Status Update for Bandai's Aug 5th Releases

We are now about one-two weeks behind everyone else shipping Bandai's Aug 5th releases, which consist of:

Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion Part #1 DVD
Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion Part #1 DVD Limited Edition
Gurren Lagann, Vol #2 DVD (Eps #10-18)
Zegapain, Vol #6 DVD

Let me explain why.

When a big limited edition set comes our way from Bandai, they usually palettize the shipment and send it via a pretty slow trucking carrier, so in these cases it might take a little longer to work it's way out to us than the stores out on the west coast. Our shipment of the above titles was scheduled to arrive around Aug 19th, however, a couple days prior we had already started to get reports from customers on the West Coast that their Code Geass DVD's were bad.

Well, everyone remembers that fiasco we went through back in January when Bandai shipped out an entire pressing of bad disks. What a nightmare that was! So when this shipment arrived we decided to hold it for a few days and see what happened.

Sure enough, people started reporting glitches in the Code Geass DVD's like crazy - so many so that on July 23rd Bandai announced another 'direct' replacement program. We don't know if Gurren or Zegapain was bad also, but we didn't want to take any chances, so at that point we immediately made the decision to send this entire batch back to Bandai in exchange for DVDs from a new pressing. I simply did not want to be responsible for sending dozens or even hundreds of bad disks out to customers if we could do anything about it. That's why we still have these titles on pre-order status, even though just about every other Anime store out there said to hell with their customers and is just shipping the bad disks.

So I'm glad we hopefully dodged the bullet on this one, but at the same time I'm not happy at all that our customer won't have these by the street date. Bandai has already shipped us a replacement batch, and they are expected to arrive by Wednesday Aug 6th, or Thursday Aug 7th. We will have all the pre-orders ready and ship them immediately once they arrive so we should be able to get these to you guy by this coming weekend, and if everything works out these DVD's will work fine for everyone.

In the event that you do get a bad disk, or have already gotten a bad disk from someone else (which I hope is not the case), you can send Bandai a message here in order to get it replaced.

So I want to let everyone know that I appreciate their patience with this and that we will be getting these out to you guys and gals within the next few days.