r/animevhs

Hi there! This one's a bit of a longshot, but please bear with me here.

I was hoping to see if anyone knows anything about or had ever visited the now-closed video rental shop called Video Hop that used to exist off of King & 6th in the International District (601 S King St STE 101 to be exact).

I live in Boise, Idaho and about one year ago, a friend of mine (he's roughly 25 years older than me and married to my Japanese teacher for context), who's fluent in Japanese, and a big physical media collector/enthusiast told me he was going to do some spring cleaning to spiff up his garage space a bit. He told me he had a massive library of Japanese VHS tapes that he was going to take to the dump unless I wanted to go through them. I've been learning Japanese for about seven years now, and am also a big physical media enthusiast/hoarder, so I told him I would love to take the entire lot from him. I picked up roughly 500 VHS tapes from him and have been slowly sorting through them and organizing them since last year.

After going through a lot of the tapes, I noticed that a lot of them had the name "VIDEO HOP" printed on the label of the tapes and I thought it had sounded familiar. I later found one with the address in tact on the label, and it just so happened to be the Video Hop store in the I.D. that I had tried to visit many years prior, but they had unfortunately already closed their business by that point. After assessing the mountain of old VHS tapes I had acquired, I can tell that roughly 300 of these tapes were originally rental tapes that belonged to Video Hop estimated to be between the years of 1995-2009.

At some point in time when Video Hop was closing down, my friend had caught wind of this and drove up from Boise to Seattle to pick up as much of the lot from the business' liquidation as possible. There's so many various dramas, anime shows, variety programs, talk-show programs, historical dramas, cooking programs, etc that were all recorded in REAL TIME with commercials and everything by somebody in Japan, and then mailed to the shop for rental purposes. For a lot of physical media archivists this is essentially a massive goldmine, and I'm so grateful to have it! I'll also be spending the next few years digitizing the entire collection of all of the tapes I acquired through my friend and putting them up on the internet archive for anybody who wants to watch them. So far I have roughly 50/500 tapes digitized and will be posting them online within the next couple of months.

HOWEVER, now, here's the reason for this post. I have so many questions! Does anybody remember this store? Does anyone have fond memories of their experiences at Video Hop? Ever since I first visited Seattle in my early 20's I always wanted to check this store out, and now about 10 years later, I happened to have a big chunk of their former rental catalog gifted to me by sheer chance. If there's literally anything that anybody at all can tell me about this place, I would appreciate it greatly! Thanks so much for taking the time and energy to read all of this!

- Oliver / 0b0cklava on the internet archive

Just got into anime vhs collecting in Aus, this is what I've managed to pick up in the wild so far. I would like to get the rest of the cowboy bebop but we'll see how difficult that might be.

- Has anyone seen Golgo 13: The Professional? Is it a good watch?

- Also the shells for vampire princess Miyu are warped, is transferring the tape to a new shell a difficult process?

I'm a bit emotional haha. I love Ghibli and especially Totoro so much, I watched the movie as a kid a lot. I have Totoro in every format and love collecting these movies on VHS in both English and Japanese. Funny enough I already have like HALF of these just from collecting them by myself but when I saw this for a reasonable price I hopped on it. It smells a bit like vinyl that got wet but otherwise in near perfect condition. Any tips for getting the plastic smell off it?

Also I've wanted this specific copy of Princess Mononoke for so long... Finally it's mine!!

I have some rare Ghibli tapes in my collection so I had to have this... Now to find a good spot to put it haha..

New to anime and VHS in general. Decent haul from the thrift ? I'm not familiar with anything but street fighter.

I found a couple of these in hard cases of whatever this series is. I thought the characters were so cute I bought it. I just wanna look up who they are. If anyone knows I’d appreciate the help.

Just got back into collecting vhs!

I had a few tapes in storage but decided to pull them out earlier this month and got the itch again. Here’s what I picked up so far

Picked up these three from Danger Zone Video in Mt Juliet, TN this afternoon. Two more Fushigi Yugi and a great copy of Wrath of the Ninja!!