I wanted to mention that our Swag offer over the holiday weekend was a great success, and we ended up shipping over a hundred and fifty free sets of memo pads to RACS shoppers. Coming off a three day weekend, it was pretty busy around here Tuesday and Wednesday when those orders went out, but we did out best to accommodate any special requests you guys made (which we had a lot of fun doing by the way!) and I hope we did a good job for you. Thanks to everyone who took advantage of our offer - you made it a success, and we're gonna do more stuff like that from time to time in the future.
Couple of things happened this week that caught us a little by surprise. First, we've seen a tremendous amount of demand for DiscoTek's recent re-release of both the Fatal Fury Movie and OVA sets. People have been snapping them up like crazy and we've had to go back to their distributor four times now (we just got another shipment in today) to order more copies. I mean this is one of my personal favs from 'back in the day' and is legitimately great, so it's really good to see an oldie but goodie can still garner so much attention. You have chosen wisely my friends!
Speaking of oldies but goodies, Discotek announced this week that they have licensed the Yoroiden Samurai Troopers television anime and OVA, the Bokurano TV series, the Comic Party TV series, and the Lupin III: Napoleon's Dictionary TV special. Bandai previously released Samurai Troopers (which ran edited on Cartoon Network as Ronin Warriors), and Discotek plans to offer it next Feb or March with English subtitles, but without the old Ronin Warriors English dub. They will also re-release the Samurai Troopers OVA at the same time, but this one with both the English dub and the Japanese track with English subtitles. Comic Party (which used to be one of Iowa's titles) and the Lupin special will be coming in January. Bokurano will be sub only and will ship sometime in 2015.
Our big news this week is NISA's release of the Love Live! premium edition - or rather , the way it just absolutely blew up over the Labor Day weekend. Long story short, we got our copies of it in last Tuesday (about a week prior to the street). We spent Tuesday and Wednesday shipping pre-orders (a lot of them), which left us with around 100 copies left over in our warehouse. So we were sitting pretty with this:
Then on Thursday afternoon, the word went out to retailers that NISA was officially stocked out of the sets, and that they were not planning on doing any repress of the set at this time. I put this out in last Friday's newsletter, and all hell broke loose. People started panic buying the sets everywhere - 2, 3, 4 at a time. Of course, this happened over a long weekend, so when we left Friday we had the above, only to came back Tuesday morning to this:
It reminded me of one of those YouTube videos you see where Walmart put's out a skid of $2 toasters on Black Friday and a hundred people just pile on. Needless to say, the Love Live premium sets we had were 100% sold out within 48 hours - sometime Sunday afternoon, and we actually had a few orders that came in on Monday that we could not fill and had to cancel, and I want to apologize to those folks that we did not have enough to go around for everyone. I gave up my personal copy (which you see in the picture above) to a customer, so I didn't get one either. I did call up the folks at NISA Wednesday and did my best to advocate for a repressing. Not sure what will happen, but I put my two cents in on behalf of fans who where not able to get one. We'll have to wait and see.
There has been a little confusion about the release dates for the next two Fairy Tail sets (box #12 and #13). Apparently, BIG BOX retailer is listing box #12 for Sep 16 and box #13 for Oct 28. We have BOTH sets streeting on Oct 28th, and this is exactly what the latest mailer that we have from Funimation says. The RETAILER ORDER CUTOFF date, which is when Funi needs our orders for them, is Sep 16th for both sets, so I think someone over at BIG BOX retailer just read the dates wrong for Box #12 and they haven't caught the error yet. Hey, I'm not gonna tell em, they'll figure it out soon enough... -_^
We have a few figurines this week that are down to the last one in the warehouse:
Naruto Shippuden: Naruto w/ Yondaime Coat G.E.M. Series 1/8 Scale Figure AF-NAR(815621)
You and Her and Her Love: Miyuki Stone 1/8 Scale Figure AF-YOUHER(4562271931286)
Fate/Stay Night: Sakura Matou ~Yukata Version~ 1/8 Scale PVC Figure AF-FS(293831)
As always, first come first served, so get em while they last!
I've gotten several dozen e-mails over the past couple of weeks from folks hot under the collar about Funi cutting out all the indy Anime retailers for their Special Edition CBB set coming out in December and only allowing us to offer the regular and limited editions of the set (which we'll have up for pre-order soon). They seem to be doing everything they can to keep the prices of these special SE releases as high as possible. Everyone is asking me how I feel about it, but what can I really say? Deja-Vu. Some executive clearly woke up at Funi one morning recently and thought it was 2007 and they worked for Bandai. The best way I can explain it is that it's like having that older brother that you love and admire, but he eventually hits a certain age where he starts to do dumb things like perceive that his friends won't think he's cool anymore if he's seen hanging out with you - so you get hugged in private but shunned in public. Eventually he realizes how shallow he's been acting ~ you know, only serving his own interests ~ but by then it's too late. You'll ultimately forgive him, and both of you will live happily ever after.
The difference here being, is that Funi isn't my brother... nuff said. -_^
Media Blasters announced BD versions of
Kite (edited) and
Kite Liberator, and a new Kite/Liberator DVD lite-box for Nov 25th. I'm really on the fence about putting these up for pre-order. MB has not gotten a single scheduled release out out for the past 3 or 4 months, and regardless of what is being posted on their FB page, I think they have turned all their attention to their FeverDreams operations rather than on getting Anime published. Plus, every year the last two or three seasons they have had some title scheduled to street right in the window for the holiday season rush, and then have left us hanging on it, so it causes us a ton of problems having to re-arrange and cancel orders right at the time when we need to be focused on other things. We're definitely going to order the new Kite releases, but I'm not sure we should offer them for pre-order - it would certainly ensure one less headache during a time when we already have plenty to deal with. Maybe we'll post them and just set the date TBD until they actually ship, if they ever do. Yeah, that sounds like a good compromise. What do you think? Feel free to
let me know. :-)
And finally, I just wanted to mention that we migrated the entire RACS store site to a new server on Thursday Sept 4th. The engineers promised that the transfer would be 'seamless' and 'transparent', and as it turned out, they were correct FOR ONCE. Of course 2 months of planning helped quite a bit, and also because the entire site has been built around the same core system for 15 years, we are so familiar with it that we can anticipate most issues ahead of time. There is something to be said for old and reliable vs. new and 'not so much'.
So the RACS store site is now running on a brand new platform, which brings all the back end software completely up to date and adds some new catalog management features that will make it easier for us to maintain the 17,000 or pages that currently make up the store site. This should all have been completely transparent to anyone shopping on the site yesterday, and I still find it amazing that we are able to do that. Not that it matters, but a little RACS trivia: while our fulfillment center is in VA and the company we work with to host the store is in Palo Alto, CA (of course), the actual data center where the servers the site runs on are in Dallas, TX and there is a mirror site somewhere outside of Chicago that serves as a backup. Our e-mail server is right here in house though (and we do also we run a mirror of that on a different rack at a host in San Diego), and that's really the only part of our internet infrastructure I can walk right up to and physically touch every day. Strangely, I find that very comforting... :-)
Robert's Random Thoughts
"In the future, everyone will be famous for $15.00..."
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The following titles have just arrived and are being checked into the warehouse now:
Can the Yamato punch through the Domel Fleet?
Advanced placement into a school of higher grade proof-reading is determined by the results of the Promotion Test strictly for class type. Ranging from A class with the best facilities anyone can offer all the way down to F Class which is composed of low dining tables, rotten tatami mats and other worn out facilities. Students can change classes by competing using the Examination Summons Battle system or ESB. Students summon characters with their equivalent test mark scores and use them to compete with other classes.
