For a long time (starting in the 1960s and ending sometime in the 1990s), foreign distribution licenses for anime were so inexpensive and so unrestrictive that it was common practice for distribution companies to buy the distribution rights to an anime & treat the frames as raw material for creating essentially completely new shows (the same way that Adult Swim treated Hanna Barbera cartoons). As a result, a lot of children’s programming during the 60s, 70s, and 80s outside of japan was actually repurposed anime (for instance, Speed Racer is an anime & certain plot elements were changed or introduced with the dub, Robotech and Voltron are both collections of episodes of anime from different franchises stuck together and recut with new stories, and the original Gachhaman anime has been adapted for american audiences no less than six times under six different names with different plots). To some extent, this continues: distribution companies that focus on children’s animation, like 4Kids and Nelvana, buy up cheap franchises and heavily censor/localize them as saturday morning cartoons.
By the late 1980s, there was a growing contingent of non-japanese folks who recognized that the shows they grew up watching were anime, and they began to hook up with the thriving japanese tape-trading network, which had a heavy overlap with anime otaku-dom (tape traders were fairly frequently also owners of model kits & garage kits, and subscribers and contributors to the growing anime zine culture). This hookup is the ancestor of fansubbing…
