I work swing shift, and it’s not quite the rainy season here, so I frequently go on a walk for my dinner break.  We live next to the main commercial drag in a smallish town in Oregon, so I have a fine selection of my choice of fast food providers.

Anyway, we also have three or four large thrift stores at this end of town, so I wandered into one after eating.  They have a big glass display case where they keep video games and movies, and sometimes there are interesting things in it.

Today was VERY interesting, because it was full of anime DVDs and laserdiscs – and some seriously unusual ones, at that.  They had stuff like the CAV “Green Legend Ran” box set that Pioneer put out back in the day, all kinds of DVD box sets from the late 90s… it obviously all came from the same collection.  The newest thing I saw at a quick glance was a DVD set of Mahoutsukai Tai!/Magic User’s Club, so… maybe 2000 or so?

Tucked in behind the Green Legend Ran box, though, I could see a spine that made me ask one of the employees if he wouldn’t mind opening the case and showing it to me.

So.  That’s the 1993 Dirty Pair Complete TV and OVA  series box set, something I would have very much liked to have owned back in the day.  Nine CLV laserdiscs,  original price a little over Y57000, current value… well, not very much.  The odds of them ever finding a buyer for this thing are basically zero, but let’s set that aside for the moment and wonder at the notion that this thing wound its way across the Pacific and eventually wound up in this case.

I mean, there are basically two scenarios, right?

One, the owner got fed up of storing or moving laserdiscs and finally just donated them to the first person who would take them – this is what happened to the bulk of my LDs, as an aside – or, two, some seriously old-school fan in town passed away and whoever inherited his or her stuff had no idea what to do with all of these weird shiny things.  Which, I’m saddened to consider, is pretty likely.

…and, no, I didn’t buy it.  I don’t own a laserdisc player any more, LDs look like crap on modern TVs anyway, and all I would be doing with it is pulling the disc jackets out so I could admire the beautiful sleeve artwork.

The majority of the sleeves sit next to each other to form 12 x 24 pictures.  Here’s a Japanese blog with lovely high-definition photos.

Anyway.  The LIKELY fate of all of this stuff is that the thrift store will have it taking up space in their glass case for a little while longer and eventually decide that nobody is going to buy it and it will wind up in their dumpster, but I am going to allow myself the fantasy that it will all be bought by someone with proper analog video equipment, a fondness for some of the best anime to come out of the 1980s and 90s, and more storage room than common sense.  I don’t think I’ll go back in for a while.