Monday, June 18, 2007

Disney dangles the carrot, leaves us high and dry

This is actually old news, but my wife and I recently discovered that Disney long ago canceled its Chronological collector series. We had purchased the first two volumes of the Donald Duck DVD sets and loved them. Each was about $30. They were going to issue a new volume until they had released all of the shorts.

After waiting for volume 3 to be released, we couldn't find it anywhere on their website. So we called the ordering number and were informed that the whole series (including the others like Mickey Mouse) had been canceled by Disney. They just cut it off in the middle of set! Now they've switched to a "Treasures" collector set, but its not chronological. Unfortunately, Disney won't be selling us any more collector sets. At least not with the same business model.

The solution to this problem (companies deciding to arbitrarily discontinue ongoing series) is to wait until all of them are released and then buy them at once. You can't do that with Disney, because they intentionally stop the sale of videos after release. This is common with their movies. If I waited until the end, I would only be able to get the last release.

The only choice is to either throw money at Disney buying their products and hope they don't decide to shove it to us, or just avoid their series products altogether. My solution is the latter, why would I start buying the Treasure series? Sorry Donald.



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