I contacted Hallmark in order to find out whether the French DVD's are official or not and got a surprising response:

"At this time, there are no current legitimate releases of Rainbow Brite DVDs."

This could potentially mean that the UK, Australian, German and Italian DVD's are all bootlegs. I've asked for more clarification and should be getting more info, but the initial response to that request was:

"They did state that there are not any current legitimate releases of Rainbow Brite DVDs. It would be safe to assume that includes the other countries."

I hope they're wrong!

I've also found a Mexican DVD set that includes all 13 episodes, includes the English soundtrack and is Region 1:

http://www.rainbowbrite.net/collect/vid ... anDVD.html

That's gonna suck if it's not official though. Craziness!

Well that's...odd, to say the least. How were the other countries able to get ahold of everything to release their own set with in the first place? We've all known that the US has never had a release.

And speaking of DVD sets, I'm quite sure that the set that I have is the Jetix release since it does have that strange kid and the dialogue is removed in some parts, which does make it better. I think that the studio that released it took that one and added their own menus to it...it's really quite a good release methinks.

Or does that just mean they aren't currently distributing any?

As in, any DVD's previously produced are not counted among the "current" official releases?

I highly doubt that anyone at Hallmark knows what is going on. Obviously licenses exist in other countries that their precious online staff are not aware of.

*C9* wrote:I highly doubt that anyone at Hallmark knows what is going on. Obviously licenses exist in other countries that their precious online staff are not aware of.

I think that you are right.

I sent them links to all of the various foreign DVD releases and just heard back:

"Thank you so much for providing those links to us. We have forwarded them to our Legal Department for continue research. The have confirmed that they are not legitimate sales. We also confirmed that no one should be selling Rainbow Brite DVD's."

Wow!

Rainbow Brite wrote:I sent them links to all of the various foreign DVD releases and just heard back:

"Thank you so much for providing those links to us. We have forwarded them to our Legal Department for continue research. The have confirmed that they are not legitimate sales. We also confirmed that no one should be selling Rainbow Brite DVD's."

Wow!

L M A O !!!

I mean really!!!

It seems that...

1. Hallmark had no idea that a number of DVD's have been produced and sold until you mentioned it to them.

2. Better yet, Hallmark lost however much in royalties because they were not smart enough to license them in the first place.

I don't believe that. Rainbow Brite was aired officially on FoxKids in germany, which later was converted into Jetix which is a Disney brand and the same guys released the DVD's which provided much better image quality and were lacking the FoxKids logo in the top corner. Where would they get this hifi-material from other than Hallmark??

They were also sold in official media stores such as HMV here in the UK and Karstadt in germany, they would not be selling bootlegs, that's far too risky for such huge companies.

Just like Europa released 30 story tapes 20 years ago and now they don't even remember it? What's next, Hallmark telling us they were illegal too?? LOL

"SunSpire"

How could they not know this information? Wouldn't someone have seen it on the internet? There are so many "official" releases in other countries. And I'm with Sunspire: How did these other companies get such high quality video and sound? Hallmark would have to have given it to them because they certainly don't come from VHS tapes.

Something's a bit fishy here.

What just crossed my mind ... wasn't there another "party" that once claimed to be the rightful owner of RB and its characters, universe etc. ? Could THEY have anything to do with this maybe?

"SunSpire"