It was a little harder to spend that $50 gift certificate from Fanatic Space than I thought it would be. Not because I had no idea what to buy, but rather, I was leary of buying what I really wanted. You see, since it was a $50 gift certificate for Amazon.com that meant Joana could something she really wanted instead of hunting some obscure website looking for something like Branson homes for sale and trying to apply the gift certificate on something that she really didn’t have an interest in.

The downside came when I looked at the product reviews for the one item I was dead set on buying, the Anime Legends Collection of Gundam Seed, set 1, which contained episodes 1 through 25 of the series on 5 discs. This is a Gundam series that I really like and I’ve been dying to have the entire series on dvd for some time now. However, check out what I saw in the product reviews:

There are glitches on the discs so I’d recommend not buying it until they issue fixed discs. Episodes 9, 10, 14, 24, 25 all experienced lock up/freeze problems. My laptop dvd player wouldn’t even play disc 2, my desktop did though and only locked up on the episodes that were bugged. Check bandai’s website to see when they issue the new ones and then pick it up imo. It’s a good price for the first half of the series.

All of the reviews said the same thing, with the latest review being added on February 29, 2008 and if you go to Bandai’s website you can’t help but to notice the huge yellow button on the sidebar of the dvds section for the form to print to get your discs replaced. Since I already had the first volume of the series sent to me via Swap A DVD I thought it better to just finish getting the series through there. It’ll actually come out cheaper than buying the sets and I won’t have any defective dics to wait a month or more for Bandai to replace. Needless to say I didn’t bother to buy volume 2 of the collection either.

Since I was no longer going to buy the set I had planned to, I had to do some rethinking. In the end I broke my promise of no books since I wanted to get the grand total to as close to $50 as possible and select the free shipping, which would make it a completely expense free purchase for me. Here’s what I ended up picking:

Prom Nights from Hell by Meg Cabot, Stephanie Meyer, Kim Harrison, Lauren Myracle, and Michele Jaffe. now, I am a big fan of Kim Harrison, and yet I didn’t even realize she was writing stories for teens. Did you know Harrison wrote for teens too? Didn’t think so. On top of that this collection has a short story from Stephanie Meyer as well, whose books I have become hooked on, so naturally I had to pick it up.

I figure, even if the other stories in the collection are less than stellar, those two stories will have been well worth it. Although, from what I recall, Meg Cabot isn’t too shabby either.

I also picked up the latest manga volume in a series I have been religiously following ever since the anime aired and I became hooked. Volume 11 of Claymore was just released and naturally I had to swoop it up ASAP! This volume picks up with the Claymores, numbers 5 to 49 (who weren’t already dead that is) in the city of Pieta trying to buy time for the Organization to prepare their secret weapon. It’s a suicide mission and it’s gonna get good!

Now, I’ve read some of the later issues of the manga in Japanese and the translated versions, but I ended up skipping the portion that covers the area where the anime really deviated from the manga for some odd reason. From what I’ve read of the manga, I can see why some fans were really upset that the anime didn’t follow the manga to the letter, but really, I think they’re both awesome.

I finally got around to adding the Xena: Warrior Princess - Original Television Soundtrack to my soundtracks collection too. There are several soundtrack releases for this series and I sadly have none of them in my collection. Now I have remedied this horrendous error by adding the first one to my collection. I can’t wait until it arrives, although, I really have to wonder if the case is as atrociously bright as the Amazon.com picture makes it out to be. Either way, this will be a great way to tide myself over until I manage to acquire the entire series on DVD.

I swear though, the only other television series that is as expensive as the Xena: Warrior Princess series is La Femme Nikita. Talk about milking your fans dry.

And last, but certainly not least, I picked up a copy of Mexico and Mariachis: Music From and Inspired by Robert Rodriguez’s El Mariachi Trilogy. I really liked Robert Rodriguez’s music that he composed for the movies, and I really liked how he and his band Chingon, changed some of the traditional mariachi music, such as “Malaguena Salerosa”, which made an appearance on the end credits of Kill Bill Volume 2. So I’m glad to finally add this cd to my collection.

So yup, yup, some major pruning of my wishlists has happened!

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