Archive for
July, 2007
— July 19, 2007
A new version of the Gentle Giant Harry Potter 5th Year mini bust has been discovered, and it is exclusive to Suncoast/FYE stores. This version is the same as the original version that was just released a month or two ago, except it comes with a light up feature. According to Voldemort’s Vault, the bust is limited to only 1,000 pieces and is more expensive than the average bust at $59.99. Click on the link above for more details including images of Harry and the light up feature.
— July 18, 2007
On Monday, Gentle Giant announced on their blog that they were removing the ability for members to comment on their blog. Not only did Gentle Giant disable commenting on their blog, they also removed all previous comments that had been left on the blog. Well, this didn’t stop me.
If you are familiar with how the search engine Google works, you know that once Google visits a site it indexes all of their content and puts it in a cached version of the site that is available to the public. If you search for a site, you can find the cached version of it.
So guess what I did? I searched Google for the Gentle Giant blog and found all their cached pages from the blog. And you know that the cached version still has comments on it. So what did I do? I saved all the cached versions of the pages to my hard drive. So Gentle Giant may have deleted their comments but they are still out there. Now I have a copy, and so can you, if you are so inclined and act quickly. In fact, I will save you the time by posting the link that I used to find them.
These pages are still up as of this writing, but soon they will be gone. Once Google revisits those pages, it will reindex them as they are and they will be gone from the Google cache. In fact, this has already happened on one of the most recent posts. Also, none of the Premier Guild member only posts are available this way because they are not public where Google could see them. But other than that, they are all there, and I was able to save all of them except for the private ones and the one that was already gone.
Just so you know, I am planning on going through these posts to find the comments that were left by Gentle Giant employees. I will be doing a series of posts over time where I will post their comments for everyone to see and comment on them. So, Gentle Giant’s blog comments may be gone but they are not forgotten and will have a home here on the Unofficial Gentle Giant blog.
— July 18, 2007
The rumor going around is that the Mace Windu Clone Wars maquette will be exclusive to StarWarsShop.com
and limited to 1,000. Supposedly, this info was published in the latest Star Wars Insider magazine. The maquette is supposed to be released at the end of this month. I will post it here as soon as it goes up for sale.
Update: from starwars.com, the Mace Windu Clone Wars maquette will go up for sale to Hyperspace members at StarWarsShop.com this Friday afternoon (PST), July 20th. It will be on sale until Monday morning (PST) when any remaining quantity will be made available to the public. Mace Windu is limited to 1,000 and one per person. It is scheduled to ship on July 31st.
At 1,000, Mace will not be around long. If you are interested and are not a fan club member, you can sign up now and still order on Friday. It is only $14.95 to join for one year, and the club itself is worth the benefits you get for joining. Plus, you get to buy the exclusive, and if you really want it, I wouldn’t count on it being available the entire three days.
Update - 7/20/07 4:29 PM ET: The Mace Windu Clone Wars maquette is now available for order for Hyperspace members only.
Update - 7/23/07 9:42 PM ET: The Mace Windu Clone Wars maquette sold out within a few hours on Friday. However, apparently many people ordered more than one, so SWS was auditing orders all weekend and throwing out any duplicate orders. As a result, Mace Windu was still available on Monday. But, SWS promised that it would be available to the general public on Monday and this was not the case, as of Monday afternoon. Some rebelscum members though reported that it was available for a few minutes to everyone. If it was, it didn’t last long, and it is no longer available on the site. I do think that it is very poor that StarWarsShop did not live up to their promise.
— July 18, 2007
Yesterday, I posted about the Gentle Giant San Diego Comic Con exclusives that are on eBay. I also asked the question whether or not the prices will go up once they are in hand. Looking at the current eBay auctions for the other clone commander busts, you might conclude the price will go up. Let’s examine the Clone Commander busts that have been released so far this year.
The Commander Bly bust was just released on Thursday of last week and the average buy it now price on eBay is close to $300. That is more around the price that I was expecting these busts to be going for once they hit release. Of course, Bly could be going for more because he was only released overseas. The edition size for Bly is 2000.
Looking at auctions for Commander Neyo on eBay, we see the same thing. Buy it now prices on Neyo are pushing $300 and up. Neyo was also an overseas only release though and has the smallest release number of all the exclusive Commander busts at 1500.
The Commander Gree bust has been out since the end of May and prices on eBay are now much lower. Gree was an exclusive at Star Wars Celebration IV with an edition size of 2500. Looking at completed auctions though, recent auctions have ended closer to $200 so prices are still high. This shows though that prices may come down on some of these over time, but again Gree was a domestic exclusive.
If you are shopping for these, remember that the Commander Neyo bust has already been raffled by Gentle Giant and the Commander Bly bust has not. So before you get Bly on eBay, you might want to try your hand at the raffle if you are a Premiere Guild member or wait until after the raffles when more will be available on eBay which might cause the price to come down. Also remember, that 500 of all five of the Clone Commander busts will be up for auction come November.
— July 16, 2007
Gentle Giant announced on their blog today that they are disabling the ability to comment on their blog for an undefined period of time. This was undoubtedly due to all the comments that were left containing profanity and directly insulting Gentle Giant employees after last week’s San Diego Comic Con exclusives pre-order.
If you ask me, those comments were out of line, but I bet that Gentle Giant was happy to take away blog comments due to the fact that all the Collector’s Club and Premiere Guild members that were bashing them on a daily basis. The reason I say this is that not only did they stop allowing members to leave comments, they also removed all the previous comments from the blog.
The new blog launched when their site relaunched at the beginning of this year. They did not have comments at first but soon added the ability to comment if you joined the Collector’s Club or Premiere Guild and were logged in to the site. So those members have been leaving comments since the beginning of the year, and Gentle Giant just removed them all. Some would call that censorship. From Gentle Giant’s point of view, it is their blog, and they can do what they want with it.
The ability to interact with Gentle Giant is listed on their site as one of the benefits of being a Premiere Guild member and it’s also listed as being one of the benefits of the Collector’s club. So what is Gentle Giant going to do now? Either they have to take those benefits off the list or come up with another way to offer that ability.
If they do add comments in or some other form of communication in the future, I hope they are able to moderate it more than they did this time.
Here at the Unofficial Gentle Giant Blog we encourage comments. In fact, I just wrote a post earlier today asking for your comments. Also, if you are going to the San Diego Comic Con, why not tell Gentle Giant what you think about deleting the comments from their blog.
— July 16, 2007
I just launched this site a few weeks ago, and I am already starting to get traffic to it. Now that I am starting to attract readers, I want to make this site a valuable resource for fans for all things Gentle Giant.
One of the ways to do this, as I see it, is to include as much feedback from fans as possible. So, this post is a call for fans and collectors of Gentle Giant to start posting comments here on the blog, as much as possible.
I want to hear YOUR experiences and opinions about Gentle Giant. I especially want to hear from those of you who will be at San Diego Comic Con. So leave your comments on this post or on other posts where they are relevant, and you will be helping to create an important resource for Gentle Giant on the web. Thank you in advance!
— July 16, 2007
Gentle Giant is importing the Star Wars Darth Vader Jumbo Chubby from Hot Toys in Hong Kong. The first 1000 will be sold as an exclusive at San Diego Comic Con and are up for pre-order on their site right now. Darth Vader is part of the Star Wars Chubby: Series 1, which includes: Darth Vader (Anakin Skywalker), Obi-Wan Kenobi, Sith, C-3PO, General Grievous and Wookiees. tall.
So what is a “Jumbo Chubby” exactly? These are Star Wars versions of nesting dolls. Each one houses two more figures within, each standing 1.5 inches tall to 3 inches. Retail on these is $11.99, but the Darth Vader Jumbo Chubby Exclusive is $55.05.
— July 15, 2007
Diamond Comics sent out a notice this week to retailers that the Lord of the Rings Balrog bust from Gentle Giant will be pushed back again. It was originally scheduled to ship in June this year. The new expected shipping date is 8/29/07. I guess they are having problems and they are trying to get it right. I hope they do because I love the Lord of the Rings line of mini busts so far.
— July 13, 2007
Take a look at the comments on Gentle Giant’s blog here and here. Gentle Giant is apparently still having problems processing online orders through their shopping cart. I heard from people trying to order that they would wait long times for the page to load so that they could checkout only to get error messages or find that items were removed from their cart. Seems like lots of others had the exact same problems. Here are some examples.
On July 12, 2007 04:36 PM, ichabod said…
After having all my items in my cart and re-submitting for 30 minutes I now get a “Fatal Error”. What’s going on, guys?
On July 12, 2007 05:19 PM, jawa01 said…
Why does it say The system was unable to process your order at this time. Your credit card was not charged, please try and re-submit your order?
It also appears that Glorfindel sold out the earliest and some people had that item in their cart and could not check out until the item was sold out.
Apparently, some people were able to get through, especially those that waited. Still, it looks like Gentle Giant still has a long way to go before they have a professional e-commerce system that is able to handle the traffic they get on pre-order days like this, even after upgrading their setup to four servers.
Finally, I have to say I do not approve of the ones that are cursing and name calling Gentle Giant on their blog. This behavior is immature and will not get what you want. It will only result in getting you banned or worse getting the comments taken away. I do not want to see the comments taken away as I feel this is one of the only ways we have to communicate with Gentle Giant and ensure they see it as well as the public.
— July 12, 2007
The Gentle Giant San Diego Comic Con exclusive pre-orders are online right now. If you are a member, check your e-mail for the links or go to the Gentle Giant blog and make sure you are logged in to your account to see the post with the pre-order links. Good luck to those who are going!
Update - 5:23PM ET: It appears GG’s site is now down.
Update - 5:26PM ET: Site is back up.
Update - 8:10PM ET: Gentle Giant updated their blog that the Glorfindel bust, R2D2 Yoda maquette, Luna Lovegood bust and bust-ups available for pre-order are now sold out. The Commander Cody bust is still available for pre-order.
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