Sometimes, you just mess up. And I did that yesterday, when I jumped the gun and
told everyone that the release date for
Degrassi Junior High - Season 1 had changed to January 11th. A bit of a follow-up on my part last night showed that the date continues to be
February 1st, and that the other date is the "pre-book" date (the date that wholesale orders from retailers are due in to the studio so they can deliver by street date).
My error was helped by the studio themselves, mind you, which is WGBH (best known to Americans as the production company behind many series that end up on PBS). At their own website store, our reader Matt had spotted what looked like a date change, because no other date was mentioned. You can see what I'm talking about in the topmost picture below. A quick check on my part to other sources would have revealed the truth, but - as I mentioned yesterday - I saw the new issue of
Video Business magazine and was skimming through it, looking for news our readers could use. I saw the listing you'll find pictured below in the lower graphic, which mentioned the Jan 11 date prominently next to the price. Seeing that date, I thought, "Matt was right" and promptly flipped to the next page without reading the entire block of text.
If I *had* read the block fully, which I did when I fully read the issue last night, I would have noticed that this was marked as the pre-book date, and that the street date was clearly said to be Feb 1st, as we had reported in the past. Seeing that, I followed up a bit more deeply, and confirmed that the street date indeed hadn't changed. Why the different date on WGBH's sale site? I could not get a straight answer to this, but it looks like either A) the site is posting the wrong date for similar reasons to my own confusion, or B) the site, being a "members-only" affair, could be offering an earlier ship date exclusively for its enrollees. Either way, that isn't the date this will be in stores. Again, Feb. 1st is the correct date.
So there you are: an in-depth look at a mistake. On behalf of TVShowsOnDVD, I apologize for and regret the error. The good news, though, is that it prompted reader Greg Madsen to point out to me that Amazon.com had the full-size cover art for the box set, and that the Canadian arm of the e-tailer, Amazon.ca, was showing off the covers for the individual discs that go with that season. Our thanks to Greg for letting us know, and here's a combo shot of those pics:
