Forum - View topicThe Mike Toole Show - The Box of Crap
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BigOnAnime
Encyclopedia Editor
 Posts: 1233 Location: Minnesota, USA |
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I could never go for these. I could up with stuff I already own in a different form (Ex: Getting a Noir single when I own the thinpak which has the extras.), or stuff I don't even like, among a few other reasons.
It's truly amazing how overprinted this stuff was back in the day. It's a mystery as to how much longer Rightstuf will swim in singles, but these mystery boxes from CR are definitely helping them clear out that crap quicker. Random tidbit: A few months ago when I was bored I copied and pasted Rightstuf's entire bargain bin item list into MS Word. The line count total came out to be well over 1,500. They have that much in their bargain bin, with the vast majority of it being overprinted singles. |
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Greed1914
 Posts: 4490 |
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A good question. I wasn't that surprised that the running theme of these boxes seemed to be the Geneon and/or ADV overstock. I've gone for the blind items from Righstuf in order to get free shipping and it is simultaneously fun and sad to get a box set from one or the other for $5. Given that Rightstuf's 25 for $100 on both Geneon and ADV DVDs served as something of a harbinger of demise for both companies, I'd wager that both got very carried away during the boom times in the hopes that something would be a hit.
That is actually why I am usually wary of something like this. I've passed up many a dirt cheap sale because it was stocked with things I have or know I don't want, so the quality usually keeps me away more than the price. |
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Hunter Sopko
 Posts: 259 |
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Haven't done the box, but I do the blind buy from Right Stuf occasionally. Mostly meh. Ellcia ($1), Excel Saga vol 4 ($5), X vol 1 ($5) are the only ones I can remember offhand. This time netted me boxed freaking gold.
Did the $10 blind buy, received the second Zeta Gundam box. I can only imagine that this was in the bin because of a floater in the box. Otherwise... dear lord. |
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Animegomaniac
Posts: 4110 |
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I bought several of Rightstuf's "bargain bundles" as blind buys, most notably Shinbou's Soultaker which was amazing ... to look at ... and Sato's Gatekeepers, a decent series which gets zero recognition {not surprising as the guy did much greater shows before and after}, not to forget Heat Guy J {which I made it though two episodes and then I forgot I had it, constantly. Such blandness and as the art box plus singles cost me less than Funimation's SAVE version, that should have been a red flag to its qualities} There was also The Melody of Oblivion but that wasn't a blind buy, I really like the series.
This is as far as I can go along with the whole "Box of crap" idea; Singles were a holdover from the VHS days and eventually had no place outside of price gouging, I mean the Japanese marketplace. I can randomly pick titles to watch through Netflix where after 8 years, I'm still finding 26+ episodes series to watch or youtube which is often a battle to find an entire series or Crunchyroll which takes all the challenge out of finding series which, back to the real point of the article, is often times more entertaining than watching the series itself {Not a fan of CR, never been a user, never will}. I've tried retroactively collecting singles but got stuck on my second series, Ghost Stories. I learned my lesson: stay away from singles, they'll just break your heart. |
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rizuchan
 Posts: 976 Location: Kansas |
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Bought a similar sort of mystery Anime variety pack at Vintage Stock a while back, against all my better judgement. I figured I could sell back (to somewhere else, probably) all the stuff I didn't want, but I wasn't prepared for about half of it to be individual discs without cases. I seriously got Disc 2 of Season 5 of the Dragon Ball Z orange box and Disc 1 of Season 4 of Kai. And 2 disc 1s of Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood Part 1.
Consequently most of it went in the trash. But it wasn't all terrible. The people that made up the set were nice enough to include a couple full series (albeit in loose discs). It was a good excuse to sample some anime I wouldn't have otherwise, but it didn't do anything for my collection. |
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Shardnax
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It's not all bad, sometimes the singles are a fair bit less than a collection, you really have to check if there are any impossible volumes beforehand, or if it's enough of a price difference to warrant eating up more space. I'll be shocked if I ever see Gainer v6 in person. At Rizu: That's VS for you  , anything they sell as a random variety pack is almost guaranteed to be junk.
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dragonrider_cody
Posts: 2541 |
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A slight correction on Shattered Angels. ADV did release volume 1, but never the rest of the series. When it went to Funimation, it went straight to box set, leaving the first single all by itself.
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Catseyetiger
Posts: 779 |
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I still would never collect a large pack of singles no matter what the price. I also would love to own some of the older animes as well as some that have never been release here in north America. But I would only be willing to collect who series sets and at near normal retail prices. I did make one exception to that rule collecting all seven seasons box sets of Ranma 1/2 before the re-release was my most expensive anime collection to date.
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la_contessa
Posts: 200 Location: Pennsylvania |
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One of my friends once noted that every movie is someone's favorite movie (specifically, in reference to the movie Ghost Ship), and I think you can apply that same principle to every form of media. Every anime is the favorite anime of someone, somewhere. It's kind of terrifying to consider, actually. As for a box o' crap . . . no, thanks. I like it in theory, but in practice, I'm done getting individual discs of shows. I got burned when Suncoast went out of business, and I ended up selling almost everything I got. I'll only buy individual discs when I can get an entire series at once. |
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bglassbrook
 Posts: 1243 Location: Gaithersburg, MD |
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I would think they make excellent fodder for DVD2BD sales. It would be sweet if some of the old OOP volumes showed up, but that's unlikely to happen this time of year with folks combing the bin for gems.
Well, the CD were coasters, but those floppies were usually full 1.44s, so a piece of tape and something to write the new contents with were the best course of action. |
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dangerwhat
 Posts: 187 Location: Central Florida |
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oh I actually like Moeyo Ken TV. I mean, I'm not saying it's the GREATEST thing ever or anything.
I also like Heat Guy J enough to get it but again not the greatest ever. The Manga was decent. I'd also put Gun x Sword in that category as well - it was enjoyably odd, though not stellar. Ghost Stories I actually really enjoyed for what it is - the dub is unfunny and horrid though and put me off. It irritated me how disingenuous it was to the show - which is a little plain originally (it just doesn't make any sense to license something you are going to dub facetiously but that's me, I guess.) I've mentioned Tenjou Tenge conversationally many times because I don't like it and yet I DO like Air Gear >.> I can't even figure out my own taste sometimes. I loved Cromartie High School so so very much. Box doesn't sound like a total waste but still. I enjoyed Appleseed a lot when I first saw it oh so many years ago now and hopefully now everyone has seen it. |
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Coderjoe
 Posts: 53 |
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It could be a condition of licensing something they expect to be more popular. |
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Aikousha
Posts: 2 |
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Wow, we already have everything that's in your BOC! That would have been a complete waste of money for us.
With "singles," both I and my sig refused to buy them shortly after Trigun was fully released. Mainly because the producers were penalizing the people that bought the discs as they were released, and rewarding those that waited a couple years... with bonuses, artboxes, and significantly cheaper prices. At least in Japan, for all the low ep count and high cost, those who originally support the shows by buying first, get first press bonuses, and often when all the volumes are collected, there is an additional loyalty bonus... These extras are usually NEVER available in the later releases. Later, we learned from other animephiles, the gamble of buying singles, when many stores didn't get all the volumes, and even for on-line stores, when they often didn't receive enough copies to fill their pre-orders. Lord help you if you lived in a rural area and therefore had to pay shipping on top of the original high-prices of on-line stores. Now, as you and others have mentioned, there's the case of the ultra-rare volumes, and the price gougers. LMAO when DragonBall was rereleased uncut... Hundreds of a-holes trying to charge over $400 for the rarer old version discs suddenly had worthless polycarbonate. I hope that happens more and more to the greedy bastards out there. Out of hundreds of series, only four we have have incomplete seasons, and that is due to the production being canceled (i.e., Fortune Quest, Geisters, I'm Gonna Be an Angel, and something from Viz that got waylaid by InuYasha) As far as that insane price on the amazon site... that's a trick sellers on several third party sales sites (and some auction sites) use when they run out of stock. They just change the prices in their on-line stock listing and click update. And since it's insanely high, no one would even think of buying it... It saves from having to re-enter the whole thing later when you get your stock back in, or going through several web-pages in order to make it invisible for a short time (and then reversing the process). This happens so often with bulk sellers of HDDs, you are constantly asking yourself if the price was for a case of the damn things.
