Bandai Entertainment has announced that it is discontinuing all of its VHS catalog except for titles from its popular Gundam series, which is currently appearing in several incarnations on the Cartoon Network.  The continued growth of sales of DVDs (see 'DVD Sales Pass VHS in Record Stores') has led many stores to curtail the amount of space given over to displaying VHS titles, and several smaller anime producers have already gone to DVD exclusively.  During the past holiday season, sales of DVD hardware continued to grow and while the penetration of DVD players into U.S. households does not yet begin to approach the 90% achieved by VHS recorders, Bandai feels that anime collectors, for the most part, are on the cutting edge of technological change and have access to DVD players.

 

Last year Bandai announced that it would only produce VHS versions of anime series that received TV exposure in the U.S.  Now Bandai has decided to retain the VHS option only for the highly popular Gundam series.  This means that Bandai will no longer produce or stock VHS tapes of popular series such as Cowboy Bebop, Blue Submarine #6, Escaflowne, Outlaw Star, and Silent Mobius, to name just a few of high profile series that will be DVD only.