Bowing to pressure from fans and from Websites like Anime on DVD, Animeigo CEO Robert Woodhead announced today that the Kimagure Orange Road Box Set 'will be completely remastered restoring the opening credits to their proper places.'  Once the new version is available fans and retailers will be able to mail Animeigo the old disks and the company will mail out the replacements.  No one will have to send back the box itself or the individual DVD cases. 

The cause of fan dissatisfaction was an attempt by Animeigo to streamline the KOR box set.  As anyone who has sat down and watched a DVD containing a number of episodes from a series will note, sometimes watching the opening credit sequence over and over again before every episode can be a bore.  In fact many fans skip the credits after the first episode in order to keep the story flowing faster.  While Animeigo left all the end credits in place in its KOR box set, it put the three different versions of the opening credits in a special file that fans could access if they wanted.  The problem with this sort of solution is that many fans love the music and credit sequences and don't want to have to go through a number of different steps to watch them.  When these fans got the KOR box set they let Animeigo know of their dissatisfaction in no uncertain terms.  In his apology to fans Woodhead admitted 'we screwed up royally,' though also noting that the attempt to streamline viewing of the series was 'well-intentioned.'

Animeigo's problems are at least in part the result of the plethora of different types of DVD players with different capabilities.  With some machines it is a simple matter to blitz past the credits if you don't want to watch them, while with others it's more difficult.  Some of the DVD players that are primarily for games and some of the low-end household units have limited capabilities. In the future more powerful players with more sophisticated search and fast forward/skipping capabilities should make what Animeigo was trying to do unnecessary.