For those following, here’s the run-down of previous statues in the collection:

• Justice League New Frontier – Hal Jordan
• Superman/Batman Public Enemies – Superman figure
• Batman Under a Red Hood – Red Hood
• Justice League Crisis on Two Earths – Owlman
• Superman/Batman Apocalypse – Batman figure
• All Star Superman – Superman (Solar Suit)
• Green Lantern: Emerald Knights – Sinestro

Story

Obviously the highlight of the release is the show itself.  It’s been available before, again and again, on DVD, and with every previous release, the price has dropped a little.  The Blu-Ray release steps the price back up a hair ($200 msrp compared to $150 for the previous DVD release) but that’s to be expected with a Blu-ray release.

There’s many ways you can tell the tale of Farscape.  It’s the tale of an ordinary man that loses everything he had but gains a family.  It’s an intergalactic space opera detailing the flights and fights of a starlost crew of prisoners, outcasts and rebels.  John Crichton accidentally ends up across the universe, responsible for the death of an imperial muckity-muck’s brother and on the run with a troupe of freaks and misfits.  It’s a love story between a cold hard bitch and her human contaminator.  It’s a story of the royal machinations of dominar Rygel and a Nebari rebel.  Zhaan is a spiritualist and a madwoman and by the end, she saves them all.  Crais and Scorpius are villains in the grand scheme of Farscape; multi-faceted, driven, sometimes sympathetic.

There’s just too many beats to pigeon hole this series as one thing or another.  They’re lost warriors who find their place.  They’re underdogs that defy the odds.  It’s a Star Trek inspired space exploration story full of frelling aliens and mysterious planets.  It’s a sappy love story.  It’s a space-bound Oceans 11 with manic capers and planets at risk.

In simplest terms, which do the story great injustice, an earthman, John Crichton, enters a wormhole and ends up flung across the cosmos.  After exiting, he realizes that he’s no longer in familiar territory, especially when he notices the alien ships circling nearby.  His ship is damaged by another ship and he is picked up by the crew of Moya, a large sentient ship, prison transport ship, in hopes that his unfamiliar technology will facilitate their escape from Peacekeeper forces.  Naturally events spiral.

The damaged ship was piloted by the brother of a high-ranking Peacekeeper who vows vengeance upon Crichton.  Another Peacekeeper was trapped on the ship after it performed a starburst, and attempts to betray the crew only to learn that the Peacekeepers have deemed her irreversibly contaminated and must be terminated.  Together, the fugitives escape and lead various forces on a journey across the uncharted territories.  They meet friendly and unfriendly aliens.  They return to Earth.  Then back to space.  They love, live and die.

For much of the series, the heroes are chased by Scorpius, a master strategist who believes that Crichton has a body of wormhole knowledge that could make him the most powerful man in the universe, but it doesn’t alter the show’s main mechanics.  They continue to run, and as they run, they encounter strangeness.

Quality

On the technical side, the video’s got a few problems.  As many people know by now, the original masters have disappeared somewhere between mastering the ADV Starburst editions and  A&E’s complete series and so this offering was made using higher-than-US-broadcast-but-less-than-true-HD PAL encodings that were upscaled.  The end result is a slightly less than awe-inspiring transcoding.  Don’t get me wrong, by and large the quality is great, exceptional in parts, but not a true representation of the 1080p power.

Believe it or not, it’s not the worst thing in the world.  A better-than-broadcast quality version of the series is better than… well… a broadcast quality version of this series.  If the original masters are truly lost and gone forever, then this may in fact be as good as it gets.

The original effects were done in SD, which means that to best experience the series, they would need to be completely redone, which would have been a costly proposition. As those wanting a complete Smallville blu-ray release know, remastering old effects can be a dealbreaker.  If it costs too much it could nix a release.  The upside is that unlike a lot of more modern sci-fi, many of the effects are physical or mechanical, not CGI.

Extras

The extras come from previous DVD releases and either you have them or you don’t.  They provide a lot of insight into the show and its fandom, and because they span several years you get a feel for the way in which the property grew in time.

A new documentary, Memories of Moya is included and features interviews and commentary from various cast and crew such as Virginia Hey, Ben Browder, Claudia Black, Rockne S. O’Bannon and others.

