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The Serial Experiments Lain Lunchbox DVD Set

A picture of the front of the Serial Experiments Lain lunch box DVD set.

The Lain Lunchbox Collectors Edition was a special edition of the Serial Experiments Lain anime, created via a collaboration between Pioneer USA and Palisades Marketing. It included four DVDs and a limited edition Boa CD.

Details:

  • Name: Lain Lunchbox Collectors Edition
  • Producer: Palisades Marketing
  • Release Date: 2000-11-28
  • MSRP: $119.98
  • SKU: 11489
  • UPC: 013023148994

Contents:

  • Serial Experiments Lain: Navi DVD [PIDA-2231V]
  • Serial Experiments Lain: Knights DVD [PIDA-2232V]
  • Serial Experiments Lain: Deus DVD [PIDA-2233V]
  • Serial Experiments Lain: Reset DVD [PIDA-2234V]
  • Boa Duvet Single Promotional CD
  • Boa Promotional Insert
  • Pioneer Anime Mailing List Promotional Insert

Photo Gallery

Original Website

Unfortunately, it seems like the Palisades Marketing pages advertising the Lain Lunchbox DVD Set were not archived online – those pages were:

  • palisadesmarketing.com/Htmlfiles/lain.html
  • palisadesmarketing.com/lain.html

Other Lain Lunchboxes

Aside from the collector’s DVD set, a few other Lain lunchboxes have been sold over the years…

Full-Size Empty Lunch Box

From what I can tell, it appears that the lunchbox could be ordered without the DVDs, as a plain full-size lunchbox. This product listing was found in the 2001 Right Stuf Anime catalog.

  • Name: Serial Experiments Lain Lunch Box
  • SKU: PAL-LBOX-1
  • Release Date: ?
  • MSRP: $17.99

Mini Lunchboxes!

The Serial Experiments Lain lunch box DVD set, laid next to two smaller lunch boxes to show the size differences between the three.
The full-size lunchbox, flanked by two of the mini lunchboxes!

A question I often see online is: What the heck are these mini lunch boxes?!

At first glance, it’s easy to think they were bootlegs, made to trick people into buying tiny versions of the real Lain lunch box – but that’s not correct!

In reality, these mini lunchboxes were made by the same company that made the full-size lunchbox, Palisades Marketing! They were sold in the early 2000’s, and two different designs were released before they were discontinued.

I have separate posts coming which will dive into each one of these lunch boxes. I’ll link them here once they’re published! 🙂

Research Log

I figured this blog post wouldn’t be complete without a summary of the research I did, or the places I pulled my information from. This section aims to explain where I found the links that I sourced in the above sections, and provide more context as to why some of them aren’t archived.

Research Target: The Palisades Website

So, our first target: the Palisades website. This one was somewhat straightforward to find, as it’s actually printed on the underside of the lunchbox!

The underside of the Lain lunch box, showing the "www.Palisadesmarketing.com" URL underneath the Palisades logo.
The underside of the Lain lunch box, showing the “www.Palisadesmarketing.com” URL underneath the Palisades logo.

The Palisades Marketing website was a great start, but I was curious for Lain-specific links – so I did some googling with the keywords “www.palisadesmarketing.com” & “lain”. This led me to mac de dvd ripping!

Research Target: mac de dvd ripping

I found an old post on the blog “mac de dvd ripping”, which appears to be a blog written by a Japanese anime fan on their adventures in ripping and backing up their anime DVD collection.

A screenshot of the mac de dvd ripping blog, showing the links to Palisades Marketing and the old Pioneer website.
A screenshot of the mac de dvd ripping blog.

On this blog, they mention that they bought the English Lunch Box DVD set from Palisades Marketing, and linked to the following page on the Palisades Marketing website:

http://www.palisadesmarketing.com/Htmlfiles/lain.html

Unfortunately, this is where the Wayback Machine fails us:

A screenshot from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, showing the error message: "Hrm. Wayback Machine has not archived that URL. Click here to search for all archived pages under..."
The Wayback Machine hasn’t archived the Palisades Marketing Lain webpage.

It seems that the Palisades Marketing website was not lucky enough to be scraped back when the lunch box DVD box set was still available, bringing this search to a close… sort of.

