All saved/backed-up September 1999.
WELCOME TO THE ORIGINAL ANIMATED GIFS OF THE INTERNET!
Way, way, way back in the day, in the 90s, this is how we shared episode or movie scenes for anime series we loved, or for scenes that never got brought over to the States due to censorship. These are super, super, super tiny in resolution and degraded hardcore, because, well, we had shitty dial-up internet connections so file sizes had to be small, and also because everyone was using 800x600 resolutions at the time, so they seemed much larger. If you could see what was going on, that was good enough back then lmfao.
Ya’ll should feel lucky you get some amazing high quality HD gifs these days.
I’d like to remind people of the process for how these were made back in their day. Some super, super, super lucky (or most likely rich) person owned a VHS to whatever video file format ripper of its time. Yes. VHS. Digital uploads for video did not exist yet. DVDs didn’t even exist yet. Like, people had to trade VHS tapes at conventions and flea markets, or with strangers online to obtain some of these tapes. If you had a big collection, you spent tons of money on shipping to get those tapes from your buddy you met on ICQ/AIM from Japan lmfao.
Fansubs and even raw videos were rare for their time for people to get their hands on. EPISODES ON VHS IN GENERAL WERE NON EXISTENT ON THE MARKET. Sailor Moon (like most other anime of the day) was just in syndication on TV. VHS tapes of the series to own/buy did not exist. You could not purchase them because they didn’t exist to purchase lmfao. Let that sink in for a second. Even if you wanted to own it, it didn’t exist. You had to know a guy who knew a guy in Japan that just so happened to be taping the episodes for his own personal use on his VCR while it aired. If he missed an episode that week? You’re screwed lmfao. Better hope somebody made an episode summary that week. This is why people started to trade tapes to fansub “distributers” in good faith that they’d get a translation out of it thereafter.
So some super lucky fan owned episodes of this show, then had to convert their VHS tapes to digital media. Then they had to painstakingly screencapture each image from that, and use whatever program at the time existed to sync up frames to play. I’m having a hard time even wrapping my head around the amount of money they had to have invested in a big enough harddrive to read the digital media… For example, in 97~98 I had a 1.5GB harddrive and that was considered top tier for the typical consumer. If clips, not episodes, but just minute long clips were just around 1~2MB (which was considered really big at the time), imagine how big an entire episode was???? This is of course before the encodes of today that made digital media as tiny as it is looking as good as it does. And 1.5GB is SUPER QUICK to load up on, especially when you’re not taking into consideration your OS and whatever programs you have installed.
Then this person makes them as tiny as possible so that when they uploaded them, their website server didn’t ban them from using too much space or bandwith lmfao. It was an insane task (that I wasn’t able to take part in, because, as stated above, ya’ll gotta have Benjamins for that). BUT it was god-send for fans who loved this type of stuff. MOVING PICTURES? SIGN ME UP. Since movie clips were impossible to find because nobody had a good enough internet speed or big enough harddrive to download them, everyone wanted super tiny easy to share images instead. If you had a gallery of this type of media, people went wild to your site. This type of stuff did not come cheap to host, and I know there were a few websites that were always offline because of the overload in traffic.
I know the first image was from Chibiusa.com. The others are from SailorMoon.org’s Sailor Moon Grep gallery (the first iteration that was free for everyone to go wild over, and then exactly as I described above kept happening, and the galleries went offline).