So I originally got into anime around 1995 when I saw a VHS release of “Star Blazers” on the shelf at the video store. I then progressed to “Manga Videos” (as the UK division of Manga Entertainment pretty much had a stranglehold on the Australian market via Siren, that’s what everyone called them), then the following year I discovered the local anime club at the University of Canberra. Though I wasn’t a uni student, the guys running the club weren’t uni students (they just rented the small dingy theatre), the people coming to the screenings were mostly not uni students, it still had 50 to 100 or so people showing up every three weeks. Despite the utter rudeness and contempt the two guys (was three, but he got jack of them and left) had for many of those who showed up to watch stuff, I still managed to get sucked in more into the world of Japanese animation thanks to a lot of the people who showed up who were FAR more friendlier.
I bought a ton of crap, hundreds of tapes, fansubs, laserdiscs, magazines, garage kits, artbooks etc. Then for about a year and a half I ran the club as the two guys who ran it gave up after three and a half years (but hey that’s another story for another time). After helping out another university affiliated club, DVD went on the market. It was 2001 when I finally got a player. With the Australian dollar as all time lows (47 cents to the US dollar at one point) and few titles coming out in the local market, it was a fairly hard time to be a fan. I got into the habit of buying the first volume of a title and the artbox. Yeah, bought way to many titles like that. Once I resigned from my old job at the shitty old ACT government in 2005, I went on a binge using about a thousand dollars of my severance pay to get the rest of the missing volumes.
I soon discovered that the Right Stuf had tons of bargains, discs for as little as US$5.00 each, plus I was snapping up titles as they were going out of print (gotta have City Hunter and Dunbine!). Then as the oversaturated market began to fall over, I snapped up a lot of the Geneon, CPM and ADV titles I was missing. By 2008, I was having 2ft x 1ft x 1ft boxes being shipped to by my PO box on quite a regular basis. I realised I had too much stuff and began watching it in a methodical manner. In late 2009 I decided to cut back by half and only ordered once a month. In 2011 I have cut back further and only order every second month.
So now it’s down to a quarter of what I used to buy (which isn’t too hard considering the lack of releases), but I have a two year backlog. So by my estimates if I no longer bought anything, it would take my two years to watch my pile of unwatched shrink wrapped discs. This is probably a conservative estimate. I have a couple of long (50+ episode) series. I’m getting though about one and a half 26 episode series a week and the pile looks so much smaller, but geez, I look at my collection at times and say “what have I done?!”. I’m seriously thinking about pruning back further and throwing out some of the crappier titles I don’t like (second hand stores don’t care anymore about DVDs or CDs, maybe I’ll give them to the Salvos), as space is becoming a premium.
However I still enjoy anime quite a lot and I’m not bored by it. I don’t understand why. I really think one day I’m going to cut back to buying no DVDs, I mean there is only so much stuff you can store in your house.
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