A couple of weeks ago we posted
this news item entitled "Spider-Man - 6 New '94 show DVDs found at Musicland Group stores."
In that story, we detailed the particulars of six titles found at Media Play, Suncoast, and Sam Goody Music stores (all part of the MusicLand Group). These DVDs were all from the 1994 animated
Spider-Man series, and went on sale around the same time that the excellent
Spider-Man 2 film hit theaters.
We went over how strange these discs were: no distributor logo, very generic-looking disc art, not available anywhere online (even at websites run by MusicLand Group chains), but most interestingly that there were no menus that came up when you pushed the "menu" button on the remote (to quote one of our readers: "by definition of the spec, this is not a DVD...because it would be outside of the DVD Forum's definition of a DVD"; to the best of our knowledge at TVShowsOnDVD, this is an accurate statement). There were other things about these that didn't add up, but we made our point.
In fact, I went on to say that "the origins of these DVDs remain a mystery. If it wasn't sold to me by a major retail chain, with widespread availability reported by readers across the country, then I would be very suspicious of them." My point was that I had bought this at Suncoast, not at a flea market, and I want to believe that a major national chain would be very careful about what they sell.
On the other hand, mistakes happen. And, in the event that one gets by even a group of chains as big as the Musicland Group, it's always applause-worthy to see them make an effort to look into it and correct it. That appears to be the case here.
Yesterday we started to receive many reports from readers that the Media Play, Suncoast, and Sam Goody Music stores were all pulling the titles from the floor. One store manager wrote: "those selections have now been pulled from the shelves....we received mail from the offices to remove those 6 selections from the shelves with no explanation."
Bravo to the company for doing what we suspect is the right thing. Hopefull they will take a strong look at this product, and any others sold to them by the providers of these discs, and make sure that the offerings meet all standards of quality, legality, and DVD Forum specifications. Consumers are not well-served by anything less!
In light of how this has turned out so far, TVShowsOnDVD readers should not expect us to list these products in our DVD Listings database. If anything happens to change the status of these, we'll let you know as soon as we find out. So stay tuned!
