Bien, gracias. ¿Y usted? Ack! Flashback to high school Spanish! And that’s about all I retained from that class, too. Well, that and how to ask where the bathroom is.

Aaaaaaaaanyway, back to the question. I haven’t heard anything about a Vampire Hunter D release on DVD. It’s being re-released on 1/18/2000 on VHS. There is also a movie coming out. If you go to the Urban Vision Homepage, they do say that they are shopping around for DVD manufacturers and are hoping to get a release out later this year. That’s about all the info they gave out, though.

Now, about Transformers. Rhino, oddly enough (well, it seemed odd to me, at least), has the rights. They don’t have anything listed, that I saw, anyway, stating that they were going to release Transformers on DVD. Now, over on DVD Animania, on the DVD database, it says that there is no date listed for a release. Now, that "no date" listed is as opposed to the other listings of a concrete date, and "rumored". I’m hoping that Kevin isn’t suicidal enough to post insanely inaccurate information about releases. So I would assume that it will be coming out, but that the sites I visited just didn’t have any release info. If anyone knows of any sort of a date, let me know.

As a note about "Streamline titles": There are a few titles that have escaped Streamline limbo, like Akira and Vampire Hunter D. The catch is that the other companies have to wait until the Streamline claim on the rights expires. So you may eventually see these titles, but not until another company has the opportunity to snap up the rights.

Well, to reiterate the great news you probably caught on the news page a bit ago (2 January 2000, to be exact), the early, tentative, extremely changeable release date is midsummer for the Tenchi Universe TV series. I wouldn’t hold my breath on that date though, as they are working on other series as well, and the potential of delay is there. But, it is on its way. Eventually.

Not too many this time. Read on!

Well, several of you wrote in to tell me of your experiences with VCD's. Some of your answers were epic, and I decided to place all your contributions on this page so that you all could take credit for the info you sent me. I have also been asked to point out that there are quite a few legitimate VCD's floating around out there, contrary to the implication that I made that quite a few were illegitimate. Thanks to all of you who wrote in! J

I was reading your column and had some input - if I may... In regards to Zinfondale's comments - Instead of spending the money to buy a dvd recorder and blank DVD's which are still very expensive I've been converting my anime VHS collection to video CD. Most dvd players support this format and, while the quality of the VCD is not that of DVD's, it is

nice to pause, skip chapters, have a copy that doesn't wear out, etc... A CD burner is far cheaper than a dvd burner and blank CD's are $1 a piece now. The expensive part can be the computer hardware and software. I believe that a lot of the new Imac's have the 'video in' capability. I was able to download most of the programs I needed as shareware.

So there is an alternative for what it's worth and it may be cheaper in the long run.

Me again. That’s it for this time. Hope you all are enjoying all the great titles that are coming out, just don’t forget to occasionally sleep and eat. ;-) See ya next time!

LadyCat =^-^=