The Rumor Buster

Continuing our coverage of Farscape’s history, all part of our contest to give away a copy of the recently released complete series on Blu-Ray, we’re looking back at just how lucky we are to be able to pick up a complete series of most shows by going back in time to an era when DVDs were lucky to have two episodes.

When DVDs first came out, they were competing against VCRs. A complete series meant a bookshelf full of tapes. Capacity was maxed out with about two hours of footage, so a show like Farscape would get two episodes on one tape. Fans could certainly tape their own shows off the network and with low quality settings and judicious commercial cuttings fit a large chunk of a season onto only a handful of tapes, but it was difficult.  What’s worse is that not every series received VHS releases, though fans of Farscape were lucky to receive the first two series on VHS in the US, and three in the UK according to this page at Sybertooth.

But the limitations on VHS, the difficulty of competing with it as a format (DVD was the future, of course, but do you want to be the company that says “sorry fans with VCRs, we think you’re dinosaurs… come join us in the future!” before your competitors do?), and the fact that yes, there were people willing to pay $25 for two episodes on a DVD lead to a horrifying, by today’s standards, release schedule.

As TV Shows on DVD points out, there were 11 volumes for Season 1, at a cost of $25 a pop, with Season 2 and beyond squeezing the season sets into only 5 volumes.  The complete series on DVD would have set you back about $650 at a retail establishment back in the day… about three times the MSRP of the complete series on Blu-Ray.

After Season 4′s DVDs were released, a “Starburst Edition” was released with more episodes per set, cramming single seasons onto three Starbust volumes for the same price as the previous releases and cutting the number of volumes from 26 to 12.  The Starburst sets were not problem free however.  As Digital Bits points out, there were manufacturing problems resulting in disc degradation, a limited replacement window for getting fixed discs… and then once the license was over the discs quickly went out of print.

A&E picked up the rights a few years later and put out a complete series set in 2009.   Again, this set had some noteworthy problems, which Digital Bits went into detail with.  Most notable was the loss of many bonus features and the lower video quality resulting from both compression issues and how apparently ADV had access to the masters for their Starburst editions while A&E did not.

Of course, there are often trade-offs.  How many people are really going to miss the text-based character profiles, especially when they’re able to call up a browser screen from their phone and the more comprehensive online databases?  Plus, A&E’s complete series frees up a lot of shelf space, as this example of how space-consuming previous releases were, from a thread on Syfy Forums.

Now, the ultimate question is, of course, how the Blu-Rays stack up against the previous releases… something we’re going to try to answer.  On Monday.