There’s plenty of old anime out there for those who know how to find it. Thankfully, there’s a lot on YouTube that’s easy to find, and not all of it is old rips. But I want the old rips, too.
Lately, I’ve been catching up on some Cat’s Eye on @AnimeonTMSOfficialChannel (Tokyo Movie Shinsha). I guess they figured they’d make more money on YouTube views than trying to sell this oldie. But it’s a win for those of us who want to cozy up with some city pop skylines. Cat’s Eye also has one of my favorite, and not overused(?), anime tropes, what I call ‘the cafe’ or ‘the hub’. A lot of the episodes have the characters returning to their cafe between story beats. Sure, other shows have characters going back to an office or an apartment, but that’s not where you want to be. Besides, it’s too Charlie’s Angels. You want a good hub. You want to go to that familiar place where everybody knows, well, probably just your face. And what’s with the highway outside? This is one of those cafes you need a car to access, isn’t it? That’s why it’s always empty. Who doesn’t dream of working at a bookshop-cafe with no customers?
You can also find some anime feature shows on private channels, and uploaders like to add in some period-appropriate Japanese commercials for fun. You can find shows of varying quality on Group Therapy PodCast and Orbital Bacon (the links go to the playlists). When I find some others worth mentioning, I’ll try and post them as well. One thing I like about Orbital Bacon is how he pays tribute to the old Saturday Morning Anime show on the Sci-Fi channel. But for old rips that are of mostly decent quality, check out English Dubbed [VHS] and VHS Era Anime. There’s some better-quality stuff on archive, but we’ll get to that later. The reason I like seeing this stuff preserved and available is that a lot of old anime distributers are not around anymore and the dubs they licensed had to be redone for present day streaming, for copyright purposes. The problem is that since these are no longer big, expensive productions, localization dubs seem to be going to the lowest bidder. Now, the translations are overly stiff and snooty (for weaboos only), and the voice acting is vapid and emotionless. Even if the old dubs did sometimes take a few too many liberties with the content and the translation, they were still sometimes pretty fun to watch.