MySQL Date mismatch – Help needed for migrating website content database

I am in the early stages of migrating content from a now unsupported CMS system to Wordpress. I am able to migrate the content including Subject, article, author, post ID, and all that good stuff that I need, but the post date is giving me major problems. The issue is that the old application stores the date in a different format.

`date` varchar(100) NOT NULL default '',

While Wordpress stores 2 dates:

`post_date` datetime NOT NULL default '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
`post_date_gmt` datetime NOT NULL default '0000-00-00 00:00:00',

The result upon import is that all my dates show up as “0000-00-00 00:00:00” and I then would have to manually transfer the dates. Due to the high number of articles/postings this would be a nightmare.

1) Any MySQL guru here who knows how I could work around that problem?

Or

2) If it is impossible to migrate the dates through MySQL manipulation, what would be a query that at least goes and let’s me make a mass change for anything that shows a date like “0000-00-00 00:00:00” and change it to the start date of my website?

Thanks.

Christoph