Fans Attempting to Pay for Enterprise

An anonymous reader writes "What started of as a suggestion to pay for season 5 of Enterprise has actully snowballed into a project that no one has ever attempted before, that of getting fans to pay for the production costs of a tv series. It has brought on board a raft of people including lawyers. I wonder if the quoted $50 to $80 million is reachable." I gotta say that Enterprise has been better this season, but I feel like it's still only mediocre. Battlestar Galactica might be the best SciFi airing right now. And I woulda chipped in for more Firefly in a heartbeat.

Comments

I look at it this way...

[Faust7]

Star Trek has been kept running on the popularity of the mythos, of the franchise. It has always been self-sustaining, through its own quality. If a Star Trek show is in such a bad state that it needs to rely on fan charity to survive... it isn't worth keeping.

Re:Proposal doesn't go far enough

[Gherald]

The commercial-free distribution costs would be insane. It would be cheaper to mail a set of DVDs to each fan.

They expect to raise 50-80 Million?

[solowCX]

After 9/11 when Amazon starting taking donations they only made $6.8 million dollars, and that was a big thing where over 170,000 people donated. They expect Trekkies to pay more just for a show?

Re:Misapproriated Funds

[Anonymous Coward]

No one (except maybe your wife/gf, but this is slashdot) tells you what you can and can't do with your money.

You've got to be kidding. Everyone tells me what I should do with my money. The governement is the worst. They have guns and prisons for me if I don't spend my money in ways they accept.

Why would they ever go for it?

[pclminion]

The production cost of the show is hardly the deciding factor for the TV producers. Even if the production was entirely paid for by fans, the fact remains that the viewership is small and ad revenues will be low. They would rather schedule a show in that timeslot which would produce usable ad revenue.

In other words, in order to get them to go for this, you'd have to cover the lost advertisement revenue AS WELL AS the production costs. That's probably going to be over $150 million at least.

Re:Not really a true argument

[ZorinLynx]

So it's selfish when I pay $2400 for a Powerbook G4? Or when I spend $900 on a nice flat panel monitor?

If I can't spend any of my money on myself, and on things that I like, WHAT'S THE POINT?

Every good person has their own way of giving back to society and the planet. I volunteer at an animal sanctuary; others donate lots of money to charity, and so on.

But I still feel we should have the right to spend money on ourselves without being called "selfish". Sheesh.

-Z

Re:yeah, i believe it

[Buran]

It seems you are forgetting that fiction has an important role in society. It looks like you think that anything fictitious is not worth any effort whatsoever.

But in fact, science fiction and other forms of speculation DO have an important role to play. If you watch PBS a lot (as do I) you know that they will frequently run documentaries on subjects such as the Apollo lunar program. While the documentaries will focus on the 'how it was done' aspect and interview scientists and researchers and other individuals who worked on those projects, they will also sometimes mention the inspiration for them. And it's important to pay attention to those things.

Take the case of Jules Verne, for instance. Verne was a prodigious science fiction writer who imagined Project Apollo to an amazing degree of accuracy -- his ship looked roughly like Apollo's command and service modules, was roughly the same size, carried a three-person crew, was named Columbia, and was launched from the coast of Florida. This is almost exactly how the Apollo program operated by the time the first actual manned lunar mission was launched in 1968 (Apollo 8; no landing actually occurred until 1969.)

Now, while it is true that many people did not believe such a thing was possible (Robert Goddard was laughed at for believing that a rocket would function in a vacuum, for instance) and Verne's stories were dismissed as fantasy (nuclear-powered submarines!? Are you crazy!?) they came true, in time.

Going back to Project Apollo, you may or may not remember that the first few crews to visit the Moon were quarantined upon their return to make sure that there were no dangerous organisms on them or their clothing or in their spacecraft. The fear of a possible contamination of Earth was raised, in part, by Michael Crichton's novel The Andromeda Strain, as well as by points raised by the scientific community. As a result, quarantines continued until we had enough experience with returning Apollo crews to believe that they were no longer necessary. (Apollo 12's recovery of Surveyor hardware, and the subsequent discovery of terrestrial bacteria surviving on some of that equipment, proved that organisms could survive for long periods of time in space.)

We have also been influenced by other major works of science fiction (War of the Worlds' radio broadcast, for instance, has long been held as an example of how we might react to the idea of hostile alien life, and ET is an example of how we could react to more friendly aliens.)

For something to happen, it has to be imagined first. Sometimes, that takes the form of science fiction stories. Not worth it? Far from it. We'll be forever stuck in the present and never stop to imagine what might come in the future without the ideas that come from those who dare to say "Hey, what if this was possible?"