(Japanese stuff meshes magnificently with American industry. Cars, eletronics, Rangers of every color! Why should anime be an exception?! Why not buy it on your terms?)
So anime series, OAVs and Movies come in plentiful amounts, especially long lived franchises and lengthy TV series. So let's be honest, that can get expensive, right? When I got seriously into anime (like... '93-'94?), I sought guidance from an old, lonely, marginally crazed man with fifty cats and a house full of anime laserdiscs and palpable regret.
I should have just taken a page from Ranma's book and swam to Japan.
Not to say that he didn't have plenty of info to share and his insight into anime, the market, voice acting, etc. made him a surprising asset to my overall understanding of the industry right as it began flooding over in tides of speedlines during the 90's. I should have written more back then, but I was an angsty child who could naught but pine for a Laserdisc player because they were obviously like touching the future itself.
Heh. Laserdiscs.
So now that I have more DVDs (anime and otherwise) than I can appropriately store and/or display, I feel it's only fair that I share some of my experience with future Otaku so that they too can writhe appropriately when they too hear that stupid word.
So with FAR less cats in tow, roughly 20 years of scraping for anime swag and experience and with current tools you can simply buy and click with, I gift you with the tools to become as big a nerd as myself with an anime collection so ample that the Gods of Nerding would themselves weep with pride at the very sight of it all, particularly since you've acquired on a budget of nothing.
With all that out of the way, let's talk preference and strategy. Since we're in a depression in the USA, anime is thick on the ground and companies are going under left right and sideways leaving their assets to be distributed by smarmy liquidators who drive the price and value down to nothing. It's AWESOME.
New Series
The newest series are the biggest pain. They always have been. As new episodes come over from Japan, they get processed in dub form, marketed and then distributed. So if you're picking everything up at Beast Buy, Fry's Electronics, Suncoast or whatever, you'll have to show up regularly and pick up each individual disc as it's released and usually you'll only have 2-4 episodes on the disc.
Doing this keeps you on top of the series, but this also leaves you with an assload of DVD cases floating around when it comes time to finish the series and months later you'll see boxed sets in the place of those same DVDs, usually for much less than you'd have paid for buying them new. And again, I have to stress the space that they'll consume, we're talking feet versus inches.
On the plus side though, you'll occasionally come across Third Party DVD boxes meant to contain ALL the DVDs released thus far. I picked up one for Evangelion as well as Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040. I paid through the nose and I really could have just been patient and picked up the better and BETTERER versions of the series, but at least I was able to buy boxes that made it look like I'd planned this all in advance.
Check Rightstuf.com for artboxes periodically as well as eBay. You might surprise yourself.
Package Deals
Boxed sets are great ways to go. You get completion. You get closure. That's worth a lot. On their own you'll look at them as pricey, and so you should as they're usually STILL way overpriced. But if it's something you like and you've patiently waited for the distributor to put it together instead of blowing $10-$25 on each individual DVD then you get to enjoy the benefit of fixed glitches (like with Evangelion), impressive artboxes to decorate your nerd cave and most importantly SPACE for more anime as your collection grows.
On the more shallow end of logic the boxes usually look awesome and lately come in slim-packs that take up surprisingly little space.
Used
An option I can't recommend enough. Check out Pawn stores, Book stores, Comic shops, Amazon, FYE and the back of Suncoast stores for their used stuff. Ebay's alright too... sometimes.
Sure, you run the risk of getting a scratched or less-than-perfect disc, but you can save yourself hundreds of dollars building an anime collection this way. Gotta have money for swag, right? Shop smart! SHOP INTER...net...mart...thing. Stuff. Whatever.
The cheapest parts are individual DVDs and I know I just recommended against getting those, but I bend the rule when the collection of individual discs in a series can be acquired for a buck apiece.
Bootleg
I need to mention this because it needs to be mentioned. Bootlegs exist and I won't pretend they don't and they usually fulfill all kinds of needs by looking good, being cheap and taking up less space than anything the domestic distributor can afford to manufacture and sell. The bootleg also has the advantage of including everything the domestic distributor has paid good money to produce so far including an English dub and all the extras they've produced.
I've had some experience comparing the domestic and the bootleg items and here's what you can expect: Usually, the quality is VERY good visually and audibly, but to keep costs down they use inferior DVD discs, which will occasionally crap out. I had a Hellsing TV series set that totally died on me after about 4 uses.
When things really go bad, you'll notice. Sometimes they utilize compression methods to keep more episodes on one disc which can make the show look horrible. My bootleg Revoutionary Girl Utena set frequently has weird visual ticks and never shows the crisp clarity of the CPM domestic DVDs. Hiccups, glitches, skipping... all the typical Bootleg gripes, but it DOES work and it is the complete series.
While I can't blame anyone for going Bootlegs because it's a cheap, attractive and tangile alternative, one needs to brace themselves for any and all consequences that such decisions merit. For fear of earning distributor ire (or potentially sending angry distributors towards dealers who I bear no malice), I will simply say that those interested in obtaining these should explore the internet. You WILL find it.