While performing this research, I noticed the Palisades Marketing website went through a number of huge web design overhauls around this time, along with shifts in company branding and URLs. Because of this, it’s possible the lunch box website is archived somewhere out there…

Research Target: Who Ran Palisades Marketing?

I was curious to know what the folks who ran Palisades are up to now, so I started searching around to learn more about their staff. I listened to a great podcast by ‘The Hyper Room’ where they interviewed the founder of Palisades Marketing, Mike Horn!

Research Target: Mike Horn’s Blog!

Upon Googling Mike Horn, I learned that he has an awesome page on his blog where he lists the entire Palisades Marketing Product Portfolio! Sure enough, the Lain lunchbox is included, listed as “Lain Lunchbox Collectors Edition”. They also included this photo, likely from the original Palisades website:

A small and somewhat low-resolution product photo showing the front and back of the original full-size Lain Lunchbox DVD set.

If you want to dive further into the history of Palisades, the podcast ‘The Hyper Room’ did a great interview with him back in 2020, available on their website.

Research Target: Right Stuf Anime

One other approach I thought up while performing this research was to check for Lain merchandise on the website of major anime retailers of the era. One such retailer is Right Stuf Anime, famous for selling all sorts of anime goods, DVDs, and tapes for decades, until their recent acquisition by Crunchyroll!

Sure enough, checking their website landed me on gold! I found the following two snippets in their news archive:

Lain Lunchbox Discontinued! Palisades announced that they have decided to stop making the Serial Experiments Lain Lunchbox. No further information was provided for this decision. However, the mini Serial Experiments Lain lunchbox is scheduled for release next February.
Lain Lunchbox Confusion. There was some initial confusion regarding our announcement about the Lain Lunchbox which we wanted to clear up. The Lain Lunchboxes have been discontinued because they are no longer being produced. Although there were a large number released to the larger retailers, Palisades does not plan to produce any more in the future and will not be filling any orders.

It seems like the original run of full-size Lain lunchboxes were sold for a somewhat limited amount of time, and discontinued before either of the miniature lunch boxes were released.

Unfortunately, basically all links to the old shop on the Right Stuf website are completely broken – they all use a host called “cave3.red5interactive.com” that did NOT age well, and the weird cursed URL formats that it uses do not play well with the internet archive at all. A few rare pages have been archived, but I only found a single shop page that had the Lain lunchboxes on it – and it was the miniature ones:

A screenshot of the Right Stuf store with the Lain Mini Lunchbox for sale.

A cool find nonetheless, but unfortunately not any more information regarding the full-size lunch boxes! (Also, weirdly deceiving, but likely on accident – you can tell that the photo is actually of the full-size lunch boxes, not the mini variant.)

So, Right Stuf was a bit of a bust for finding more info on the full-size variant, but at least it was still cool for learning more about the mini lunch boxes.

Research Target: Other Historical Posts

While I was performing this research, I came across some fun historical pages and posts that I thought I would share. None of it is particularly relevant, but it provides an interesting peek into the state of the Serial Experiments Lain fandom back in the early 2000’s, almost 25 years ago.

First, I enjoy seeing the way that various anime websites describe Lain as a series. Palisades’ description of Lain can be seen on this capture of their ‘ProductLines’ page from 2001-12-30:

Serial Experiments lain is a 13 episode TV series put out by Pioneer LDC and featuring character deisgns by Yoshitoshi Abe. The series is set in ‘present day, present time’. The boundries between the online world (Wired) and the real world are becoming blurred. Lain gets drawn into the wired world after she gets an email from a friend who has recently ‘abandoned her flesh’ by jumping off a building.

Another fun side effect of this research was stumbling across some historical fan reactions to the release of the lunch box DVD set. This set came out over 20 years ago – it’s amazing any of this is archived or still online!

First, a post from the ‘Ask Ken at Palisades’ thread on the Muppet Central forums – posted July 11th, 2002.

I went to the comic store yesterday and finally found the new Serial Experiments Lain and Trigun mini lunchboxes… WOW! THE SE: LAIN one in particular I LOVED!

It’s cool to imagine the Palisades mini lunchboxes being available in a local comic store, and it’s fun to see the reactions someone had to them all the way back in 2002. Gives a little bit more context to where and how they were available, and why there are so many floating around these days!

Appendix

Misc Metadata

If you want to try digging for some of the ancient Palisades photos of the Lain Mini Lunchbox, the un-archived URLs I could find include:

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