アニメ Republic

Recently I have been tracking down various anime titles that never made the jump to DVD nor had they been released on Laserdisc. These poor lost souls languish in the forgotten abyss we know as VHS.

Some of these are more common than others and can be found in places like eBay or Amazon marketplace among other locations. Others however are rather rare and can reach prices equaling or surpassing their original retail price, in some cases by a significant amount. I was recently outbid on two Galaxy Express 999 movies release back in the day by VIZ. These were the English dubbed versions of the two films. The subtitled version can be found on DVD by way of a Korean R3 (legit as far as I have been told) release at a fairly decent price. The two VHS tapes eventually went for $57.00 and $26.00 for the first and second movies respectively. Since I already picked up the subtitled versions on DVD, I didn’t go overboard for these.

Here are a few other examples of rare and hard to find VHS releases. Sol Bianca 1 and 2 never made it to DVD in the US (a edited version was released in the UK some years ago) and while the first OVA did manage to get a laserdisc release by then AD Vision Inc., the second OVA only ever had a VHS release. Complier is another title that would probably sell okay if released on DVD, but for now we only have them on VHS (in this case the English dubbed versions). I managed to track down all three volumes of the original release of Dangaio released at the time by the late great US Renditions.

The folks at ADV and Right Stuf/Nozomi have recently been making some ground in releasing older titles on DVD with such titles as Guy, Princess Minerva and Toward the Terra the movie (which did get a laserdisc release though). However they each have a number of other titles that are still all but forgotten now and seem to be permanently relegated to VHS. I picked up both the subtitled and English dubbed versions of Leda – The Fantastic Adventures of Yohko from (at the time just) The Right Stuf. Also included in this grouping are AI City and Lily C.A.T. (from Streamline Pictures). Twin Dolls from AD Vision is another title released in two volumes under the old Softcel Pictures label. Also in that group is a rather cool ‘old school’ OVA consisting of three separate stories entitled The Cockpit released by Urban Vision. This is another of the titles that had sub-par DVD release in Europe.

And leading the pack in hardest to find and most expensive has to be Super Deformed Double Feature released only on VHS by AnimEigo. This title consists of two “Super Deformed” type parody shows called Ten Little Gall Force and Scramble Wars (featuring cast and characters from the Bubblegum Crisis series among others. Of course who can forget the famous (??) one and only English dubbing attempt of Urusei Yatsura entitled Those Obnoxious Aliens? This one was also released by AnimEigo and never saw the light of day after that.

There are plenty of others of course. I am still looking for a few to fill in the gaps on my list. As more arrive from the hunt I will post updates of the more notable titles. Not to mention if any of these do end up getting a DVD release at some point.

Enjoy!!