SPECIAL 25th ANNIVERSARY DVD OF THE LAST UNICORN, WITH EXTRA FEATURES (BUY IT HERE, OR PETER S. BEAGLE GETS NOTHING)

Price $15.00 unsigned, $25 signed in three places (disc, cover art, and slipcase), $30 personalized. Available now.

In April 2004 Lionsgate Entertainment released The Last Unicorn on DVD for the first time in the United States...and it was terrible. Produced from poor-quality masters, this fullscreen version cut off both sides of the original image, looked blurry and dark, sounded screechy and awful, contained no extras, and featured cover art that looked like My Little Pony on jelly-bean steroids.

To say that fans of the film were disappointed would be an understatement. Yet with no other version available, they still bought it in droves, purchasing 540,000 copies before it was finally replaced with something better: the 25th Anniversary edition shown just to the left.

The new version happened because of us. The minute the first terrible edition appeared, we started lobbying Lionsgate to do something about it.

Lionsgate's first response was that the film's English owners had assured them that they already had the very best masters available. We knew this wasn't true, so we kept pushing Lionsgate to let us show them the beautiful German edition, which had been digitally remastered and cleaned-up by the German distributor because The Last Unicorn is such a treasured film in that country.

We finally got to do that in 2006, in a meeting in Lionsgate's Santa Monica offices. To the company's credit, once they saw the difference for themselves they didn't waste any time. They licensed the German video masters and 5.1 audio mix, licensed the English cover art, worked with us to assemble some nifty extras (including a video interview with Peter S. Beagle, and a gallery of Last Unicorn art), seized on our marketing suggestion that 2007 was the 25th anniversary of the film's first release...and on February 6th, 2007 released a new widescreen DVD anniversary edition that finally did the movie justice.

It has been a terrific success: Lionsgate has now sold more than 800,000 copies of this new edition. In fact, the 25th Anniversary Last Unicorn was the second-best-selling "catalog special" DVD of 2007. The only film to beat it? Spiderman 2.1!

Peter is pleased and delighted, as are we. But we're even more pleased that slightly over 4,000 of those new DVDs were sold through us, in a special arrangement with Lionsgate.

Here's a shot of a slightly-bleary Peter working his way through signing the first flood of orders that came in:

SO EVERYTHING IS GREAT, RIGHT? NOPE... NOT AT ALL.

Except for the copies that were purchased through Conlan Press via this website, or at Peter's sales table at various conventions, none of the other Last Unicorn DVDs have ever paid him a cent. That's right — at least 1.5 million DVDs have been sold around the world since 1999, and only the 4,000 copies sold here have earned him any money. From all the rest, Peter has gotten absolutely nothing.

We hope you will spread the word that the very best way to buy The Last Unicorn on DVD is right here, where more than half of every sale goes straight into Peter's pocket.

Our very deep thanks to Lionsgate Entertainment for making this possible.

Yes, I would like to get The Last Unicorn 25th Anniversary widescreen DVD.

WE HAVE THE LAST (ACCORDING TO WARNER BROTHERS) AVAILABLE DVDs OF THE 1978 ANIMATED J.R.R. TOLKIEN'S THE LORD OF THE RINGS

Price $15.00 unsigned, $25 signed in two places (disc and cover art), $30 personalized. Available now.

In 1977 Peter S. Beagle hired on as a consultant to Ralph Bakshi and Saul Zaentz's troubled production of an animated Lord of the Rings. Bakshi and Zaentz had a script in hand which wasn't good enough to use, and they were running out of time to do something about it, since in animation the actors' voices have to be recorded very early in the process. So they looked to Peter — screenwriter, fantasy novelist, and acknowledged Tolkien expert — to tell them how to solve the problem. Their brief: read the script and tell us how to fix it. Peter's fee: $5,000.

Problem was, fixing the script wasn't an option. Complete replacement was called for, and that's what Peter told them.

In return they said that there wasn't anything left in the budget to pay for a whole new script, but...if Peter would agree to write a script as an extension of his already completed consulting contract, they would pay him more than his usual screenplay fee for part 2 of the story, and hire him to write other movies for them as well.

Peter's film agent told him it was a smart career move to say yes...and that's how he wound up writing eight or nine drafts of a 180-page screenplay for nothing. It was an epic job: at one point he was holed up in a London hotel room, typing script pages that were literally being run straight over to the recording studio where the voice actors were doing their work.

The bad news: there never was an animated The Lord of the Rings, Part 2; Peter never got hired to write anything else by Saul Zaentz or Ralph Bakshi; and he even had to threaten to sue to get the second half of his original $5,000 consulting fee. To this day he's never gotten another penny from Saul Zaentz for his work on the film, despite having contributed so much to the property's enormous worldwide success.

The good news: the script was great, and the animated movie based on it inspired a 17 year-old New Zealander named Peter Jackson to go read Tolkien's trilogy for the first time. That's right — we wouldn't have had Peter Jackson's marvelous set of films if Peter Beagle hadn't come through in the pinch back in 1977. And the films we do have might not have been as good: if you compare the books and the Bakshi movie with the Jackson films, it's obvious that Jackson drew directly on a lot of things that Peter S. Beagle invented for his original screen adaptation.

Just like we sell The Last Unicorn on DVD so that Peter finally makes something from it, we recently decided to carry the animated Lord of the Rings as well. To our surprise, we found out something shocking: Warner Brothers was letting the title fall out of circulation. There were a very small number of copies left in the warehouse (fewer than 600) and the company had no current plans to make any more.

So we grabbed them. All of them.

(Or so they claim. If there are any left on their shelves, they aren't admitting it to us.)

...and we'd love to sell them off, with more than half of each purchase going straight to Peter S. Beagle. So if you'd like a copy of this DVD for yourself, or a friend, either signed by Peter or not...for a little while longer we have them here!

Yes, I would like to get J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings DVD.

To find out what you can do to help Peter S. Beagle finally get fair treatment from Saul Zaentz, click here.