Saturday 18 May 2013

First UK MLP:FiM DVD coming out on 2 September

We've known for a little while now that Clear Vision, purveyor of a motley collection of DVDs ranging from mixed martial arts through NBA basketball to Marvel, has signed a deal to bring the first two seasons of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic to the UK. What we haven't known until now is how long we'd have to wait to see it. Thanks to this Amazon.co.uk listing, it appears that the first disc will make its debut on these shores on 2 September — just in time for the post-BUCK comedown.

There's precious little information about the DVD so far, but the facts that it's apparently going to be a single-disc product, and that it will be subtitled Welcome to Ponyville, are fairly strong pointers that this won't be the full-season box set that I think a lot of us were hoping for. The Region 1 box set fits on four discs (7/6/7/6 episodes) and that seems like quite a strong possibility, though a five-disc release with one DVD of six episodes and four of five is also in the running.

One big question concerns extras. The Region 1 S1 box set — though sadly not the S2 one — contains commentaries by the show team, which are generally considered to be the single biggest reason to buy it. I'd love those to be included on the UK version, but in the apparent absence of a proper box set I may be asking for too much. Actually, I think we need to steel ourselves for a potentially very basic release, containing little or nothing beyond the episodes themselves.

I think that those thinking of waiting for a Blu-ray release may also be asking too much. Given how much of a minority interest the show is in the UK (and it will remain so unless it gets proper TV coverage...) I really can't see a Blu-ray being released. If you want your ponies in HD, you'll have to buy the German Blu-ray, 2.0 English audio and all, or wait until the recently-announced European iTunes version adds an English option to the current German dub. It's coming soon, apparently.

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