If you're an Old Trek fan....

[Pain_Man]

If you're a Trek fan there's good news:

 

Amazon has dropped the price. It's also nearly 50% less than the price charged by Barnes and Noble & BestBuy.

 

They're now going for $35.49 ea. So you can get the entire series for $116.47 (oddly enough, they're selling the entire series as a set for $175.98 Doesn't make much sense to me.)

 

There is an HD-DVD/SD-DVD combo set but it's $96. For $10 bucks more you get the whole set and with the up-rezzer in my Toshiba AD-30 gets it close to HD. The soundtracks have been remixed to Dolby 5.1 (a DTS mix would have been nice).

 

The interior and other live action shots look great, the colors rich, the images crisp. The space shots don't fair so well. At least we don't see any wires, but they still look grainy. The special efx, of course, look dated, but it's hardly fair to criticize that. Especially since Star Trek had the lowest budget of all of NBC dramas for that era. (Interestingly, according to Ron Moore--BSG impresario and long-time Star Trek writer and producer--if Nielsen had tabulated ratings back then they way they do today, the show would have been revealed for what it was: a massive hit. And this surely would have led to a much, much longer run.)

 

Season 1

 

Season 2

 

Season 3

 

They've also dropped the prices on Voyager and Next Gen. (They are next on my list. It's a veritable Trekker--i.e. geek-fest).

 

 

Checking Amazon UK, the price is 28 pounds, about $56 US. Don't know if that's a drop or not. (I assume the big price difference is probably due to the VAT tax??? If I'm wrong, pls correct.)

[weisborg]

Yeah, I had just bought the full set of the old ones when the HD came out. They have the updated stills and planet flyins that the Sci-Fi channels and such have been playing. I guess I'll have to get the HD now...argh! Its still nice seeing the old stuff though and how they did everything with so little money. On one of the extras it said each show had the budget of one dinner on the set of STNG...

[Pain_Man]

Star Trek had the lowest budget of any show on NBC back in the day. It is said to have been between $200,000 and $250,000/ep.

 

Next Generation cost about $1.5m per episode (obviously eps like "The Best of Both Worlds" must have cost a lot more).

 

Compare that to say Bill Cosby's salary for the Cosby show which was said to be $10,000,000/yr (Ted Danson was paid a similar amount for Cheers; both are rumored to have given up their resids--i.e. their share of syndication money--for the huge upfront salaries).

 

And the Star Trek movies were always criminally low-budget, never getting anywhere near the kind of fundage that they needed. Still, Harve Bennett and Rick Berman did a great job working with what they had. Especially since Shatner and Nimoy were paid $6M each for each movie; Kelley was rumored to have been paid $3M. The rest of the "core" cast were paid in the high six figs, something that caused deep resentment on the parts of Doohan, Nichols, Koenig, Takei--understandably so.

 

(Bennett's best move being to hire Nick Meyer who wrote and direct ST 2 & 6 and wrote 4. Though other names are given writing credits, Meyer essentially throughout the original drafts and wrote new ones from scratch. He's also a gifted novelist. Check out his The Seven Percent Solution, an imaginative collaboration between Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud. He discusses it briefly on the Director's Commentary for Wrath of Khan.)

 

 

Yeah, I had just bought the full set of the old ones when the HD came out. They have the updated stills and planet flyins that the Sci-Fi channels and such have been playing. I guess I'll have to get the HD now...argh! Its still nice seeing the old stuff though and how they did everything with so little money. On one of the extras it said each show had the budget of one dinner on the set of STNG...

Edited April 9, 2008 by Pain_Man