This past week, I had the most amazing discovery.
I’m not sure when, but at some point a video store opened up close to me. Deciding not to go in on many occasions, I figured that this time I would see what’s up. “Maybe they’ll have anime for cheap,” I thought.
And boy did they.
“Time capsule” and “anachronism” are not quite the right ways to describe this store, but it’s a good starting point. The store was small, but concentrated as 80% of the stock was kung fu movies with an entire shelf devoted to Jean-Claude Van Damme. Copies of Street Fighter stared me right in the face. But I wasn’t there for Belgian heroics, I was there to find anime. How was their collection, you ask?
Naruto.
Ninja Scroll.
Fist of the North Star.
Urotsukidoji.
And all of it was bootleg Hong Kong DVDs.
Yes it is THAT kind of old-fashioned video store, a relic of the age when anime was perceived as all tits and porn… but now also Naruto. Oh, and of course the anime was right next to the porn shelf. If you didn’t like Demon Beast Invasion, maybe you’d go for Some Like It Black.
And then there was another shelf devoted to DVDs about black booty that was entirely separate from the porn section.
This store…was history.
OGIUE MANIAX 
I worked at an upstart video store about ten years ago — starting a video store with thousands of VHS tapes just as DVD was taking over the market probably wasn’t the best idea, and they closed about 3 or 4 years later — that had an anime section I unfortunately didn’t explore as well as I should have. Tons of titles mostly from the 80’s, all displayed with extremely sun-faded VHS boxes. I distinctly remember the signage on the top of the shelf read ‘Japanimation,’ too.
LikeLike
At every FYE I’ve been to, anime and porn sections are always right next to each-other, partly because the first part of the porn shelf if anime porn.
I think my mom thinks that all anime is porn or something. She thinks I’m some kind of insane pervert.
LikeLike
It disturbs me to go to the FYE in the local mall and see the porn section. I’m a miserable failure at being a prude, and society is way more sexually open these days (sort of, in certain ways), but something about that sort of setup just weirds me out. I just cannot fathom the sort of person who’d stop by FYE while in the mall and buy some porn.
I can fathom the sort of person who’d stop by the adult store and buy some porn–that’s what the adult store is there for, but that is the Here Be Dragons on the road map of madness.
LikeLike
I think what really makes it worse, though, is the fact that often you essentially have Pokemon DVD’s sitting right next to Debbie Does Dallas.
FYE is far from the only ‘mainstream’ store that does this, though – Best Buy does it (in the ones that actually have anime sections), as do most places that actually carry both porn and anime.
LikeLike
*raises hand*
LikeLike
I usually see anime close to the foreign films, special interest, or TV sections. Or sometimes it’s mixed in with the action and kids/family sections (since those are the only genres of anime video stores typically have – mainstreamed kid shows or Adult Swim-like shows). I don’t go to video stores very often and I don’t think I’ve been to one with a porn section so I couldn’t comment about that.
I wonder if the day will ever come when we’ll see DVDs of Azumanga Daioh, Lucky Star, and the like anime in the comedy sections of U.S. video stores?
LikeLike
“I just cannot fathom the sort of person who’d stop by FYE while in the mall and buy some porn.”
Not to be too apologetic, but that’d only be the very people who made the Suncoasts, Sam Goodys, FYEs, Media Plays, and whatever other Musicland/Transworld ventures there were into the very cornerstone of anime as a viable retail product. The kind of person who’d buy porn in the mall instead of in an adult store is well…MOST people who would buy porn. A mall is safe. A mall isn’t located on the border of some dangerous industrial sector of town, the way adult-dedicated outlets have to be by law.
These places succeeded as well as they did BECAUSE they sold straight-up porno on their shelves, from the safety and convenience of your local shopping mall. The porn labels were what kept companies like CPM, ADV, et al financially afloat for them to license actual GOOD stuff. The side effect of this was that era was the era where the war to fight was convincing people that not all anime was violent rape porn. We’ve moved on since then. Now we fight to convince people that not all anime is borderline child porn. Well, I do anyway. (Most of the time, I can’t win this fight.)
Regardless, now that these retail outlets are gone such that the only place you can buy hentai is either online, at anime conventions, or at porn stores, the only companies releasing the stuff anymore tend to be companies that don’t really focus on anime much. (Yes, I include Media Blasters as such a company.) Good riddance I say, because Japanese animated and live-action porn is completely unerotic crap due to the Japanese libido being seemingly dominated by the need to see rape, torture, murder, and other things the brain is forced to love when censoring mosaics deny it from seeing the pink.
LikeLike