Wednesday, August 01, 2007

The return of Media Buying Tuesday

Fortunately for my wallet, there's only been a trickle of media releases that I've been intersted in lately...until yesterday. I don't consider it a Media Buying Tuesday unless at least two items of note are being released. Well, this Tuesday saw the release of two of my favorite movies of the year: Hot Fuzz and 300.

Buying the former has been an ordeal, which I still haven't finished. See, Wal-Mart has an exclusive bonus disc that contains pretty much every special feature from the UK version that was left off of the American release (and that's a lot). So I went to Wal-Mart during a break from work and the only bonus disc packs they had in stock came packaged with the fullscreen edition of the movie. Yuck! So, after work I hit up two more Wal-Marts only to find only more fullscreen DVDs. According to director and co-writer Edgar Wright's MySpace blog, 65% of the copies Wal-Mart ordered were fullscreen. Seemed more like 100% to me.

Anyway, I didn't want to totally miss out on the bonus disc, so I reluctantly bought one of the sets. Luckily, when you unwrap the set the copy of the movie itself is still shrinkwrapped. So last night I went back to the first Wal-Mart that I went to earlier and intended to exchange my fullscreen copy for one of the widescreen single disc editions, but they were sold out. That wasn't too surprising since Wal-Mart seems to have a fullscreen-to-widescreen ratio of 50-to-1. I guess I'll just wait another day or two for them to restock. Hopefully, I'll be able to enjoy some Hot Fuzz goodness this weekend.

3 comments:

jasdye said...

another reason to boycott wal-mart.

that and the little chinese orphans they keep chain-locked to their workstations.

Micah said...

I don't boycott WM, I just don't prefer to shop there. Yeah, the low prices are tempting, but I'm a Target guy. Their clientele includes less riff raff. :)

Wal-Mart has always been terrible with their DVD selection, though. But their average shopper must eat up fullscreen DVDs. Can't handle dem black bars!

Wooly Rupert said...

Yeah, you COULD do that..or you could just get the region 2 version like I did. Oh, you don't have a region free player? WHO'S LIKIN BEASTMASTER NOW BEEYOTCH??!!?