Season SIX OFFICIAL TNG Blu-Ray Discussion Thread

Especially when you consider what pricing was 13 years ago when the DVDs were first made for sale. $100-110 each. We're getting like 10x the product at less than half price.

 

If Paramount was still handling the shows, I'm sure we'd be stuck with their hefty prices. I didn't buy the DVDs for a long time until the prices finally went way down the 40s-30s.

 

I'm slowly dipping my toes in Season 6. Over the weekend, I watched Realm of Fear. Crusher's uniform looked decidedly more blue than teal. I didn't compare it to previous seasons, nor do I have the Season 6 DVDs any longer for direct comparison.

Did they change her uniform color in Season 6, or is the color timing of the blu-rays off?

 

I didn't notice any color timing issues. The color difference could probably be attributed to either an actual change in the color of the uniform (which happened a few times throughout the series) or a new costume (not faded).

 

I think they did change the uniform a bit, because it does look a lot more blue in seasons 6 and 7, compared to the more teal looking one in 4 and 5.

 

Thank you both, and I agree that it was probably different colored material. The rest of the image looks fine. If the color timing were off, I'd expect other things to look wrong, too.

I've now watched Man of the People, and it strikes me more than on previous viewings how the plots started to get very bizarre in Season 6. It's been noted by others as well; it just really stands out to me on this round of viewing.

I'm not even sure I understood the expository dialogue, but this is how I think they went:

Time's Arrrow Part 2 - Some aliens who feed on other life forms take a glowing snake (who likes to rest as a walking stick while not eating) back to 19th Century Earth. The snake sucks the life out of derelicts (the aliens are hoping they won't affect the future by killing losers), and they take the snake back to their cave, where it gives up the life force so the aliens can ingest it through their foreheads.

Realm of Fear - the ship was too close to some kind of plasma, and the crewmembers had themselves beamed into it to avoid a disaster, where they resided as huge grub worms until the Enterprise crew hugged them and brought them back.

Man of the People - the boring handsome guy has a lot of evil thoughts, but he manages to download them into conveniently smitten beautiful women, who quickly age and die due to the accumulation of these bad thoughts. Once Crusher cuts off Troi from the download, the bad thoughts back up in his brain and kill him.

Did I get them right?

 

I give Man of the People a pass. They were planning to do Relics, but James Doohan became unavailable so it had to be pushed back, and they rushed to get Man of the People done in its place. The writing staff noted they had to "gangbang" the script to get it done in time. I wonder how it would have gone down if they were able to polish the script.

 

This attitude smacks of ignorance... you really do have no idea just how much cost, work and effort goes into remastering this material. The operation at CBS Digital is HUGE, requiring a large round-the-clock workforce working constantly on the most minor details to ensure the product passes muster with the studio and the fans. This slavish attention to detail comes at a price, and $60 a season is a BARGAIN for what you're getting.

 

Honestly, I would have been OK had these been $100 per season based on the work done. (Maybe not season 2 ) I felt like it was cheating to be getting the season sets plus the standalone release for $65-$70. Times sure have changed from the DVD gauging from 2001.

Reconstructing this show frame by frame was no easy (or cheap) task.

 

Surely it's less work than a new series would take to make from scratch, since it's effectively just the post-production costs, yet it costs more to actually buy than other series on Blu-ray.

Maybe they'd sell more than twice as many copies if it was half the price.

 

Unfortunately that's not how it works. $60 is a fair price. Just based on these forums, it's really the vocal minority complaining about the price, so I doubt reducing the price would increase the sales all that much.

 

But it may be discouraging purchases by casual fans who see that they can get two box sets of most other shows for the price of one TNG box set.

 

I know several people who are waiting for all seven seasons to be released until buying. It's not all about price.

 

On a per episode basis, the release week pricing is actually right around the same cost as pretty much everything else out there you can buy, cheaper even, compared to some that have only ten or 13 episode seasons.

 

The sets aren't selling very well - that suggests it's more than just a minority who find the price objectionable.

And bear in mind, this is a Star Trek forum full of obsessive fans. If some of us think the prices are too high, what would the average Joe on the street think?

With services like Netflix becoming the standard way for people to enjoy cult shows like this, the Blu-ray pricing is not very palateable for the mass-market.

 

Aren't selling well compared to what? As you alluded to, physical medium is a dying format, so I wouldn't expect to see a massive sales.

As such, you're also not going to attract an "average Joe" to purchase the blurays, whether they're $30 or $60 or $90. An "average Joe" might casually view the show on Netflix or Amazon Prime, since it's included in their subscription, but they're not going to invest even $30 for a show they may or may not like.

For what it's worth, most of the season sets have been on the top of the charts when they've been released.

 

Earlier seasons? Expectations? The necessary amount to greenlight DS9? Take your pick.

Do you think they're selling well?

 

Read the rest of my post.

 

I always read posts fully before replying. I assume you're referring to your last sentence, but I would say that appearing in the charts doesn't mean much. However, I will also therefore assume that you think it does.

 

Lowering the prices isn't going to change anything. It's becoming much more common and convenient for people to stream their shows. Heck, the "average Joe" probably doesn't really care about the remastering. If TNG is already on Netflix Instant, why should he bother grabbing the blu-ray set? Heck, the individual two-parter releases were also done for the casual fans who probably didn't want to get a whole season but wouldn't mind getting the popular two-parters. All this sentiment about the sets being "too expensive" sounds pretty absurd to me. Having the sets priced as they are (they're currently in the $30-$60 range on Amazon) is EXTREMELY generous for the kind of work that's being put on remastering TNG, especially when you look back to when even TOS was remastered with the first season having a price listing of $194.99 for HD-DVD. It's not like contemporaryblu-ray releases like THE BLACKLIST where its episodes have already aired and have been on sale digitally since that airing.