My good buddy Mark Evanier is railing against the multimedia conglomerates making us buy the same titles over and over again. Go read his piece, then come back here.

Normally, I agree with every word Mark says. On the off times that isn’t the case, I at least agree with every other word. This time, I agree with Mark’s sentiment. For instance, I have already purchased the James Bond Special Edition sets, including the movies I don’t even really like (does anybody like Moonraker?). Now comes word that an extra-special edition is coming out with frame-by-frame restoration like they’ve been doing on the Disney animated films. I don’t care any more. I’m not buying them again. I’m through… at least until the HD wars settle and one format prevails. Then I’ll consider rebuying.

But the one problem with Mark’s argument is that it’s a Catch-22. He says wait for the Ultimate Box Set, which has all the seasons of your favorite show. However, if the individual seasons don’t sell well enough, companies are now starting to reassess midway through and cancel series. For instance, Huckleberry Hound Volume 1, pictured at left, may turn out to be the only Huckleberry volume released due to low sales. Other series which have recently been shelved after one or more seasons were released are Boy Meets World, Murphy Brown and Night Court. If the sales aren’t good enough to release the entire series individually, they’ll never get to that ultimate box set.

I agree with Mark that these marketing schemes are devious and unfair to consumers. I also want to be sure that the rest of the seasons of Leave It to Beaver and F Troop come out. There is no good solution, except The Seven Percent Solution… but I’m only buying that once!

This entry was posted on Monday, August 7th, 2006 at 5:28 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.