How OVAs Worked
Brief description of how the direct-to-video-rental model helped create the anime boom by allowing wide diversity in bankrolled anime projects, outside the production committee system.
Anime in the 1980s–1990s was famous for its diversity and edgy content like sex & violence, enabling the early careers of famous directors. I summarize what made this possible: a change in anime business models from being captive to established censorious media interests, to ‘direct-to-home’ video sales of ‘original video animation’ or OVAs—a misnomer, as it involved rental stores as much or more than individual consumers.
The rise of home videotape players but high prices of videotapes meant that video rental stores were the preferred method to acquire videotapes, and decentralized rental stores could collectively pay, on an episode by episode basis, for all sorts of strange sketchy OVA productions that would be ignored or censored. Successful OVAs would serve as proof-of-concept and bankroll followups.
But the economics & technological circumstances that enabled this breakout from the standard media model would not last, and standard media interests would both loosen their censorship and flood the market with cheap videotapes, rendering rental stores & the OVA model obsolete, and relegating ‘original video animations’ to just ‘video animations’ as a way to further monetize existing franchises by selling minor productions directly to fans.
The ’80s–’90s OVA boom is a remarkable example of how business models & incentives can matter far more to art than any technology, individual, or trend. The Wikipedia history is a little confusing & muddled (was it ‘individuals’ buying VHS tapes, or ‘rental stores’? what did speculators have to do with anything?), but this is how I understand it.
Anime has always been a difficult business economically for animators & anime studios, even as anime has been extraordinarily lucrative for many entities around anime. It can be very good to be a licensor making merchandise, or the owner of the copyright in an anime adaptation, or the publisher of the original light novel/
Why? The basic answer is the usual media/
This changed in animators’ favor. When videotapes were invented and home video became a real alternative to movie theaters & broadcast/
The third equilibrium won eventually2, but early on, the second equilibrium of few expensive rentals was dominant. The paradigmatic example was porn rental stores: men greatly prefer porn in the privacy of their own home to going to seedy disreputable undeniable porno theaters (used to be a thing, young readers—Times Square was infamous for them), video rental stores could segregate them from regular videos to make renting them deniable (who’s to say which kind of video you went in for?), and variety is the spice of life, while compiling a large collection too expensive even without copyright margins. So, you didn’t buy porn, you rented it.
The side effect of this was that rental store owners became, collectively, almost venture-capital funders of new porn: they kickstarted speculative pornographic enterprises, particularly when it came to series, or new actresses or genres. They were atomized, disparate, privately-contactable, profit-maximizing individuals with little market or bargaining power; it was possible for anyone with access to film-making & tape-dubbing equipment to film a porno and sell individual copies by mail, and if it hit a niche, sell some more to the same owners (because a popular tape could only be checked out by one person at a time, and might wear out), quickly making back their costs to reinvest in another tape. A porn company was a rental store’s way of making more rentals. An earlier dynamic had contributed to the American Golden Age of Porn starting about a decade earlier—you can make the still-infamous _Deep Throat for all of $258,032$50k1972, which when distributed to several hundred porno theaters charging by the head, could explode to anywhere up to $516$1001972m in gross revenue (and triggering countless imitations).
Anime OVAs exploited ‘sex and gore’ for the same reason. You could never get NHK to air, much less bankroll, ultraviolent/
If you want to do it, you can: there are no gatekeepers there. You can put just about any videotape up for sale with some ads in anime magazines or mail-order catalogues—and people did. All sorts of wacky OVAs (like the influential Megazone 23) got started by selling an episode or two (not always getting finished), and relying on sales to fund more episodes; and if things went well, they could be stapled together into a ‘movie’, or justify a full-scale TV series. Dream Hunter Rem, for example, started as an ecchi/
So if OVAs were so great, why have they long since ceased to mean much of anything to an anime fan, and they now talk more about things like web-animations or shorts or the ‘NoitaminA block’ or Netflix specials? For the same reason that they came into existence: economic & technological change continued, and the business model ceased to be such a win.
The ‘bubble decades’ surely played a role in all the money sloshing around Japan, available to be speculatively invested in anime, and that would abruptly end forever by the mid-1990s. Even if Japan had not entered its lost decades, however, the OVA period was doomed. When was the last time you entered a video rental store? If it was ever, it was a long time ago. (I’m not sure if I set foot in a Blockbuster this side of 200025ya AD.) VHSes, and then DVDs, became ‘too cheap to rent’. There was an explosion of DVD boxsets delivering everything to the comfort of your home—no late fees ever. (The Blockbuster late fees were truly extortionate.) When the high-price equilibrium collapsed, movies and anime started being broadcast regularly; broadcasters had to expand their tolerance far beyond anything permitted before. Why would you go out of your way to rent from your local video store if you can watch it on TV? The customers returned to the comfy & no-longer-so-stifling embrace of the oligopolies, and purchasing completed series.
All logical and following their incentives, but the consequence was the gradual fadeout of the OVA model in favor of making safe anime to sell to existing fans in known numbers: hence all the one-off ‘sidequels’ or ‘sequels’ to existing franchises. I feel nostalgic for a period I knew primarily from gawking at Right Stuf mail-order catalogues, going, “that’s an anime? How on earth did that get made‽”… But anime has done fine for itself since then, and the nature of these things is that they are cyclical as leverage moves back and forth, and no one can predict what the future will bring—who foresaw that big tech & media giants competing over streaming markets would lead to an OVA-esque anime market where demand for new anime was white-hot and all sorts of strange series could get made? And streaming itself will surely fadeout and some new market dynamic replace that. And if it’s a bad dynamic, well, I still have a lot of old anime to watch.
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When media was really expensive, people resorted to informal sharing to a much greater degree than they do in 2023. For example, you would try to buy the same video game system as your friends so you could share games, and you might coordinate by discussing the games you planned to buy to avoid duplicates. Similarly, many anime fans would buy some tapes because they intended to share it with friends who came over, or during sleepovers or ‘movie nights’, or often at an anime club. Anime clubs themselves would be de facto ‘video rental stores’—some college anime clubs would amass collections of thousands of obscure (often bootleg or fansubbed) tapes & DVDs, access to which was the chief privilege of membership for skint students.
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Which is not guaranteed. Many markets will never reach the ‘cheap’ or ‘free’ states, for example, relatively boutique software services—which is why if you are in that market, you should charge much more.