The other day we
reported that Best Buy would be selling
Voltron: Defender of the Universe - Collection 1: Blue Lion early, beginning tomorrow Sept. 12th, instead of waiting for the general release date of Sept. 26th. In that story, we show you a small shot of the Best Buy weekly ad circular page from this week, which advertised the set at a $22.99 discounted price (a cost which
Amazon.com is now matching, but the e-tailer won't deliver the set until the 26th).
Over at the official
Voltron discussion forum, our story turned into a
discussion thread yesterday. In our story, we mentioned that we had not been able to get in touch with Media Blasters for comment, but it looks like the
Voltron forum's admin was able to do just that (and on Sunday, no less). The admin relayed this message:
So here is the official answer from MB:
In exchange for promotional consideration (the ad and such) Best Buy received a two week window before street date. Wal-Mart did also in exchange for placement.
...I apologize that you weren't aware of all of this, it did come together rather quickly recently.
Wal-Mart's weekly ad circular for the current week, however, does NOT show
Voltron in it, so we're not sure what their "placement" consideration granted to Media Blasters would be. A check of Wal-Mart's website shows that they're selling
Blue Lion on Sept. 12th all right, for a discounted cost of $26.88. A number of our readers have written in to TVShowsOnDVD, though, and said that they will not support these chains and their early releases, but instead will wait on Amazon to deliver the package to their doors in just two more weeks. It seems that the backlash against this sort of "exclusive" deal is growing more and more,
even as retailers scramble for special promotions.
What is TVShowsOnDVD's position on this sort of thing? If you read through
one of our recent news stories, especially the last paragraph, you'll see that we're fed up with reporting on the exclusive bonus DVDs at particular retailers, and we won't post about them any more. However, we feel that we must keep our readers informed about "whole" releases, despite their exclusivity, and so we'll continue to report about "complete" releases that are only available at one retailer or another, like when Best Buy was
the only chain that had the Dave Chappelle series
Buddies, or like with the current exclusive early release at Best Buy and Wal-Mart of the first collection of
Voltron. However, those "add-on content" bonus DVDs aren't something we're going to cover any more, unless it is a truly exceptional situation.
