What a great article!
I always thought the annoying dimming was some kind of copy protection scheme, like the old Macrovision from back in the days of VHS.
Wow, that sent me down a rabbit hole of searching. I am old enough to have messed around with lots of VHS tapes in my day, but I was still too young to know what was going wrong with the picture. Reading how Macrovision screwed up the picture through desyncing the scanning explains why some of the “non-authentic” tapes I got never played right for me.
To get around Macrovision, you had to have a gadget called a genlock or time base corrector that repaired the video’s frame signal so that a VCR could record it properly.
Genlocks and TBCs were also very helpful when dubbing unprotected anime tapes.
They didn’t entirely solve the video signal degradation to the copy, but they did make the copies much clearer.
Generally pre-record original anime tapes from Japan weren’t copy protected. I seem to remember that one or two that were, but I can’t remember the titles.
Really interesting perspective on this issue. Out of curiosity at one point, I got my hands on the porygon episode and the flashing is certainly jarring. It didn’t really bother me, but my wife said it gave her a headache (just a minor one, not a migraine fortunately). I had no idea that there was so much that came out of that incident. Really neat!
I wonder if different screen technology at the time made it worse (CRT then, vs LCD now)?
I wish streaming services would have the dimming as an accessibility option like captions or audio description; you could even have it on by default and have the uncensored version be opt-in
Link to Spy x Family Season 2 opening. I understand why it can stimulate seizues https://youtu.be/Hlw8dTz_iq0?si=ZqKyiNBkU3SZsEss
What an interesting website name!
