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Firefly Coming to DVD
Kaypro writes "According to the scoop over at Ain't it Cool, it seems that Fox has decided that there's not enough viewers to keep the Firefly series on the air, but somehow there's enough fans to make money off DVD sales. Go figure. Included in the set will be the entire season plus unaired episodes and the original pilot in full 16:9 format. Extras I assume are included as well. No release date has been set as of yet." The missing episodes will be nice. In order will be nice. Such a good show. The last couple of episodes were just awesome.
Excerpt from AICN:
"Further to the piece about Firefly coming to DVD at some point, the UK Sci-Fi channel have now added the series to their listing for May. According the listings here they have it on Sundays at 7pm starting with the first part of Serenity on May 18th. In their forums they have also confirmed they'll be showing the unaired episodes!! YEAH!!!"
Also I have a blooper quicktime clip of FireFly which is pretty funny, but more often scary. Weighing in at 57.9MB, I was wondering if anyone would be willing to host it on a BitTorrent link for our fellow Slashdotians. Reply below.
Eddy.WriteLinux.Com
Ok, Fox...
Where's MILLENNIUM!?
It's apparently cost effective to release them for series that weren't on the air long and which will therefore be difficult to find even in syndication (which has traditionally at least demanded that shows be on the air for three years or so to sell). The other short-lived Fox show I'd like to see come out on DVD is Action.
Fox didn't handle Firefly particularly well but I'm sort of doubtful that was the reason for its demise at the end of the day. I sort of enjoyed it and found the characters generally appealing, but the whole literal Western in space thing took a REALLY massive suspension of disbelief. The whole economic system the show portrayed just didn't make sense (e.g. paying for an interstellar trip by hauling some cattle around). Etc. And it was reputedly a very expensive show to make.
There are a ton of sites to answer not only this question, but the same question for MANY other shows as well. I won't remind you that a google search for firefly space western may turn up some infromative pages, but will point you to TV Tome.
"...it seems that Fox has decided that there's not enough viewers to keep the Firefly series on the air, but somehow there's enough fans to make money off DVD sales. Go figure."
I'm going to be uncharacteristically non-cynical for a moment, and suggest an alternate theory. Perhaps Fox will see how many DVD sets are sold, and if sales are surprisingly high, continue the series.
TV production houses now undoubtedly see DVD sales as a huge revenue earner, most likely beginning to rival their traditional advertising and subscription income. Now, even if the series doesn't cover costs while being broadcast, the money from DVD sales could potentially more than make up for that. In that scenario, a series like FireFly would have a huge chance at success - but it would all depend on how much the fanbase truly does value the show.
The future of TV could become little more than DVD advertising, with the episodes shown on the air little more than fodder to lure people in. DVD sets then become the real product, and are sold riddled with bonuses, extra scenes, and eventually, as in this case, extra episodes.
So, maybe Fox will think there's enough viewers - if you cough up for the DVDs.
(Then again, what do I know? I've never watched FireFly, I have no experience with American cable TV at all! Armchair analysis is fun!)
Honestly, the sets are why I liked the show. Star Trek looks like a cruise liner, not a military ship. FireFly is the first sci-fi where the inside of the ship actually looks like the inside of a real ship - functional, cheap, and not as many windows as people would like. And the freaking sofas and normal terrestrial furniture/decorations reinforce that.
I loved how FireFly's ship just seemed so real. A ship I could finally believe.
The reason why the FX stood out was simple: Firefly was shot entirely with handheld cameras... INCLUDING shots with CG composited into them. That's incredibly difficult to do in a way that it looks right, but when the artists pull it off, it's outstanding.
Expect to see the same technique used in Sci Fi's "Battlestar Galactica" mini this winter.
is that they don't really even seem interested in Sci-Fi. John Edwards, Scare Tactics and the bounty of 'B' quality horror movies make up the majority of their lineup. They only seem to put up 2 hours of quality sci-Fi per week. Babylon 5, Stargate SG1, Farscape, Outer Limits... In the past 5 years they have had very few good Sci-Fi shows considering that they are called the Sci-Fi Channel.
I think if they had any real sense, they would negotiate hard for syndication rights for good, recent Sci-Fi shows that started on broadcast TV, or recent quality movies. How come TNN can get Star Trek:tNG, and the best that the 'Sci-Fi' channel can do is the ancient original with Kirk? They never seem to get a movie less than 10 years old that grossed more than 10 million in the theaters. In fact, alot of the movies they show had to bypass the theaters because they're so bad.
Sci-Fi's problem is that they think only single, dateless dorks would like Sci-Fi. They usually only have 2-3 hours of programming each week to promote their good shows in (on good weeks, no less). This is their 7-10 slot on Friday, the no-date loser slot where regular networks put their crappy shows. Sci-Fi thinks this is the best time to run their top-notch programming. There really isn't any reason to tune in any other time, so you only find out about their new shows if you are already very into one of their current shows.
re TV->DVD market -- part 3, profit!!, is questionable
First, when Millennium was ended, DVDs were not really all the rage, esp. full TV series releases. The cost to go to DVD was probably far higher than it is now. The transition to go to DVD was not on people's minds immediately (see third).
Second, Fox probably was trying to sell the series to some sort of syndication like market, for reruns, which is the traditional faire. They tend to make more money this way.
Third, if they killed the series so badly as you think, you honestly believe there was someone with a clue who cared about the series at Fox? Hardly.
Fourth, the contracts they may have signed may have been dependent on a certain amount of time before going to VHS or DVD. Or a number of years to try to sell before going to syndication. Time passed, now coming out with a DVD looks less bright, and in retrospect not coming out with the video sooner was a mistake. Maybe they had something else in the pipe, like a holding agreement on the video release of the series.
Fifth, they could have looked at the economics and seen that while assured sales figures were high (the fringe fan market if you will), the other potential buyers were iffy enough not to warrant the risk (lame excuse in my book).
Personally, I agree with you--stuff should go to DVD sooner. Millennium would probably have been a success; even now, still. Babylon5 come out after years on DVD (was on VHS) and seems to be doing reasonably, despite the time to DVD was a while and there is a dichotomy in whether people liked that show. Then again, I'm one of those people that think Season 5 of Farscape could have been a sequential release DVD and been able to recoup the costs of shooting season 5 plus some small profit (although interest lost from the time to sales might not have made it viable)--iow, release a DVD with 2-3 shows, wait until sales reach figures that recoup the shooting costs for those episodes (so people buy, knowing they support the show, and limit pirating) + 3/22 of that amount (since the last DVD released doesn't have this guarantee), release the next in line, etc., until all 22 episodes were released.
When I first started watching this show, I didn't like it at all (I liked John Doe). But after a few episodes, I was hooked. I adored Firefly, and it really sucked when it was canceled.
Maybe Fox will release Andy Richter Controls the Universe on DVD, so we can finally see all of the unaired episodes. There were 3 or 4 episodes from last year that never aired, as well as 6 or so from this year that were judged too smart and funny for public consumption.
I think if you read the full posting you'll see that they were actually destroyed. The wording was, "They did not fold and hold them..." They could certainly be rebuilt, though. And the latest glimmer of hope came just last week.