There’s some interesting talk about the show’s economics, and the savings involved with amortizing the show’s costs over a season, and the expected self-inflated sense of importance.  The show was great, and popular, but there’s a fair amount of over-indulgence and hyperbole when it comes to discussing efforts to save Farscape, at one point claiming that the outpouring was so massive television interviews were being routinely crashed by sign-bearing Farscape fans.

Of particular note is the acknowledgment of Farscape’s female audience and its appeal as a show where the female characters are smarter than their male counterparts.  While the legendary “geek girl” is an ever evolving creature, it owes credit to shows like Buffy, X-Files, Xena and Farscape which appealed to female audiences sci-fi can often overlook.

A large portion of the documentary is centered on the Aeryn/Crichton relationship. The taboo of bringing major characters together, both characters realizing they can’t ever really get back to their homes, the emotional awakening of both characters, the devastation caused by his Season 1 torture and how that informed his later years.  Long story short, they start out as enemies, develop a relationship, die and have a baby. With bumps along the way.

Scorpius and Crais are briefly evaluated as villains that aren’t entirely unredeemable. Bad guys with good stories. But ultimately, Zhaan is the only other character given significant focus, which is not surprising because her actress is one of the few to contribute to the documentary.

The series finale is referred to as “reckless”, and as a necessary element to the story, though as fans who sat through the finale can testify it was downright brutal.  For those that haven’t seen it, and are afraid of spoiling the ending of a show that’s been off the air for the better part of a decade, the series ends with lovebirds Aeryn and Crichton apparently murdered.  Turned to crystal.

The Peacekeeper Wars, a miniseries that wrapped up the Farscape television universe, brought the crew back to status quo, revived Aeryn and Crichton, and finished up with a tale of epic star wars, though obviously it can’t be referred to as such.  It’s not included in this release because of licensing issues, which can often pose a problem for feature film or mini-series releases that accompany television shows, though it is a necessary part of the storyline.

It’s not like missing Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles or Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.  It’s like missing Return of the Jedi, or the King for that matter.  It’s not visiting an old friend for one last adventure, it’s a frantic attempt to find out what happened to your friend after hearing they met a grisly fate. And, worst of all, Peacekeeper Wars isn’t available on Blu-Ray unless you hunt down a European import, making it one for a select die-hard fan.

Overall

It’s a great set, with a lot of bang for your buck.  Especially through online merchants offering fairly steep discounts, you can pick up the complete series, extras and all, for a price that works out to between $1 and $2 an episode depending on the sale.  It’ll take a while to plow through the 88 episodes and abundant content such as audio commentaries, deleted scenes and documentaries, but the show still holds up in terms of dense plotting, interesting visuals and vibrant characters.

It’s also a milestone in genre television, one of the cornerstones that may not get the acclaim of Battlestar Galactica, or the widespread familiarity of Lost, but an important show that really moved the genre ahead.

The original masters might turn up someday, or there might eventually be an agreement to produce a complete set including Peacekeeper Wars, but there’s no guarantee of either and while the slightly reduced picture quality and cliffhanger ending might be frustrating for some, there’s no reason to deny yourself such an interesting and bold program just because you’ll have to pick up a DVD to see the ultimate ending.

The studio provided a review copy.

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.

Elements of the Boom! Studios continuation of Farscape were written by Rockne S. O’Bannon (the show’s creator), David Alan Mack (a Star Trek novelist) and Keith DeCandido (a Farscape novelist), and freed from the constraints of having to keep the characters static, the books have considerably more weight than their Wildstorm counterparts.

Originally a series of mini-serieses, the separate, episodic stories quickly developed into a considerable body of work that greatly expanded the established canon and, with no pesky show to worry about, the material could move characters forward similar to Buffy Season 8 and 9, or Angel After the Fall.

The minis eventually gave way to a 24 issue series that concluded in October 2011 with the end of a massive war against the Kkore, villains introduced during Scorpius’s 8 issue series.

