That depends on what you mean by "nuts". The United States is far from the only country that is concerned about region codes. Virtually any country that plays a big part in global entertainment uses region coding to some extent. However, it is up to individual DVD player manufacturers, video game makers (especially the consoles) and movie studios (among others) to decide if they want to use the codes or not. They use them to control the release of their product.
But like I was telling VG555, manufacturers have made it pretty easy to change the region codes on DVD players, so its not much of an issue. Nobody is going "nuts" about it. That's why it would be silly to out of the way and pay out the butt in order to buy a region free DVD player. Its much cheaper to simply get a regular DVD player and change the codes (or change the code of the one you already have).
Learn basic economics before spouting it to me. Supply and demand (in its most basic form) says that BOTH the supply AND the demand for something will dictate the price of an item or service. Rarity in and of itself doesn't necessarily call for a higher price in something; there has to be a demand for it (and even then, other factors remain). Gold is valuable because it is not only rare but because there are a lot of people who want it. However, I have a piece of special foil that is used in NASA satellites that I would be lucky to sell it for anything, despite the "rarity"; nobody wants that (it certainly won't help if I tried to sell it for hundreds of dollars, but more on that later). If something is rare, but nobody wants it, the price isn't going to be all that high (at least compared to rare items that are in demand).
In the same way, an anime from the 1960s (especially one that was barely released outside of Japan) isn't going to garner a lot of attention (from what I can see, even Toei barely pays attention to it; hell I doubt they even released DVDs of the show). The price of the box set is probably jacked up in order to fool people or to scam those who desperately want the anime (it is an old and rare anime, yes, but not worth $900). Hell, the "box set" is probably fake anyway, made by some bored as hell guy who just happened to have some rather useless tapes lying around and converted them to low-quality DVDs so that he could sell them to chumps.
In this case, the price is high because the guy can afford to do so. Even with the lack of demand, if there is no competition, he can charge whatever the hell he wants. Of course, this is rarely smart; supply and demand also dictates that the high cost of an item will cause demand to go down if nothing else about the product or service changes (people are only so desperate for something; there is a limit).
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