I was browsing through Drexler's Facebook updates, and his update for this past Saturday (Dec 1st) says: A little more info from him in the comments as well: As I don't go into too many of the other sub-forums, I don't know if anyone else has heard this. Sad now.
Damn it i wont have $ for it till prolly after Christmas =/ so now if i go trying to find the rest and this and ones i accidentally damaged each will prolly be 100+ on ebay ;_;
I've only missed a couple of years, you can usually get them online even after the new year if you don't wait too long. This is sad news indeed.
Not to throw water on the fire, but this doesn't surprise me. I've thought for years that the art in the calendars was not up to snuff - technically, it may have been great, but it didn't seem very exciting. On top of that, the landscape format is pretty useless, and almost impossible to hang right. Having watched this forum over the years, and all the, frankly, brilliant stuff that has appeared here, I've always thought there had to be better choices to be made in what art was chosen, and how, for the calendars, and as far as their format, it probably would've been much better to just stick with 12" artwork, so the calendar could hang like any other.
How well does oldTrek merchandise in general move now? I know my purchases and interest have dropped to zero in the last six or seven years.
It's such a shame, because SOTL endorsed several fan designs, bumping their status up from fanon to semi-canon! It introduced many designs to a wider audience, and it is a shame to see that go. I'm sure that there are many here who were hoping that one day they might have the opportunity to depict one of their own designs in this manner.
DST are finally moving ahead with their Enterprise-B and Klingon Bird of Prey toys/models. And new "old" Trek model kits are coming out fairly frequently, albeit as reissues of older kits. The Klingon BOP Haynes manual has also sold fairly well from what I gather. Personally, for me in the UK at least the main issue with SOTL calendars is that no one here sells them. Only once have I found them In store - and that's at the Forbidden Planet (comic book shop) Megastore in London.
That's odd, Dac, because I always noticed a few copies at the Calender stalls that pop up in shopping malls near Christmas up here in Scotland. Agree that the landscape format was a bit of a pain to either hang, or get a particular image framed because of the fold in the middle! Still, it will be sad to see this go.
I asked this year at a "Calendar Club" near me and they just gave me a weird look when I told them the Ships of the Line Calendar they had wasn't the right one. They've released a JJVerse SOTL which is just screencaps from the movie this year instead of the Doug Drexler produced one. At least near me.
I have to agree. What really irked me with these calendars and other artwork tie-ins was that TPTB seemed to think that we all love seeing the Excelsior, Reliant and Klingon Bird of Prey ad nauseum. Those ships are 30 years old! How about a calendar devoted to the little-seen ships of Trek, like the BoBW kitbashes, or how about coming up with some original designs for the conjectural classes from the Encyclopedia? The calendars with Mark Rademaker's new ship, Drexler's Enterprise-J, and Andrew Probert's original Ambassador design were terrific...why not have more of that kind of thing? There's really no such thing as "semi-canon." Either it's canon or it isn't. And although it was cool that some fans got to showcase their designs, it's really no different than some new ship design in a comic book as far as how official it is.
Sadly yep, last one. It was a good run! It might return in another form. Personally I would like to see some sort of app, but only if it has some decent features that would make it interesting for a long time. A "simple" (I put at least 300 hours in each of my own) image wont do it for an App. I proposed some ideas to Doug, lets wait and see. p.s. 2013 had a shifted deadline (2 months forward) making it impossible for me to finish my new ship on time. (Otherwise we would have seen Demeter) To avoid reusing old work, I decided to create a new image with 2 existing models, also something I would normally try to avoid. I still have some calendars at home, 2008 and up. Wondering if I should sign them and put them on Ebay?
I really do not want it to be the last. These are fantastic calendars and I always look foreward to purchasing them each year. This is rotten.
How big a factor in production costs is paying for the art from "the usual suspects". There's just as much good stuff out there done by amatuers that a "contest" like the old "Strange New Worlds" books used to do could get them enough quality art to fill a dozen calenders at far less cost.
Yeah, I've been a proponent of the SNW concept for the calendars for about a decade, now - they probably didn't want to do it because it would admittedly take a lot of man-hours going through the entries, let alone putting the thing together. But it would've been a nice way to bring in new artists, not just new writers.
Reports of the SoTL's death were premature! http://www.thetrekcollective.com/2013/01/ships-of-line-lives.html#links