For the past week various online retailers - at least 8 that we know of, so this is no idle thing! - have shown listings for a
February 5th release in the USA of
My Favorite Martian - The Complete 3rd Season. As you may recall, this past November an Australian outfit, Umbrella Entertainment,
released a version of this that was sold "down under" but could be imported to the USA or Canada and work fine in our Region 1 DVD players. We told you at the time that the folks at Jack Chertok Productions had worked with Umbrella on this release, and had depaired of Rhino ever completing a dedicated third-season release in North America. Could Rhino be out to prove them(and us) wrong?
Some of these online listings, like
the one at Amazon.com, show the releasing studio as indeed being Rhino. Others, like
the listing at DVDEmpire.com say "WEA" instead. Warner/Elektra/Atlantic (WEA) is a distribution entity for Rhino, and RykoDisc is as well. All three companies are part of the Warner Music Group (WMG), which used to be part of Time Warner but has since spun off into their own company, traded separately on the stock market.
None of those entities have any listings or announcements for such a product at their online password-protected press sites, or retailer sites. Nor is it listed
at Rhino's consumer site. In the past week, we've attempted to contact Rhino, WEA and WMG to get more information about this release, but we either met with people who were unfamiliar with this release coming from their companies, or else we left messages for people "who should know" but who did not return our calls.
We successfully got in touch with Jack Chertok Productions, and I had a very pleasant conversation there. It seems they had gotten inquires from fans, too! However, they had no knowledge of Rhino or any other portion of WMG releasing
Martian - Season 3. Further, Rhino's license for this show will be up in August, so it makes very little sense for the studio to try to spend the money to release this product with only six months left on the clock. We agree; it would certainly be an unusual move.
Another interesting aspect to this is that one of the online listings for this release is "big box retailer" Best Buy. However, the SKU (stock keeping unit) number that the retailer has assigned to the product indicates that they have no intention of stocking this set in stores at all; it would only be available through BestBuy.com online sales and delivery. Fascinating.
Most of the listings agree that this will have a list price of $47.95 SRP, and Amazon is taking pre-orders as of this writing for $35.99; it seems to be a safe way to try to purchase it, because Amazon won't charge you if it never ships. We're still confused here, though, but we're trying to get to the bottom of this whole thing. So stay tuned!
