More Deep Dives, Red Sorghum, major store news
- Justin Sevakis
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Hi guys. We have a lot to cover today, and I'm heading over to Tokyo in less than a week, so I'm just going to get right to it.
Alien Nine Delayed
Due to some minor tweaks required of the AstroRes upscale, we are bumping the release date of Alien Nine to June 9, 2026. Sorry for the delay. We promise it'll be worth it.
The Web Store Evolves
Between the enormous success of the Discotek Deep Dives program and the hit release of Whitest Kids U Know's MARS, our little web store, which I literally threw together in a week as we launched the new AnimEigo last April, has become a little creaky. We really like Wix, but it just wasn't built for a store this big. (For everybody who hasn't been getting shipment notification emails... we're sorry, we're still working on that.)
Over the next month or so, we plan on transitioning the website to a new, self-hosted platform. This will be quite an undertaking, and we anticipate a few bumps, especially with order history and points. But once the dust is settled, look forward to a much more responsive, robust experience as we work hard to fill the gaps left by the drawdown of other prominent online stores.
We'll post more info once things are ready.
Zhang Yimou's Red Sorghum now up for preorder!
This is one of those titles where we can't believe we have it. Zhang Yimou's (Hero, House of Flying Daggers) award-winning directorial debut work Red Sorghum is now up for pre-order! We'll have a lot more to say about this one in the future, but needless to say this is an absolute masterpiece of world cinema, and we're thrilled that it's in the same collection as Big Boobs Buster!
New Discotek Deep Dives Posted
Here's what you clicked this link for. As last month's Deep Dives have started shipping out, we are proud to add a bunch of absolute bangers to our store this month. Take a look!
In addition, we've also added the following discs from Media Blasters:
The Anime Business, and the End of our Membership Program
Starting with the debut of The Anime Business, we made use of a Membership Program so that our biggest supporters could better participate in the work we're doing. We had lofty goals for the Membership Platform, which was offered through Wix, but we ended up not doing most of them. We just didn't have time, and the platform proved to be pretty limiting.
With our new goal of transitioning our site off of the Wix platform, we have made the decision to end the Membership Program. We're extremely grateful to everyone who joined, and the revenue really got us through some rough waters during our early days as a publisher. However, its existence required us to stick to a strict monthly schedule for new episodes, and required us to carve out some bits to keep behind a paywall. Not easy nor ideal, especially when you're trying to run a company at the same time.
As we run out of banked interviews in the coming months and start looking to shoot some new ones, we will be taking advantage of a looser release schedule. And better yet, nothing will be paywalled. All of the existing bonus material has also been uploaded to our YouTube channel, free of restriction. If you haven't seen some of the bonus material before, look for extra nuggets from your favorite interviews, plus some sit-downs with new people!
The Anime Business isn't a huge success, to be honest – some episodes get huge numbers but many don't. Still, it's important and the people who watch it LOVE IT, so we will continue doing it as time allows for the foreseeable future.
And speaking of which... Our long awaited interview with AnimEigo founder Robert Woodhead is now live for everybody! And as the audio kept rolling once we'd turned off the cameras, we actually caught the very conversation where he brought up passing the baton to us. It's a pretty special interview. Hope you enjoy it.
As you can imagine, we have been insanely busy, and that shows no sign of slowing down. Until next time, best wishes!
-Justin