All in all, the Boom! Studios Farscape universe consisted of 3 four-issue minis featuring D’argo (D’argo’s Lament, D’Argo’s Trial and D’argo’s Quest), the 8-issue Scorpius series, three 4-issue minis featuring the entire cast (The Beginning of the End of the Beginning, Strange Detractors, and Gone and Back) and 24 issues of the main ongoing title.  56 issues total over approximately three years… not a bad run for a show that had been off the air for so long.

The comics brought back many secondary characters instead of simply focusing on ship’s main crew.  Familiar faces from the show like Grayza, Sizoku, Noranti and Grunchlk are given roles to play in one issue or another.  Even D’argo and Zhaan make appearances through backstories, flashbacks and the use of an alternate reality storyline for one mini.

The comics lovingly pay homage to the television series itself, with throwback references like an issue where Aeryn and John return to the commerce planet they landed on in the pilot episode, and the books events build to a 12-issue epic War for the Uncharted Territories, which ultimately concluded this iteration of the Farscape universe.

Comic books related to TV shows aren’t new.  From westerns like the Lone Ranger to sitcoms like I Love Lucy and soap operas like Dark Shadows, comic books have been a great supplement to their broadcast media.

Farscape’s first shot at comic book super-stardom was… lacking.  It consisted of a two issue mini-series in 2002 titled Farscape: War Torn.  Wildstorm would later find great success in licensed books like Friday the 13th, World of Warcraft and Gears of War, but Farscape did not appear to catch on and War Torn is a footnote in the superhero-heavy Wildstorm’s early days.  At two issues, the series lacks the meat and bones to get collected even if the rights holders were interested.

Despite being written by Marv Wolfman, the story’s not that impressive.  The main story is a fairly common war story about two groups on the verge of war that can only be stopped by the timely intervention of Moya’s crew who, as always, need supplies.  The back-up is a Chiana centered tale where she and a handful of Nebari battle a contagion. The art is problematic, with great representations of D’Argo and Rygel, and varying degrees of success representing the more humanoid characters.  Newly created characters look like disposable Image designs.  The backgrounds are either blank white or gradients. Not very impressive, especially considering how Boom! Studios’ Farscape adventures managed to use bare backgrounds much more stylistically, and even captured better character likenesses despite a stripped down animated style.

Still, you have to respect the difficulty of creating a story within a pre-existing universe.  You can’t shatter the universe without putting it back in place.  You can’t add a new crew member, or kill off one.  You can’t dismember Aeryn unless she’s magically healed later in the story.

Of course, that’s not necessarily a problem with the recently concluded Boom! Studios series and its related minis.  Which we’ll talk about next time…

And speaking of guardians of the galaxy (or at least the guardians of A galaxy), don’t forget to check back later for details about how you can win the complete Farscape series on blu-ray!

William Shatner plays William Shatner, which is as always one of his most humorous and well thought out characters.  He even sings a little bit, though it’s unclear whether it’s a tribute to his musical fans or as an indulgence.

The narrative itself skips between the various actors, which gives the film its forward motion and overall framework.  It’s more a testament to the stress of being an actor playing one of the Star Trek captains than a celebration of Star Trek.  In fact, it’s more a documentary about acting than anything else.

Those thinking the movie will be non-stop Star Trek and pop-culture phenomena won’t find more than a superficial reference for the first half hour or so.  I mean that in a good way.  It’s not disappointing, just unusual.  Those in the hipster contingent looking for some meta-textual ironic “he’s laughing with us” performance won’t get what they’re looking for either.  When Shatner gives Bakula horseback, lessons it’s earnest.  It’s sincere. Bizarre, but not in a Priceline commercial sort of way.

Everyone starts with an origin story of sorts, how they became the actor that became the Captain.  Patrick Stewart talks about the emotional depth of growing up poor, and discovering theatre before cutting to Avery Brooks talks about his drive to join the choir.  Kate Mulgrew opens up about lying to her father to get him to pay for college in New York, a front for her acting ambition.  Scott Bakula discusses his voice lessons and his love of music.  Chris Pine’s production of Waiting for Goddeau.

Shatner’s backstory is delivered in a series of monologues, and inserted into his interviews with others in the ham-fisted way you expect a friend to interrupt your stories with their own, and in their ind better, twist.