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PurpleWarrior13
 Posts: 2027 |
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I thought about doing this to get introduced to some new series, but eh, I don't think it's a good idea. It reminds me of the anime section at MovieStop or F.Y.E.'s filled with old random used singles from random shows released 10-ish years ago that you might have at least heard of.
I definitely prefer box-sets. I would only get singles now if the quality is just as good and cheaper purchased at once, or maybe if it's out-of-print and it's going for a decent price. I did grab the last two Sailor Moon SuperS singles at MovieStop for about $4 each since I knew I couldn't find them cheaper anywhere else. It's still the only part of the series I have on DVD (I did pick up some S VHS tapes really cheap off of ebay, but I can't play those anymore). I also got the Tenchi Muyo Mihoshi Special/Pretty Sammy DVD for $25 from some random third-party seller on Barnes&Noble.com which is a GREAT deal considering it often goes for $50-$75 used on ebay and Amazon. However, you can load up on old singles of shows still in print pretty easily. It's pretty easy to collect the old Dragon Ball Z singles since they usually go for pennys (plus shipping) used on Amazon. But I digress. Based on the patterns I'm seeing, there's nothing that would interest me in these blind boxes. I wouldn't mind owning Appleseed, but on Blu-ray, and I doubt these have anything in the format... I'm surprised these don't really have anything from FUNi. You'd probably get a random old Case Closed or Yu Yu Hakusho single, DBZ: Cooler's Revenge, or Ouran High School Host Club Part 2. |
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AnimeCornerStore
Accredited Retailer
 Posts: 119 Location: Winchester, VA USA |
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It always irritates me a little bit when folks talk about those strange, really high prices in Amazon marketplace like as if someone is actually trying to sell an item for $5,000 or $10,000. That's not the case. Those price anomalies are not money laundering schemes. They are caused by a seller who is using real time pricing software (like Tekometics or Feedvisor or any one of 2 dozen other reprice solutions).
It happens when a seller does not include a 'maximum price ceiling' in the pricing rule for that item, and the item suddenly finds it by itself on Amazon. In a competitive vacuum, some of these software packages will automatically increase the price to the maximum default price that is setup in the software for that particular product classification unless a separate ceiling is set. See, those packages are not only designed to make sure you have the lowest price based on a set of defined variables against your competitors, but also the HIGHEST possible selling price based on those variables. So if you set a class wide default price ceiling of $3333, then the item will be priced at that level until someone else lists it again at a lower price. The seller probably does even know. It's usually just a case of a seller inexperienced with the programming variables of their pricing algorithm, and most sellers who use pricing software (and ALL the big ones on Amazon and E-Bay do) will have thousand of item listings and can only get around the reviewing each item every few weeks. They have no clue what any particular item is selling for at any particular time during the day. Our pricing solution makes something in the order for 4,000 price changes per day on average where a human working 8 hours could make maybe 200-300. Even we have the issue come up sometimes, so we sort our listings by price from time to time to identify the items that are pricing in a vacuum and add additional pricing variables to those items to keep it from happening again. So anyway, that’s why that happens. Selling on Amazon is rich tapestry. Stepping off soapbox now…. Happy holidays to everyone! Bob (aka Robert) President The Anime Corner Store Follow RACS on Twitter or Facebook or on the RACS Official Blog |
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