Throwing a huge party you have to invite some funny guys. They inevitably become the life of the party. I was going to talk about them but I’m not. Hulu added old Saturday Morning favorites Voltron, Felix the Cat, Fat Albert but with their “added bonus” of the feature-length anime? Origin: Spirits of the Past they completely dropped the ball on this one.

When you throw a party you must give people directions. If you mess up one part of those directions you have a lost guest and subsequently some angry people. Double checking links and information is all a part of being a responsible party planner. Whoever drops the ball in their part of the journey doesn’t matter. What ultimately matters is that it reflects badly upon the brand not the individual at fault.

A faulty link from their “added bonus” forced me to search on my own for the movie. Is that what they meant by an added bonus, a scavenger hunt? My search on Hulu for “origin spirits of the past” had to be sorted by date added (because I know for a fact that they just added it) at http://www.hulu.com/search/origin+spirits+of+the+past?sort_by=pub_date.

I’m not exactly sure why a name of a movie they clearly have in their inventory can’t be found on the first search page when sorted by relevance when every word in the search is very relevant to every word in the title of the movie. The proper Origin: Spirits of the Past link is http://www.hulu.com/watch/62720/origin—spirits-of-the-past NOT the one they originally gave which is http://www.hulu.com/origin_spirits_of_the_past.

UPDATE: The proper link is NOW http://www.hulu.com/origin-spirits-of-the-past. It seems the underscore has given way to the hyphen in link naming. Apparently someone got a little too shift-happy before.

People understand that things happen. What people don’t understand is that when you are launching an initiative with just 4 links to check, there is no excuse to get any of those links wrong. With a high profile move one must always make sure everything is proper. The weakest link is always the default standard in the viewer’s mind.