Last week, I wrote a little guide about collecting all the available box sets for the Bruce Timm Animated DC Universe, and thought I might do the same for Star Trek. The obvious difference in collecting the Trek universe is that there’s more of it and the box sets are much more expensive. So instead of focusing on the universe consists of, as I did with the DCAU, I’ll give you a hand in finding the cheapest ways to procure the Star Trek box sets and films at the most reasonable prices online– I have found the best prices on Amazon.com. Be sure to check eBay as well– occasionally you’ll find a better deal, but so far, I’ve found Amazon to be much cheaper, especially when you consider shipping. You can get free super-saver shipping on all of these sets, and if you buy from a private user, they’re only about $3.00 apiece to ship. Also, if you don’t mind buying used, be sure to check local Game Stops and Suncoasts for good deals.

Star Trek: The Next Generation was the first series to be released on DVD by season, and they originally cost over $100 a set. While most shows are released between $40 and $60 a season, Star Trek has always been one of the most expensive shows to buy. That’s probably because Paramount knows it’s selling to a very expansive fanbase who will spend more to buy a show they’ve been waiting to have this kind of access to for decades. But now that all five series have been released and a lot of used sets are winding up back on the market, prices are going down. If you haven’t started buying up your favorite series or you’d like to try and own all of it but you couldn’t see spending $100 a set, you’re in luck– right now, it’s not too difficult at all to own every season of Star Trek for less than $50 a box set.

The Next Generation

My advice is to buy an entire series at once, whenever possible. That’s where the best deals seem to be. Last year, a TNG 20th Anniversary box set was released. Not only can you get the whole seven-season run for one price, but it’s a great space-saver because it’s also all in one very pretty box. I own this set and am very pleased with it. It includes evey episode, all the special features from the original season sets, and a disc with several new and interesting featurettes. Originally $455.99, you can pick it up on Amazon.com now for $326.99. Before you accidentally spill your coffee all over your keyboard because that still sounds like a lot of cash, keep in mind that it’s only about $47 a season. Also, watch for deals on all of these sets– very often, a private seller on Amazon will have a brand new set for even less than that. I bought mine for $280. 

The Original Series

Believe it or not, TOS was one of the last series Paramount got around to releasing by season, but it was well worth the wait. These sets have some of the best packaging, the restored picture and sound is very nice, and it includes some of the most intresting special features, including interviews with a lot of producers and crew from the show still living. I managed to find all three seasons packaged together at Suncoast for $150. Right now, Amazon has them for only $107! That’s only $36 a season.

Deep Space Nine

I made the mistake of buying these by season as I found them, so I still have four seasons left to go and I haven’t been able to find them for any less than $50 a season by themselves (I know I said $50 a season isn’t bad, I found the other three used for $35) But you can get the entire series together on Amazon for $237.99. That’s only $34 a season! Now you see why I wished I had waited…

Let me warn you that with DS9, while the special features are as fantastic as on every Trek set and they’re well worth your money, the packaging starts to fall apart after a while. There are a lot of flimsy plastic pieces that pop off. It’s unfortunate, because the presentations of the discs themselves is some of the best– this was the first se to have a book-like case, which flips one disc after another rather than a whole fold-out case where you have to spread the entire thing out to get one disc, as was the case with the first TNG release (the new set as mentioned here is book-like). Again though, still very much worth the money if you love the series.

 Voyager

Voyager is still one of the most expensive to buy new when you find it in stores (next to Enterprise). On Amazon, the entire seven-season runs costs about the same as the TNG set– $334.95. That’s about $48 a season. This is the only series I haven’t picked up yet, so I haven’t found any better deals than that.

Enterprise

This is the one show that remains around the $100 mark a season if you find it new in stores, probably because it’s the most recently produced and released. I just ordered this one and haven’t received it yet, but as I understand it, it’s the only series with outtakes and commentaries. I think it also has the neatest-looking packaging. I bought mine for about $180 on Amazon, but full price right now is $249.98– about $62 a season. At this very moment, however (if you’re reading this weeks after I’ve posted it, this may not still be the case) some private users have it for much cheaper, as low as $178.99.

Movies

There are two releases of each of the films– a single disc, and a double-disc special edition. I highly recommend these later releases because they have a lot of fascinating behind-the-scenes features. Amazon has the entire box-set of the 10 films for $72.99, which is about what I paid for them a year ago. That’s only about $7 a movie, which is very inexpensive.

The Animated Series

It’s not considered part of the Star Trek canon, so you can have a “complete” collection without owning TAS. However, a lot of people have discovered the short-lived 22 episode series through this new box set and were pleasently surprised by it. It was produced in 1973 and includes the voice-talent of the entire original series crew (except for Walter Koenig). This show is on Amazon now for only $36.49.

Star Trek Remastered

The remastered seasons of TOS are also being released in Blue-Ray/DVD box sets by season. You can’t buy them all together yet  but the third season will be released Nov. 18. If you don’t know about these, the remastered episodes are being done by Michael Okuda (Trek visual effects wizard from TNG through Enterprise) who has used CGI to seemlessly improve the visual effects of TOS without distracting from the original work. Things in space (ships, planets, etc) have been completely reimagined, some backgrounds have been added to, but the soundtrack remains the same and very little has been done to anything in the foreground (the aliens all look exactly the same, though the Gorn blinks now). Season 1 is going for $79.99, season 2 for $59.99, and season 3 will be $66.99.

