Let me talk about something that happened to me this week!
So years ago, I bought like 20 something Ranma 1/2 VHS tapes. Like, I'm talking 5 or 6 years ago.
This was when I lived at my parents house, and they still had a 30 something inch CRT TV in the living room. When I bought this lot of Ranma tapes on eBay, I scrounged the closets for a VCR so I could actually watch the dang things. My parents never toss stuff, so they actually had one that worked! I was pretty stoked, watching old dubbed tapes of anime was a cool experience for a 21 year old Samb.
Look at all my Ranma 1/2 VHS tapes! There's not a lot of info on these online honestly... Also hey, my Mario Kart 64 in my N64!
Introducing my Sister
My sister is like 9 years older than me. She did not live with my parents, but she lived, and still does live, close by to them. This means she makes tons of trips to their house for various reasons. She saw the VCR up and running in the living room and immediately asked my parents if she could have it. For some reason, they said yes?? I'm still not sure why they said yes, when it was literally only out of the closet and working because I was literally using it??
I really don't understand it, but a day after getting these tapes some use, I was left woefully without a VCR. I was not going to buy one right then, I was a college student that had a working VCR the previous day, and I'll be damned if I was going to spend my money because my parents didn't care enough about what I was doing.
Fast Forward to last week
So my wonderful girlfriend Oki, who I love very much, has had a CRT in her room forever now. She took it with her when she moved in with me at the beginning of COVID, so we've had it for ages.
Her being so lovely, she let me yoink the TV into my room recently. We've bought an HDMI to RCA adapter so we could hook it up to a PC years ago, but didn't really use it until we moved it to my room.
The specifics on that aren't for this post, that'll be it's own thing. The important thing to note here is that I finally have a CRT again, so I really wanted to find a VCR to hook up to it. I wanted to watch my Ranma 1/2 tapes finally and I also wanted to buy some Sold-As-Blank tapes to check out. Seems like a fun hobby, and if I ever find anything good down the line I'll post about it!
So since I was looking for a VCR, Oki generously asked her parents for me to see if they had one still. Turns out, they did! And they didn't need it!
We score the VCR from them, a Funai SV2000, and I'm stoked again!
Plug in the tape and... The tape jams and the actual inner tape gets yoinked out a bit!!
Ahh! What have I done!!
No big deal! Just fix the tape real quick and google for help...
WOW! 2008, and being told "just take it to the shop" because... they're right, I have no clue what I'm doing inside this VCR! Welp... Guess it's time to give up for now, maybe I'll try to figure it out later...
The Landlord
So I spent the last 4 years living with a group of pals. There was two parents and their daughter, my at-the-time-we-moved-in-coworker/friend-now-just-friend Brundy, my girlfriend Oki, and me. A lot of people, but we rent a house, so it's been fine.
The family recently moved out, without me knowing until the downstairs was void of all furniture! A weird event for sure, but exactly how I would expect something like that to happen.
My roommate Brundy is actually the son of my landlord, so it makes dealing with the landlord way easier honestly. When we told the landlord that we had no furniture, he was like "Hey, let's pull the couches from the garage and you can use them :)"
I was super happy with that, it would be nice to have furniture again and I don't have to spend money?? Nice!
When my landlord showed up, I was conveniently home and able to help them move the couches.
The landlord is a general handyman that owns his own business, which is nice since I work at a home improvement box store. This also means that he has a collection of old stuff in the garage from the last couple decades, since he would never know when stuff would come in handy.
Since we were already moving stuff, he asked if we needed anything else. We scored a couple lamps, and as a half joke I asked if he had a VCR in there I could have.
He replied with "I think I actually do!" and pulled a cloth off of some DVD players and a super nice Symphonic VCR / DVD player combo!!"
Finally! I have a working VCR again after all this time!!
Also, this made me learn about the Ranma 1/2 VHS tapes I have! There's not a ton of info about these online, but I found out that I have multiple subtitled VHS tapes. I was surprised to learn that even back in 1996, the year I was born, that consumers could just buy subtitled anime. That's so cool!
And the only real good resource I could find on these tapes is an old college website that's still being hosted and was posted by someone named Wayne? It's seriously a throwback. It mentions on there that they might finish producing tapes by 2003!! Super cool.
Thanks for the help over 20 years later, Wayne! Hope you're still watching good anime!!