Recently, I received my copy of “Bakemonogatari Off and Monster Season” on BD. I have 19 volumes of this anime now, having been collecting them for over a decade, with most of the purchases from 2014 to 2018. Ultimately, the total price came out to about $1400.

A while ago, I pondered how much this would have cost if the entirety of Bakemonogatari came out in the 1990s, and would have thus been released on LaserDisc. There are a lot of variables here, so I have to do a lot of guessing and presuming and other clumsy mental gymnastics.

Let’s go over some technical details about LD.

First off, due to the nature of LaserDisc, there were hard limits on how much could be put on a disc. This was because the information read from the disc wasn’t binary data, it was a direct analog NTSC (or PAL) signal meant to be displayed by a CRT TV. That also meant that compression wasn’t an option. And without compression, the hard time limits for LD were 30 minutes per side for CAV or 60 minutes for CLV, and not one second more. This is much different from DVD or BD, where the video is stored as data files in a recognizable format, and the option to vary the bitrate meant more video could be put on a disc.

CAV offered better video quality than CLV, due to how the information is stored on the disc. CAV was also able to do freeze-frame pausing, which for Bakemonogatari is highly important. So, the first presumption is that Aniplex would have used CAV, which caps each disc at 2 episodes each, 1 episode per side.

Now, let’s start tallying up the episodes to get an idea of how many discs this anime will need. Where a season has an odd number of episodes, one of the episodes will be on its own disc.
Original Bakemonogatari series (2009): 15 episodes, 8 discs
Nisemonogatari: 11 episodes, 6 discs
Nekomonogatari Black: 4 episodes, 2 discs
Nekomonogatari White: 5 episodes, 3 discs
Kabukimonogatari: 4 episodes, 2 discs
Otorimonogatari: 4 episodes, 2 discs
Onimonogatari: 4 episodes, 2 discs
Koimonogatari: 6 episodes, 3 discs
Hanamonogatari: 5 episodes, 3 discs
Tsukimonogatari: 4 episodes, 2 discs
Owarimonogatari: 13 episodes, 7 discs
Koyomimonogatari: 12 half-episodes, 3 discs
Owarimonogatari 2: 7 episodes, 4 discs
Zoku Owarimonogatari: 6 episodes, 3 discs
Off & Monster Season: 15 episodes, 8 discs
103 episodes, 12 half-episodes, and it would need up to 58 discs.

There is also a trilogy of movies.
Kizumonogatari 1: 64 minutes
Kizumonogatari 2: 69 minutes
Kizumonogatari 3: 83 minutes
The total runtime is 216 minutes, or a bit over 3.5 hours. If released individually and without any editing, each movie would need 2 discs. If it was released as one set, they could have done it as a pair of movies without removing anything and it would only need 4 discs. For reference, the BD sets for the movies were released all at once, so it’s plausible.

For some of the series, they could reduce the disc count by a few. But this is Aniplex we’re talking about and they know nothing of mercy. They might consolidate the movies but probably not the TV series unless it was really obvious. We’ll assume that’s what happened, and settle on a total disc count of 62.

Anime LDs back in the day ranged in price, with ￥6000 to ￥8000 the norm. Movies and shows with higher production qualities tended to skew upwards, so I’m going to go with ￥8000 as the MSRP for each.

62 × ￥8000 = ￥496,000

In 1998, the currency exchange rate was about 130 yen to the dollar, so I’ll go with that.

496,000 / 130 = $3815, or a bit over $60 per disc.

Spicy, especially by 90s standards! But wait, there’s more! The price assumes one would have paid MSRP for those discs. Which was rare outside of Japan. Anime fans in the US during the 1990s didn’t have many options for getting anime LDs. Sure, there was always someone selling them at conventions, but that came with a mark-up. Similarly, city centers with a dense Asian population would have stores selling anime. Again, with a mark-up. While an accurate conversion would have been 8000 yen = $62, most places just tweaked the price to be 100 yen = $1 and made some profit that way. So in reality, it was more like $80 per disc. Some of us were lucky and we had the right circle of friends where we usually knew someone who was going to Japan at some point, but most of us were not so lucky. There was also the option of mail-order, however shipping costs on LDs from Japan was brutal due to their weight and size. For the sake of incrementally buying this many LDs over a span of a few years, one would have to hope That Friend was cool enough to buy a bunch of them and bring them back in their suitcase.

$80 × 62 discs = $4960.

Ouch. We’re getting into “decent used car” money. Or a significant down payment on a new car. At least by 1998 standards. What’s that? There’s this thing called inflation? You’re right! The inflation index from 1998 to 2026 is 99.5%, or effectively double. The $4960 spent on that Bakemonogatari LD set all those years ago would be like $9900 now.

Alright, so you’ve spent a used car’s worth of money for the full set of Bakemonogatari on LD, now what? I hope your shelving system is strong enough. On average, a LaserDisc and its packaging weighs in just under half a pound. Our 60-disc set would weigh in at a bit over 30 pounds, in about a foot of linear shelf space. Ultimately, the number of fans in the US both rabid enough to buy all of them and well-heeled enough to afford all of them are likely in the single digits. I’m sure they’re already familiar with the care and feeding of LDs and have shelving that can support it, but if you got into the LD scene 15 years after it ended production, you were likely picking these up for pennies on the dollar, and using whatever storage Ikea had on sale.

“What if it was on VHS?”
Another question nobody asked. Alrighty then. Tape has some advantages, such as the ability to put more of it on the spools to increase playback time. Four or five episodes on one tape was common, and tapes were inherently cheaper to buy. For this, I’d say it would be on about 33 tapes total, give or take a couple, with VHS having a bit more flexibility, such as being able to go up to 2 hours at SP speed. And tapes back then were going for $25 to $30 each. What are we up to?

33 VHS tapes x $30 = $990 in 1998, or a bit under $2000 in 2026.

Well, that’s certainly more reasonable. But lawdy that shelf space that would get filled. You would need almost 3 full feet of shelf space.

“What if it was on DVD?”
This is very possible, because in Japan, the whole show was in fact released on DVD as well as BD. Many of them are still available! But being from Japan, the discs are going to be Region 2, and untranslated. Then again the LDs were also untranslated and that didn’t stop us.

The discs generally have 2 or 3 episodes each to keep the bitrate high (less compression), and are going for 5000 yen each, or about $32 as of current exchange rates. Maybe closer to $40 if you want the limited edition sets with the extra music CD that came with it. Later volumes have slightly higher prices of about 7000. I counted about 48 of them on CDJapan, and I’ll just say an average price of 6500 yen. Good enough.

48 DVDs x 6500 yen = 312,000 yen, or about $2000 at current exchange rates. Mind you, this is assuming they’re all available new. Some of them aren’t. Shipping 48 DVDs to the US is going to be expensive. At that point, you’re better off flying to Japan for a few days to a week and picking them up there. (For some of you cats, that’s all the reason you need.) You’re okay with used? Cool, hit up Suruga-ya, Sofmap, and Trader and any of the other used shops and watch the decimal point on the price tag shift to the left. If you can’t go to Japan for whatever reason, you can buy from those stores online as well as the likes of Mercari.

“I can find the DVDs cheaper on Amazon. They’re translated too!”
I know you can, but those are Chinese bootlegs. If you’re gonna pirate, save your money and do it right.

Supposing for a minute that Aniplex wasn’t handling the North American license for this, that someone else such as Sentai or Discotek was doing the licensing, translation, distribution, and so on. They’ll probably package and price it to MOVE. $40 per disc? Nah, it’ll be more like $40 for an entire season. They’ll somehow squeeze the entire show into a handful of thinpaks that take up a scant few inches of shelf space, and the total price will stay in the lower hundreds. They might even have it dubbed in English too. Region 1 DVD would definitely win this round.

Now, as for getting this show on BD in the US, most of it is available.
Bakemonogatari $150
Nisemonogatari $120
Neko-Black $50
Second Season re-release (includes Neko White, Kabuki, Otori, Oni, Koi, Hana) $220
Final Season re-release (includes Tsuki, Owari 1-3, Zoku Owari, Koyomi) $340
Off/Monster $130
Kizu movies $210 (3 × $70), or you could get the Koyomi Vamp release which has over an hour chopped from it, for $80.

Total price comes out to about $1220. It’s a little less than when I was buying them incrementally, and the way the Second and Final seasons are packaged, that goes a long way towards making the shorter sub-seasons available, instead of chasing after a dozen different box sets that may or may not have gone out of print. I don’t think I’d get the re-release of the movies, since there was so much cut from it. But that’s just me.

“But that’s still too much money!” You’re not wrong. Twelve hundred bucks can pay a lot of bills. And really, we should be paying our bills before we blow our money on anime. If you really really want to watch it all and you don’t have the coin for the physical media, well, you nyaa where to look.