The Dark Horse reissue of the Magic Knight Rayearth manga in two omnibus editions is slated for January 18, 2011 and February 1, 2011. Amazon and RightStuf are still listing both volumes as preorders, so who knows what's up with that. Dark Horse picked up the license way back in 2009 when Tokyopop lost its Kodansha licenses.
Fixed a factual error about the first pressings of the Original Song Books.
There's been a resurgence of interest in Magic Knight Rayearth recently. Yay!
Did you know the Magic Knight Rayearth Best Song Book album is available on the American iTunes? I didn't! (Sadly it's not available for the rest of us outside the USA.)
Also Naomi Tamura released three of her songs from MKRE in a Complete Best set on Apple's iTunes Store worldwide this summer. "Two of the songs, "Yuzurenai Negai" ("Unyielding Wish") and "Hikari to Kage wo Dakishimeta Mama" ("Still Embracing Light and Darkness"), are already available in the American version of iTunes along with the rest of the Magic Knight Rayearth Best Song Book album. However, her new Complete Best set will also include "All You Need is Love," her ending theme song for the Rayearth original video anime remake."
Yup! Available for rent in the USA: Anime Season 1, Anime Season 2, and the long out of print Rayearth OAV.
Following the end of Tokyopop's relationship with Kodansha, all of their Kodansha titles including Rayearth are effectively out of print as of August 31. Tokyopop just rereleased the Rayearth manga a few years ago in the right-to-left format and their books are still easy enough to find online. But once they run out, do not fear! Dark Horse has picked up the license of numerous CLAMP series (Magic Knight Rayearth, Clover, Cardcaptor Sakura, Chobits) and will republish MKRE as two large omnibus editions, one for each of MKR and MKR II. No word yet on whether the Dark Horse editions will include the lovely colour bonus pages, which were only available from Tokyopop in the limited edition box sets.
The Magic Knight Rayearth anime is being reissued in a remastered format (more discussion here). Release date for the first season is January 26, 2010. The World of Magic Knight Rayearth DVD Box Set containing both seasons in two slim packs is still available. The remastered version is about the same price as that set but apparently will have a big boost in quality.
I have refreshed this site's design and fixed lots of outdated information all over the site (even cleaned out the moldy links page). Lyrics for Original Song Book 1 have been added. But most notably, I have gone back and reripped all my MKRE CDS in FLAC and high bitrate MP3 for the Music Albums, replacing the Ogg files which were encoded at a lower bitrate (some tracks for the RUN/Yami no Yume single are still ogg because they were sent in to me in that format, but they are at a good bitrate for ogg). Some of the CDs are in MP3 only because that's all I have.