Many of the scenes act as little bon mots unrelated to each other.  Chris Pine talks about stunt work and then we’re off to a Star Trek convention where Shatner meets a man claiming to be his nephew.  There are themes, like the struggle of the actors, punctuated by the appearance of a Tribble Hunter. There’s an almost surreal moment where Avery Brooks leads Shatner on an exploration of the concept of humanity as music unleashed into the universe.

Despite the flash and dazzle of bright-colored jumpsuits and warp drives, the Captains are trained and disciplined actors, lovers of the theatre and music, and devoted to their work.  You can look at Star Trek as silly pop culture, but the actors approached it with the same seriousness as a production of Hamlet.  They put in long hours, for long years, sacrificing family time, giving up roles and opportunities they had always wanted.

Almost unspoken is the heavy burden being a Captain has on these actors.  Not the burden it placed on their families… that part is covered repeatedly, but the way it changes their careers.  They don’t accept roles, they accept places in history.  No other title, except maybe the companions in Doctor Who, carries the level of expectation of a captain in the Star Trek franchise.  No matter who you are or what you did before or after Star Trek, being a captain becomes a defining role.

There are guest appearances from Star Trek the Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and a host of beauties, each one the most beautiful woman to appear in Star Trek, as Shatner notes.  Some might be disappointed that the “secondary captains” are ignored… those that gain commissions over the course of the movie franchise for instance. It’s an excusable overlook though. While those captains are important to the universe’s mythology, this movie relishes in the fact that it’s not as obsessed with Trek as its fans are.

For those looking for the Star Trek insight, it’s there, but you’ll hunt for nuggets.  They’re Easter Eggs.  Patrick Stewart explaining how the Next Generation crew helped him realize how to have fun while acting, for instance, or various actors comparing techno-babble to Shakesepaere.  Robert Picardo explaining how a character’s popularity is tied to the availability of their action figure.  A Romulan Warbird faux paus. But in general, the movie is, as it should be, the exploration of what it means to be a captain.

The studio provided a review copy.

In the DCUC subscription, does the tooling budget allow for slightly larger accessories than traditionally available? For instance, could Oracle with a wheelchair be a regular figure, assuming of course that her chair is nowhere near as large as Metron’s?

We love the DC Universe subscription program because it is the perfect place for us to release larger form factors and accessories. Metron and his Mobius Chair is just one example of the amazing design creations you’ll see in the DC Universe Club Infinite Earths program. And in case you haven’t heard, the 2012 subscription has been re-opened to allow fans one last chance to sign up. If you haven’t already secured your subscription for 2012, you have until October 3 to do so on Mattycollector.com.

Considering the failure to meet the DC Universe subscription threshold, aren’t you concerned that charging the so-called “cherry pickers” a premium will only serve to continue alienating potential customers? In other words, if scalpers and online retaile

Our goal was to make awesome figures available via the Mattycollector.com subscription program.

We hope that we’ve made that possible with options for both collectors that want to secure all of the figures as well as fans who want to pick and choose.

Any plans for Ghostbusters 3.75?

Nothing at this time but you never know what the future will bring!

Any plans for MOTU 3.75?

Not at this time. We putting all of our limited resources into the 6″ Classics line right now.

Any updates on what the new scale talked about at SDCC will be for the WWE line?

All we can say is this: it is planned for Fall 2012 and it will make you feel like a kid again.

X-Men

• Angel
• Beast
• Blob
• Colossus
• Cyclops
• Iceman
• Juggernaut
• Nightcrawler
• Professor X
• Sabretooth
• Storm
• Wolverine

Super Hero Squad

• Captain America
• Doctor Doom
• Dormamu
• Falcon
• Hulk
• Iron Man
• MODOK
• Juggernaut
• Spider-Man
• Thanos
• Thor
• Wolverine

Good Versus Evil

• Daredevil
• Galactus
• Hawkeye
• Hulk
• Hydra Agent
• Iron Man (Hulkbuster armor, 2 versions)
• Kang
• Mister Fantastic
• Nick Fury
• Spider-Man
• Venom

A rundown of the previous Marvel Squinkies figures is here, and BRM previously showed us the four squinkies that came with the Spider-Man dispenser (Doctor Octopus, Hobgoblin, Wolverine and Spider-Man)