If you go with Amazon’s current prices and buy directly from them instead of a private user, here’s what you would spend total (assuming you don’t already own any of these):

All Five Canon Series: $1256.91

All Five Series w/Remastered instead of TOS: $1356.88

All Five Series + Movies: $1329.90

All Five Series (w/Remasteed instead of TOS) + Movies: $1429.87 

EVERYTHING: $1573.36

Chances are, you don’t have $1600 lying around to blow on Star Trek. But if you buy you favorite series first and work you way backwards slowly, these things are bound to keep going down in price. If you had bought each of these by season when they first came out, i would cost you several thousand dollars to own the entire canon.

And just think about how many hours of entertainment you’re getting. Just counting the regular canon, there are 703 episodes. If you watched one episode every day, it would take you two years to watch everything. And if you did nothing but watch Star Trek without sleeping, it would take you just under three weeks.

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan

If you’ve read my Three Timeline Theory, you know I spend a lot of time watching and pondering Star Trek. Probably too much. Not only do I run a weekly club, write a lot of trivia, and pride myself on knowing canon well enough to come up with crazy ways to make contiuity mistakes work, but I also know a thing or two about production itself, and I even have a little theory about that.

 Besides the fact that they’re all set in the 24th century, have overlapping timelines, share some of the same characters and a whole lot of writing staff and production crew, the other major thing Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager all have in common is that they ran for seven seasons. Both the original series and Enterprise were cut short. There are a number of reasons for this but there’s one very interesting one that isn’t talked about too often. All three of those shows came dangerously close to cancellation due to being in ratings hell. And they were all saved by a bold step by the producers.

TNG became the ratings powerhouse it was the rest of its run because of the popularity it gained during the summer after The Best of Both Worlds Part 1. The hype surrounding the cliffhanger about Picard becoming a Borg, no one knowing whether he would live, die, or whether Patrick Stewart would return created a lot of new viewers– the ratings for the reruns that summer were higher than they had ever been for a new episode, and it transformed into a phenomenon. DS9 wasn’t doing so hot either until Worf was added to the cast. Same thing with Voyager, until Seven of Nine came along.

Every Trekky knows the famous ways in which these shows were saved, but I wonder how many have realized the bizarre coincidence they share. Every one of these events occured during season cliffhangers between the third and fourth seasons! All three of these shows almost didn’t make it past their fourth year, and if these stories and new characters hadn’t been added, they may have been cancelled during that season or wrapped by the end of it.

What makes this especially intriguing to me is what happened to Enterprise. In 2005, the fifth Trek installment was cut short with only four seasons. And four seems to be the magic number. It almost wasn’t even renewed for a fourth, put in that same dangerous situation of the shows before it. It was pushed from its Wednesday night slot at 8:00 back to TV’s pit of prime time despair, Fridays at 9:00. But I’m not sure it’s just that time slot that killed it. There’s every possibility that it would have met the same fate even if it had stayed on Wednesdays, considering that even the bold 26-episode Xindi arc of season 3 hadn’t managed to boost ratings very much. And somewhat like The Best of Both Worlds, it had a surprising cliffhanger, in which Archer seems to be dead, only to be discovered in an alternate history where aliens are helping the Nazis to win WWII.

But these days, somewhat thanks to The Best of Both Worlds, epic cliffhangers are common place and not enough to jolt any series back to life. So the question is, would a Worf or a Seven of Nine saved Enterprise? It’s hard to imagine what character could have been added that would change the show’s fate, considering the problem many Trekkies loyal to the Berman/Braga shows had with it in the first place was its premise. There’s no way to do a prequel to Star Trek without ruining the continuity that came before it, and that’s exactly what Enterprise did. Though it was a highly entertaining show and had a lot of episode worthy of the Star Trek legacy, its continuity issues were too numerous for a lot of Trekkies to ignore. So the only way Enterprise could have survived would be to bring in a very large fanbase of people who didn’t have to be Trekkies to be Enterprise fans, and apparently it didn’t do a good enough job of that.

Season 4 did have a brave new direction, led by its new showrunner Manny Coto, who was on the writing staff during season 3 and wrote many of its best episodes. But unlike the previous season, Enterprise stopped trying to create its own mythos and started concentrating again on the classic mythos of the Trek universe. Coto’s mission seemed to be cleaning up the mess made by the first two seasons and making the show fit better with the rest of canon, especially where it concerned Klingons and Vulcans. And it was a great idea… if there were very many Trekkies still watching the show. Because what it couldn’t do is keep bringing in that new fanbase– now it was actually trying to be Star Trek, while its earlier seaons had tried to somewhat distance themselves from the rest of canon.

Perhaps it was too late to get that old Trek fanbase to join by the fourth season. The ones who didn’t like it in the first place had three years to become very annoyed that there wasn’t another Trek show on the air that went forward instead of backwards. I doubt if they would trust any show set in the 22nd century and with a ship named Enterprise, no matter the story direction.

But the most interesting part of all of this is that, if the show had made it to a fifth season, another regular cast member was planned to be added: Shran, the Andorian. Shran was played by Jeffrey Combs, who has had a long history with Star Trek and has played numerous characters, especially in DS9. His Shran character was very popular with fans, and appeared in about half a dozen episodes. The idea that he might have become part of the regular cast, serving about Archer’s ship, reminds me a lot of what happened on DS9 and Voyager.

And it makes one wonder, if the staff had this revelation at the end of season 3, if Shran had become a regular in the fourth season, just like Worf and Seven of Nine… would it have been enough to save the show? I really don’t know. Shran was popular with fans already familiar with the show, but Worf and the Borg brought in fans from outside of DS9 and Voyager. I don’t know if Jeffrey Combs himself would have been enough to do that. But maybe, just because it was that fated fourth season that saved the other post-TOS shows, it might have helped.

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan