Updates - November 2nd, 2007

Now that the Ghosts and Ghouls of Halloween have been put to bed for another year, we find that the holiday shopping season is upon us, so we know that crunch time is only a couple of weeks away (you can always tell what time of year it is by the amount of window dressing the other retailers are doing). This year will be different from previous years in that there will be a larger than usual amount of items that are being discontinued or will be harder to get, and to complicate matters the studios have made it clear that they will not be carrying large holiday inventories as they have in the past, so my advice is to shop early and get your holiday gift items ordered well before the crunch that occurs between Thanksgiving and about the second week of December. As always, we'll be stocking up and working overtime so that we can do the very best job possible for you.

This week we finally received confirmation of what we already knew - that Illumitoon is pretty much history (at least from doing anymore DVD releases), which leaves several rather lackluster series like BoBoBo, B'tX, and Beet the Vandel Buster incomplete on DVD. It also leaves the DVD release of AM Driver canceled altogether. I don't think that Illumitoons demise is a product of a weak market, I think it was a product of bad management. The company was fairly new, formed by a group of former Funimation execs who got some venture capital and tried to license and produce series that they thought would be mainstream hits, only to release those titles with a very poor marketing and distribution infrastructure. They did manage to get their titles picked up for cable TV, but they never put any weight behind the DVD releases which were actually produced on the cheap and poorly packaged - so they never developed a following and thus, they are now gone from the DVD scene. My feelings are with the fans that did start to collect their series, but at least we can take solace that their they only got one or two volumes of each series out and that fans have not made too large an investment in their products.


Bandai Entertainment and Kadokawa are leading us to believe that they will be releasing Lucky Star soon, which is quite exciting. Bandai has no comment on the show for now, but they have included a teaser trailer on the forth Haruhi DVD, and you can view that trailer here. Bandai will probably make a formal announcement once they have set a date for the release, and we'll be anxiously awaiting that!

The folks at Adult Source Media called us up and asked if we would like to run a sale on their items through some of November, and I thought it was a great idea, so you can now save up to 40% off on all of their titles. Adults only for a limited time!

All ASM Titles On Sale Up to 40% Off MSRP! Limited Time!

It's been a heck of a week in regards to new arrivals, with most of the studios pushing titles out to us deep into November's release schedule. I love it when we get stuff in before anyone else, especially when we are able to get a new release to you 2, 3 or maybe even 4 weeks before people can buy it at the store. This week we are shipping Death Note 1, the final volume of Haruhi, Witchblade 2, My-Otome 3 and tons of others way before fans going to place like Best Buy will ever see them. You can always count on us to have it first (shameless plug).

It's the first week of a new month, and as usual we received an absolutely HUGE new manga shipment on Wednesday that included great stuff like Claymore 10, Silver Rain 7, Shana 2 and several excellent new series such as Fall in Love Like a Comic and Yagyu Ninja Scrolls - 51 new manga in all! We also have another lavish new figure update, and I wanted to mention that - once again - the new Motoko figure has sold out within 24 hours of her arrival, just like the last one. Sorry if you missed her! I also want to mention that we have not yet received our entire shipment of the gorgeous Saber Maid figure, and what we do have is already spoken for, but the rest of her are in transit now and will be arriving mid-next week so get your orders in now before she sells out! Check below for the scoop on everything that's come in, or check our updates page for the complete story!

My parting word for you this week is - CHI! That's it for this week.

Have a great week - and remember - ENJOY your Anime! :-)