24 Hours in the Wayback Machine

For roughly the last 24 hours, AnimeHistory.org has been doing something a little ridiculous.

We went digging through the Wayback Machine.

Not casually. Page by page, capture by capture, following dead project links, old torrent indexes, forgotten Blogspot pages, IRC references, release manifests and fansub group sites that have been offline for twenty years.

The result is one of the largest fansub-history updates we have made to the archive.

A large number of our fansub group profiles, series release records and Fansub & Scanlation History pages have now been updated with surviving contemporary evidence. In many cases, information that previously depended on later databases or community memory can now be tied directly to the groups themselves.

That distinction matters. And this search turned up some incredible examples.

ANBU × AnimeOne — the Naruto breakup

We finally recovered the original public statements surrounding the famous ANBU and AnimeOne Naruto breakup. AnimeOne announced on August 12, 2004 that the joint had ended because of “Irreconcilable Differences,” while refusing to disclose the details. Two days later ANBU published its own lengthy explanation discussing staff turnover, production delays, release consistency, licensing policy and the extent to which the two groups had become identified with each other.

That vague phrase, “Irreconcilable Differences,” helped fuel years of rumors about what happened. Now the archive can preserve what both groups actually said at the time instead of repeating the folklore.

Dattebayo’s torrent trail

We also found Dattebayo’s own surviving torrent archive. It preserves Anime-Heaven Naruto releases immediately before the transition, followed by Naruto 105 tagged “[A-H STAFF IN NEW GROUP]”, and then Dattebayo’s releases continuing through Naruto 220 and directly into Naruto Shippuden. That gives us primary evidence for a piece of Naruto fansub history that has often been retold incorrectly.

Blood+ and the wider archive

Blood+ received a huge documentation upgrade as well. Archived project pages from Bakakozou, Shinsen-Subs and Your-Mom Fansubs now preserve their releases directly, including episode coverage, dates, filenames, CRCs and project status. Bakakozou’s surviving site also documents its complete release of Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid, while other recovered pages strengthened the histories of Code Geass, Samurai 7, Samurai Champloo, Chrono Crusade, Gundam SEED, Bleach and several other series.

We even pushed farther back into scanlation history, recovering a 2002 Band of the Hawks page distributing Berserk manga years before much of the history surrounding that project was documented elsewhere.

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All of this has now started flowing into AnimeHistory.org’s database.

• Group histories have been expanded.
• Release coverage has been corrected.
• Joint projects are being kept separate instead of being flattened into one group.
• Claims that were stronger than the surviving evidence have been pulled back.
• Fansub history pages have been rewritten where the primary sources materially change the story.

We are also building a source ledger behind this work so these discoveries do not disappear again when another old site, mirror or archive link eventually stops working. Twenty-year-old fansub history is still sitting out there on the old web.

You just have to go looking for it. 😄