I translated and re-uploaded the article that was uploaded in 2006.
Looking back, it was probably the end of the year in 1998 when I was organizing my room. I was thinking of disposing of some old VHS videotapes and decided to check their contents before doing so. It was when I played the tape that I was hit by a nostalgic shock from the footage from around 1989, especially the TV commercial part that moved me. I thought I had to somehow save this footage, so I bought a video capture board at the beginning of 1999 and started capturing it from dozens of VHS tapes I had at home. The work was quite hard due to the performance of the computer at the time (Pentium II 400MHz) and the HDD capacity was only about 10GB. Sometimes frames dropped during capture, and it took time to edit and compress the footage for saving. I continued to stare at the hourglass and my computer screen night after night.
The first TV commercial that captured my heart was this one:
"Fuji Color SUPER HR Minamino Yoko ♪ Hideaki Tokunaga, 1987"
Minamino Yoko is wearing a light purple cardigan and staring intently while Hideaki Tokunaga sings "Shining~♪" (Minamino was really cute back then).
"Lion Page One Nishimura Tomomi ♪ Alfee, around 1987"
Although she is now labeled as the originator of natural stupidity, at the time, I feel like she was still a legitimate idol. I think it was around the time of her debut (the dates may be inaccurate since they rely on my memory).
Then, my friend D got hooked on this one:
"JT Libera Mild"
It features a line of blonde women on stage who turn into the screen and the letters LIBERA are highlighted by spotlights. The hands and feet are also shaped like LIBERA. Does anyone remember this?
And then I thought of something at that time. "Won't the TV commercials we're watching now become nostalgic footage someday?" It's actually true. Looking back, what happened at that time has already become nostalgic. In the end, I decided to proceed with capturing old VHS tapes and TV commercials from that time in parallel. And now, I have collected 20,000 TV commercials (as of 2006).
