Nostalgia Trip: My Story of Watching The Slayers, Day 8
Day 8: This one favors our English speaking fans, but it’s too great a story in the history of watching Slayers to leave out. Do you remember the Great Slayers Disc Exchange (I think that’s what it was called)? Do you have a story involving your participation in it? And are you still mad at Software Sculptors? If English isn’t your first language, what stories do you have about the studios bungling the release of Slayers DVDs in your primary language?
So when DVDs started to become a thing, my money laden sister, Gabs, wanted to buy the Slayers DVDs for a variety of reasons. One was because we’d only seen the English dub and we wanted to see what the original Japanese voices were like. Gabs passed on the first release of the Slayers DVDs because there were some sound problems and they were notably buggy and waited patiently for the new ones to be released with the promise that the sound problems would be fixed.
I happened to be visiting my folks when the new DVD set of Prime was released, and Gabs and me were joined by my dad to watch them. We put the disc in, set it to the Japanese audio, and the first disc was fine. But when we got to the second disc we got…EchoLina! Really, Lina sounded like she was talking at the bottom of a wind tunnel. The second and third discs both had sound issues, though the others were fine.
Gabs had ordered them through Planet Anime, which had an online store and a brick and mortar store close to where I lived. Since they were a small business Gabs concluded that they must have deliberately swapped the new discs for the ones from the previous release to recoup lost costs. So when I went home the next day Gabs came with me and we went up to Plant Anime early the next morning.
We got there before the store owners did, and we were all bright eyed and bushy tailed. We got in the store and Gabs started lecturing them, talking about how she’d waited patiently for the new DVD release but they had the same sound issues the first release did.
Their response? They gave us a wry smile and said, “you have to buy the new ones.”
Gabs and I wondered if they’d heard her right. Gabs shot right back, “these are the new ones!”
The Workers nodded and said, “no, the new ones.”
Gabs was flummoxed and I finally stepped in and said, “she just said she bought the new ones.”
The workers gave a bemused grin, I honestly think they had had this conversation several times before, and said, “No, you need to buy the NEW new ones.”
Gabs opened her mouth to say something, shook her head, and her brilliant response was, “What?”
Turns out, after messing up on their first release of Slayers in DVD format, rather than making sure they fixed the issue when they re-released it, they released a new edition with the same problem, though apparently this time it was only the Japanese audio that was affected. And what really stank was Software Sculptors knew the discs were defective when they released them. In fact, there was already a disc exchange set up. For $10 in “shipping and handling” fees you could send the defective discs in and get corrected discs. This was called The Great Slayers Disc exchange.
Needless to say, the whole thing left a rather sour taste in our mouths.
Of course, Software Sculptors is no more. From what I understand anime profits were razor thin, but it’s also no excuse to knowingly ship a defective product to people. Basically, there’s a reason they didn’t make it.