Anime Downloads: Legal & Not so Legal
So many distributors clued in as to how smart it would be to take advantage of fair pricing and convenient downloading of anime episodes after a piecemeal fashion, so much so that aside from iTunes, you can download as much as your console hard drives can handle on your Xbox 360 and PS3. The logical drawback is the fact that losing the hard drive usually means losing everything you downloaded because ludicrous rules apply to paid downloads, then there's the lack of a tangible disc which can be played anywhere.
I don't entirely recommend the paid downloads except as a cool way to get a good quality taste of a show for a couple of bucks. I did that exact thing with about thirty different series, which I bought into about half of them, as in I went out and got their boxed sets. Good stuff.
And that leads into the other option, which I have to mention because it also needs mentioning. Just like bootlegs, This is NOT an option I'm recommending for a host of reasons.
Usually, these are assembled by pirate-hat-wearing nerds who have strange ideas about the ethical cost of an anime boxed set and put it up for free. The quality varies and unlike the paid downloads you'd have paid for, you spin the virus roulette wheel and run all sorts of fun risks from what otherwise seem like guys who are really generous with another dude's stuff. Additionally, there's the ethical point, which beyond the fact that you're stealing from the distributor there's the fact that you're helping to kill any reason for them to bother bringing them over from Japan in the first place.
While I wish things were always cheaper, prices for anime have never been more reasonable. VHS tapes were paid for in money you received after selling your organs on the black market, while DVD boxed sets of the same anime are selling for bus fare by comparison.
On the internet all bajillion episodes are up for free? Fuck you, Internet. Fuck you.
I don't disagree that some companies (animeigo, for instance) need to snap the fuck into reality about shit that is ancient, dusty and wasting away in their possession and price it accordingly in neat piles so they don't kill off interest of awesome titles, but it doesn't mean you should steal from that company.
Vote with your fucking wallets!
There's a reason people boycott things and since you literally ARE the market, you can define how things operate for your benefit.
This bleeds into the awkward part of online anime downloading that is usually always free and is what is know as a Labor of Love. Naturally, I'm talking about...
Fansubs
Fansubs are how anime REALLY got noticed, who wouldn't notice free anime? Usually fansubs were super accurate and had awesome subtitle features and language/cultural guides that helped us filthy Gaijin understand the situational context of the far east.
Before distributors oiled themselves up and jumped into the ring to fight over licenses, anime just sat around in dusty piles and clever minds brought over tapes from Japan and using magical equipment applied English Language subtitles to the Japanese language anime and gave away tapes usually for the cost of the shipping expenses and the blank tapes as well. This is how I watched a series called Mysterious Play or, as I knew it, "Fushigii Yuugi", as well as Voltage Fighter Gowkaizer, Tekkaman Blade 2, Virus Buster Serge, Tenchi Muyo and a bunch of other stuff.
It whets the appetite of the market, spreading free advertising by getting on-hand nerd reviews before there's a product to sell domestically. It builds on an existing market and for a long time was a bigger benefit than a burden to the domestic market.
That was then. Now we have other problems...
Just like the piracy of the domestic product, Fansubs are FREE and found in copious amounts on the internet since most anime fans usually get their fansubs online anyway. But the complications extend even further because with a tool like Youtube online it's a devastating thought as to how it could affect anyone foolish enough to distribute in any country, ever.
It benefits fans of Bleach and Naruto for instance because they can watch episodes in roughly the same week that they air in Japan complete with commando-efficient subtitles by heroic nerds graded by hazard levels instead of personalities and since copyright law is super flimsy on stuff that is broadcast... well, they go nuts!
It doesn't SEEM like it does any harm, but over time it WILL eat into the profits as they try to bring it into the country and since it's all floating in the air as opposed to being tangible copies of tapes or discs the downloads will be nigh available forever. So things get really awkward for the local distributor as the die-hard crowds will already have had their fill meaning less copies will sell.
The less copies that sell, the less domestic support that franchise will have. Which is why they approached the problem in this direction: Distributors tolerate fansubs up until the point their product is on the shelf, they do little to harass the fansubbers. The "plus" is that the domestic distributor has the original creator's stamp on the translation and usually gets the same approval for their English dub.
Uh... Well, the whole Fansub/piracy line is really one for the market to reach consensus on and the industry to out-do the competition. ADV Films had that down to an art with good dubs that were worth waiting for, cool extra features like pop-up cultural references and the jiggle counter and a lineup so reliable that they went from localizing for consumption to directly MAKING anime as well as dabbling in other side projects like the live action Evangelion film (now dead in the water) and Lady Death.
I'm dreadfully heading off topic now, but basically there's all kinds of avenues of anime collection in this day and age for anyone on any budget. Knowing me, I'll flesh out the options I've listed with better examples, but for now please leave thoughts and suggestions. I don't plan to mention the downloads or bootlegs and how to obtain them, again so not to spread ire or wrath in either direction.
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