How do DC’s television plans, for instance the upcoming DC nation shorts, “Super Best Friends” and potential live action Green Arrow, factor into Mattel’s plans for future line-ups?

Sorry, this is not information we can share with the public at this time.

Will future waves of Action League feature New-52 style DC characters, or will Action League remain a haven for more classic characters?

You can potentially see new 52 characters in all of our lines. They are not restricted to 6″.

DC’s New 52 appears to be making many steps to broaden the exposure base of its characters, for instance, introducing digital combo packs, shucking high numbered books for ready-made collections and jettisoning continuity. Can we expect increased comic tie-ins, such as comic packs, action figure ads in the comic books or mail-in exclusive figures?

We do not have plans for comic book packs ins right now, but it is certainly something to explore.

Will there be an increased presence of gimmicks and action features in WWE, for instance, the Force Flex Lightning?

For the kid aimed product, yes. Collector product less so.

Will we see more DC Universe themed Polly Pocket figures and if so, will they remain a seasonal impulse item?

It is possible. Nothing to announce right now but the previous ones were big sellers!

1) Considering the number and variety of vehicles already produced for the Brave and the Bold line, is there any chance that some of these will be repurposed or re-released as part of the DC Universe line?

No, not at this time.

2) The DCU All-Star figures revealed so far have been an unusual combination of apparent repaints and figures requiring minimal tooling. Would larger waves allow more unique sculpts?

There will be some figures with more tooling and others with less depending on the best execution for each character.

3) Can we expect any news about the future of DC’s 3.75 plans at the upcoming Toy Fair?

No. We do not have a DC 3 3/4″ line planned at this time. Maybe down the road.

4) With Dark Knight Rises coming this summer, what product lines can consumers expect to see? 6 inch? 3.75 inch? Action League?

We will have this to announce at NYTF.

5) With a fresh slate of DC direct-to-DVD animated movies coming out this year, can we expect any Mattel tie-ins like either the Public Enemies line, or the one-off retailer exclusive figure pack-ins?

At this time, no we do not have plans for this in out 2012 lines.

We can definitely explore props for DC Universe.  This would be a great execution for Mattycollector.com.  So be on the lookout there for any announcements about future prop replicas!

Is there an estimated in-store date for the Flashpoint wave of Action League figures?

The Flashpoint-themed mix is scheduled to hit shelves around February 2012.

Is Mattel able to make Young Justice or YJ styled figures based on characters that haven’t appeared in the show (although there’s certainly enough actual appearances to choose from)?

Although this could be a possibility, our focus has been on characters that have appeared in the animated series.

With Wildstorm characters in the “mainstream” DCU right now, and Milestone characters appearing in Young Justice, are both available for Mattel action figures?

Yes, these characters are available for Mattel action figures, however we don’t have anything specific to announce at this time.

Hasbro has recently launched it’s own construction toy brand, Kre-O.  Has Mattel given any thought to producing it’s own line of construction toys?

Sorry, Mattel can’t comment on any in development concepts or ideas!

Got any questions for Mattel?  Ask Matty here!

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…

• 

  For the first time ever, Farscape, the Complete Series, is available on Blu-Ray

  Farscape, The Action Figures - A look at Toy Vault’s now classic (or is that vintage?) line of action figures featuring the Farscape crew.

• Farscape, The Comic Books Part 1 - A look at the Wildstorm mini-series
• Farscape, The Comic Books Part 2 - The Boom! Studios, post Peacekeeper Wars comic book universe.
• Farscape, The Video Releases – From VHS to DVD, Farscape’s long journey to your home theater.
• Farscape, The Blu-Ray Review

Questions:

1) What is the one character who, despite being a crew member from the beginning of the series to its end, did not get an action figure?

2) How many issues did the Boom! Studios ongoing Farscape series last?

3) What teleportation-related term is used to describe the second release of ADV DVDs?

4) What is the name of the Farscape follow-up mini-series?

Remember that the answers to all those questions are in the above coverage.  Once you have all four answers, submit them to clevernamehere@therumorbuster.com before 12:01 a.m., Sunday, December 11.  One entry per household, this contest not valid if you live where contests are prohibited, no purchase necessary  and all the standard rules apply.

Every email containing the correct answers (spelling and grammar are not important, but they are nonetheless encouraged) will be assigned a number and one winning number shall be picked at random.

The prize was generously provided to us by the studio.