[Aoi Kurenai]

Quote:

Originally Posted by EpsilonX

I can't even imagine how hard it would have been to be a toku fan in 2004, in terms of sub availability and places to watch.

Surprisingly, not too difficult.

Back then you only had TV-Nihon working on stuff, so you always knew where to get your subs from. (there was another group early on in Magiranger but TV-Nihon sorta bullied them out of existence) Streaming wasn't a really a thing back then, but I'm really glad to have gotten into stuff in an era where you had to download what you wanted to watch. It gives you more control over what you watch if you're able to just torrent them as opposed to relying on some random website to upload the episode. (YouTube wouldn't really start becoming popular until 2006, so around that time people would cut the episodes up into three part chunks and toss them on the site)

That said, 2007~2009 was probably the prime era for being able to download older shows. After Megaupload died, a lot of uploaders went away but before that you had almost every series you could imagine freely available.

It was such a stark contrast to late 2004 when I managed to find a low quality real media encode of the first Kamen Rider episode. It was super pixelated but I figured this would be the only way I would ever get to see such an old episode of something.

Internet history, especially in the last two decades, is a really cool thing to have witnessed firsthand. I'm 28, so I never really experienced the tape trading scene aside from the few times I would head out to flea markets and some Asian vendors would have Dragon Ball Z episodes that were years away from premiering in the US.