We've mentioned Fox's consumer-oriented
TV-DVD website a few times before, and yesterday they updated it to show some new "Coming Soon" titles in their master list of all TV-DVD releases. Among those new titles that had release dates named for the first time was
Angel - Season 4:
There's a big problem with that date, though: it's not a Tuesday. Hard-core - and even not-so-hard-core - DVD fans know that just about every retail-store-based release date on record happens on a Tuesday, with the occassional Friday release for special situations (you can count those on your fingers and toes, though). Retail chains build their schedule around this. The Target chain even has a name for it: "Tune-In Tuesday."
Having explained this, let's take another look at that picture up above. The
Angel - Season 4 release date shown in that graphic is Sept. 9th, which in 2004 is a Thursday.
Without leaping to the conclusion that Fox is referring to a different year - after all, you don't want to wait for 2008, do you? - then it's probably safe to assume that this date is simply mistaken. Note that the first title listed in the picture,
The Bernie Mac Show, isn't correct either: it says 5/1, which was last Saturday. The actual release date for that set was Tuesday May 4th.
On the other hand, the
Angel date is probably pretty close, just like the one for
Bernie Mac. It could be the Tuesday before (9/7) or the Tuesday after (9/14). Or perhaps the person updating that Fox TV-DVD site with this info mistakenly read off from an "orders-due-by" date, and the street date is just a few weeks later. Who knows, maybe 9/9 really IS the correct release date, and Fox has something special in mind for that particular day? We just really don't know here yet, as Fox hasn't announced anything so far through their normal press channels.
The safe thing for us to conclude is that "
Angel - Season 4 is coming this Fall," and leave it at that for now. Stay tuned, though, because we'll definately call over to Fox and try to get this straightened out. We'll report back to you just as soon as we can. Our thanks to Jaime Weinman for the heads-up, and also to Alex Wagner for his insight.
