Before streaming services were invented, there way file sharing and before that there was fansubs. Someone would import a VHS copy of anime from Japan and then re-record through a PC with their own fan made subtitles added over the top. Those master tapes would get pushed out to a network for volunteer fans who would act as bootleg distributors for people looking to get copies. The cost of these tapes was shockingly low. I guess the idea was that if no one made a profit from this public network of piracy, no one would get prosecuted. The main downside was that unless you were ordering tapes straight from the original importer, the quality on these would often be pretty bad. A lot of the catalog distributors boasted weren't made of master tapes, but consumer tapes that they had gotten second or third hand. In many cases, you were getting 6th or 7th generation copies with the intros and endings crudely edited out to fit more episodes per tape. There was literally no other way of getting a hold of this stuff so we often let the abysmal quality slide, so long as the subtitles were still marginally readable.

I still have my "A+" quality copy of The End of Evangelion as a relic from my teenage years. It's one of the most formative pieces of media in my life, so it's nice to have an artifact to hold that reminds me of those times.