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On Fri, 20 Jun 2003 03:54:02 GMT, Darrel Christenson
<> wrote:

>> In case nobody's noticed, I see that Best Buy is including a bonus
>> disc in its set of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys Season One set
>
>Care to share exactly what the bonus disc is?

OK, now I have the set. I'm not quite sure I was correct in mentioning
a bonus "disc". The Best Buy version consists of 7 DVDs and 1 CD-ROM,
total 8 discs, and on third DVD, along with Hercules and the Maze of
the Minotaur, is a featurette titled The Men Behind the Myth, with
participation from Sorbo and Hurst. Whatever number of discs is in the
non-Best Buy set, this featurette is, I would suppose, not there. The
UPC for the Best Buy set is 1313126269.

>OK, now I have the set. I'm not quite sure I was correct in mentioning
>a bonus "disc". The Best Buy version consists of 7 DVDs and 1 CD-ROM,
>total 8 discs, and on third DVD, along with Hercules and the Maze of
>the Minotaur, is a featurette titled The Men Behind the Myth, with
>participation from Sorbo and Hurst. Whatever number of discs is in the
>non-Best Buy set, this featurette is, I would suppose, not there. The
>UPC for the Best Buy set is 1313126269.

How is the physical quality of your disks? I am extremely careful
with my disks, almost to the point of being obsessive-compulsive in
their conditions. I always hold them from the edge and return them
immediately to their keepcases when done viewing them...

After buying the Xena box set at Best Buy, I examined each disk under
the light before first playing them, and noticed on a couple of them,
there were some slight scratch marks, and one of them had a big patch
of scratches, as if someone got some dust or something on the disk and
tried vigorously wiping it off with a rough piece of cloth.

Upon buying the Hercules box set, I opened it up at home and found
that somehow, they managed to give me two copies of disk 2, and zero
copies of disk 3. My aunt exchanged the box for me on her way home
from work the following day, and when I opened the new set, I found
the inside flap of the box (where it holds all the papers and the
coin) was badly bent. Examining disk 6 revealed a few odd markings on
the data side, and the data side of disk 1 not only had a couple odd
marks, but also a small scratched patch, and a very huge, and very
visible fingerprint.

I'm starting to suspect that Best Buy may be manually opening the box
sets themselves to add the bonus disks, and not caring at all about
the quality of the disks. This is definitely inexcusable.


Kain

>I haven't noticed any problems, and visually, they do check out as
>eight distinct discs. I've been watching the episodes, and Disc 2 is
>fine.

>Oh, and I've watched all the Xena episodes and had no complaints.

Oh, I never had any problems actually watching the disks. Everything
looks fine as far as video quality. It's the physical quality of the
disk that I'm curious about. No idea why I keep getting ones with
scratch marks and all on them. :S

Kain

>Were the discs still on their spindles when you opened the package?

Yup, they were all on their spindles okay.

>On the other hand, the large thumbprint suggests that some other
>consumer returned the package and it got re-shrinkwrapped. I have
>heard some stores do that with computer equipment; I had not heard
>that about Best Buy.

Yeah, this is what I'm thinking. Either it was returned and
repackaged (though it does seem rather unlikely since this was two
days after the set hit the store), or the people who are in charge of
inserting the bonus disk into the packs are very careless.

Kain