Drink From Every Cup

Anime VHS Tapes from My Library

I’ve been reorganizing storage boxes in the garage, and today I got to a section of anime storage boxes. There are a lot of cool – but useless – memorabilia. I have a lot of magazines and publications that I can’t yet bear to part with – Newtype, Newtype USA, Manga Max, Protoculture Addicts, Animag, Animerica – and more. There are booklets from the early days of Anime Expo and Kumoricon. Also, I have printouts of email correspondence from fandom in the 1990s, including fansubbers. I reboxed the items (from old, limp bankers boxes into the new, sturdier ones from the remodel) and put them back onto the storage shelves.

However, there were three bankers boxes of VHS videotapes. And I’ve decided it’s finally time to discard them. All they are doing now is taking up valuable space – and I no longer can play VHS videotapes, anyway.

Bankers Boxes of Anime VHS Videotapes

I unloaded the boxes for the group photo at the top of this post. The photo will be the only record of that collection once the tapes are gone.

Memories of the days of anime fansub exchange are precious. Some of the correspondence I kept brought back memories. (I had a good relationship with well-known fansub champions Bruce and Karen Duffy, who lived just outside of Salem – an hour from Portland – and who I actually got to visit a time or two. Trivia: Piro of Megatokyo fame did some of the illustrations for the Duffy’s fabulous VHS tape labels – for the Marmalade Boy series, I believe.)

As far as the commercial VHS tapes go, I think I have DVDs or Blu-rays of all of those series. The only anime VHS tapes that are withheld from this purge are my Gunbuster VHS tapes. My Gunbuster collection is sacred. And of course, the Gunbuster tapes weren’t in the boxes in the garage anyway.

So... sayonara, VHS collection. I’m letting go of the 1990s – finally!