Robert's Anime Corner Blog: Yawara Coming! + FUNI and ADV Feb Releases Posted

If you've been following some of my newsletter rants you know that we've been back and forth with AnimEigo for about 3 months trying to figure out if we were going to be able to carry Yawara or not. I'm happy to report that Robert W. (who heads up AnimEigo) and I have finally been able to come to an agreement - so we will indeed be carrying the limited edition Season 1 of Yawara! Yeah!

AnimEigo spent quite a bit of time and money producing and mastering this set, and they have to meet a certain number of unit sales at a certain price level to recoup their costs. This was one of the main reasons Robert W. was reluctant to release this series into retail as he was afraid it would put pricing pressure on the sets that would hurt their direct sales. We've agreed to sell it only for MSRP, and he's agreed to let us carry it - so our customers can now buy it directly from RACS. Robert W. and I exchanged quite a few e-mails on this over the past few weeks, and I want to thank him for giving us this opportunity.

Our first batch of sets shipped to us today from North Carolina and should be on our dock no later than Wednesday of this week (12/3), so we'll have it in plenty of time for people who want to give this set as a Christmas gift (even if it's to themselves...-_^). The boxed set includes Eps #1-40, and premium features include stuff like program notes, character bios, and interactive map, image gallery, and a 60-Page Booklet - everything you might expect from a premium AnimEigo release. You can pre-order your set here, and they should be shipping by Wednesday or Thursday of this week.

Series Synopsis: Yawara Inokuma just wants to be an ordinary high school girl. Unfortunately for her, she's been trained since she was a toddler by her grandfather, Jigoro, to be a judo prodigy. Nothing less than an Olympic Gold Medal and the coveted National Merit Award will satisfy him, and he'll do anything to ensure she achieves it - whether she likes it or not!

Funimations and ADV's February Schedule Posted

Funimation and ADV have sent over their February 2009 release schedules, and we've posted both to the store site so the following items are now available for pre-order:

ADV February 2009