Their final sale page says it all. And said sale ends tomorrow. I assume there were at least a few people who were waiting on these because it seemed like they'd be around forever; I was one of those people and I'll probably miss my chance on getting these. So, this is a heads-up. The Nintendo stuff is up there as well, by the way. This will probably have no effect on the bajillions of "Singles" going around as they are from a different distributor.
Keep in mind, it's only Shout! Factory's license that is expiring. Cookie Jar Entertainment still owns the rights to these shows, and I wouldn't be surprised to see them release box sets themselves, or license them out to a different company. Now, it's extremely unlikely that we'll see the exact same sets, since Shout! Factory probably owns the rights to any aspects of their own creation (such as the dvd menu authoring), but I wouldn't be surprised to see new box sets for these shows appear in stores in the next few years. Heck, maybe we can even get nice large collections, like a box that contains ALL of DiC's Sonic shows in one package. I don't claim to know everything. It's entirely possible that the shows are never on DVD again. But my point is that this is merely the end of one licensing deal, not the show as a whole.
That's rather depressing....I was hoping my partner was going to buy me AoSTH DVDs eventually... At least there's youtube.
I daresay that copies of these will still be floating around shops for a while. I hope so, anyway - I've yet to pick up the Christmas AoStH/SatAM hybrid, that's the one gap in my collection. How will this affect the Region 2 distribution, if at all? Same people or different?
Well, at least these have been ripped and now we have not-VHS ripped quality episodes online. That's excellent as far as the preservation effort for these shows goes, no? Shame I can't afford the other two AoSTH DVDs.
I recall finding old DiVX-encoded Vols. 1 and 2 of AoStH, but not Vol. 3. (Although the Chaos Emerald Saga and Sonic Christmas blast were ripped from "The Fastest Thing in Time" and the Sonic Christmas Blast DVD, respectively.)
I believe that I have a "permanent copy" of this in the form of an AVI file I "borrowed from the internet" years ago.
I know that in the UK, Delta distributes some of the Sonic series such as AoStH and SatAM. I purchased a copy of the AoStH boxset which contains every episode excluding the Christmas one and although it was nice to have, the quality of the episodes were absolutely abysmal. I contacted someone who used to work on the show and he said that they probably just used bad masters. For those who don't know, it costs alot more to use the original clean master and it's much cheaper to use a copy.
I have that DVD set - it's not even that they used bad masters, some episodes still have the original tape identifiers on them!
/\ I That's just lazy. Anyway, I already have the complete SatAM box set, so this doesn't really effect me. The rights could go to someone new, or (more likely) they'll just sit in limbo forever, being mercilessly bootleged and pirated for always and eternity.
Yes, but notice the date, 2004. The original would have said either 1993/1994 (depending on which episode) so obviously this is a copy from the master.
Honestly, I didn't find the quality of the DVD to be bad at all, way better than the recordings that were going around the internet before the release of them.
I'm actually glad for this, I may swap out my set for whatever Cookie Jar puts out because I hate the Shout! version of the Saturday set. All of the fan art makes it look like a DVD-R bootleg.
