Humble Beginnings
I've been into Japanese pop-culture for as long as I remember. Back in the late '70s and early '80s, I watched Battle of the Planets, Star Blazers, Jonny Socko, Ultraman and Godzilla on TV. I guess it was a natural progression from all the Star Trek, Space 1999 and Doctor Who I've been watching. In the late '80s, I started tape trading and discovered great shows like Kikaida and Kamen Rider, and also a lot of crappy anime. 'Fansubbing' started taking roots in the early '90s, but getting tapes where very hard, unless you were part of a group of elitist snobs. After a couple years of trading the latest shit anime garbage and wondering why show I like (tokusatsu and classic '70s anime, like Mazinger Z) weren't being fansubbed, I decided to do it myself. Everybody at the time was using the Amiga and a program called JacoSub. So, in 1995, I found a fully loaded Amiga on ebay and was ready to go. But being the lazy bastard that I am, it took about 6 months to figure out how to use the Amiga and JacoSub. During that time, I discovered a website called JIGS (Japan Internet Goods Service, or something like that) to buy the latest VHS and LDs. And there was another website, I forget the name, that sold used LDs. I've built up a nice little collection of Japanese LDs. I searched the internet for scripts and copied the subtitles from fansubs. The first thing I subtitled was a Dragonball Z movie. Don't remember which one. But I did manage to find quite a few DBZ scripts on-line and a local Japanese video rental had many of the episodes on tape. At that time, I spent day and night subtitling anime but I realized I still wasn't subbing the show I wanted to in the first place. I had the the shows I like on VHS and LD but I couldn't find any scripts. Thus started my search for a translated. In 1996,I hounded Eric, a good buddy of mine who taught himself Japanese and had a Japanese girlfriend, to translated for me. After much badgering, I got him and his ladyfriend to translate the Kamen Rider X movie. It was only a half hour long, but it was a start. I had a spiny tailed iguana, whose latin species name is Ctenosaur, as a pet at the time and "Ctenosaur Video" was born. While trading tapes, I met Paul of Henshin Video. Since he was interested in getting shows subtitled himself, he gave me some Carranger, Guyferd and Gatchaman scripts he found on-line. And of course I subtitled them. Someone fansubbed the Japanese movie "Hakaider" a couple years earlier, but a director's cut version of the movie was released. So I got (after much begging) Eric and his then girlfriend (now wife) to translated the 20 or so extended minutes. During this time, I really started getting into Japanese period-piece action movies like Zatoichi and Lone Wolf. In 1997, after having a small collection of my own subtitled stuff, I openned up my very own website and started selling that and various straight-japanese tokusatsu shows I bought at the local japanese video rental. Another friend of mine, who was in college at the time, introduced me to a japanese girl, Miyuko, who ended up translating "Carranger vs Ohranger" for me and then quickly disappeared. Later on, Paul wanted to meet me at a comic book convention he had a table at. But at another table, I meet Victor and Shelton, who are pretty notorious in the anime bootlegging world as Anime Labs, Project X and a lot of other names. I showed them a few episodes I translated and we started talking. Then my college-boy buddy introduced me to another girl who wanted to make some money translating, named Miho. She translated a few titles, and had 2 of her friends (forgot their names, sorry!) to contact me to do some translations. Finally, my search was over! I had three translations - their translations were pretty bad, but workable. Then on my answering machine was a message from another friend of Miho, named Yuko. Thinking that I had enough translators, I didn't get back to her but she was persistant. I finally meet up with her and gave her 2 episodes of "Fireman" to translate. She quickly finished them and the translations were amazing. They still needed some work, but she was definately the best translator I worked with so far. And to think, I wasn't going to call her back. (Side note, to this day, about 7 1/2 years later, I never subtitled those 2 episodes of Fireman) A couple of months later, I meet with Victor and Shelton at another comic con. We talked more and they took me in and helped me out, think that it would be "better to work with each other than against each other." So in January of 1998, I started selling my tapes at comic cons...
It's getting late and I'm hungry and tired now. So... To be continuted!