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The Future of Star Trek on DVD

The recent Paramount announcement that they are to discontinue of the VHS releases of Enterprise due to low sales should come as a surprise to few. We suspect the ending of Enterprise on tape is not purely because of the fall in sales of the format, but it is due to the global weariness of Star Trek in general.

Word is that last year, Star Trek sales made up somewhere between 20-25% of the entire income for Paramount's UK division - and of that, around 75% was comprised of Next Generation DVD sales, meaning that DVD reissues of Star Trek is outselling new product roughly 3:1.

These might sound like healthy figures, but there is still something problematic with the Star Trek franchise as a continuing entity. It's a safe bet the most people who purchased the Next Generation on DVD are die-hard fans wanting to replace their worn-out VHS copies, whilst at the same time not bothering to tune into the more recent incarnations that are cheapening its good name.

The cinematic failure of Nemesis (other than the fact that it wasn't very good) can also be contributed to the fact that new Star Trek stories could be seen on TV every week - when Star Trek V flopped at the box office, producer Harve Bennett remarked that “when you have turkey sandwiches every day, Thanksgiving doesn't seem like such a big deal”.

It came as a genuine jolt to Paramount executives when Nemesis turned out to be the lowest grossing movie in the franchise - but not to most jaded Star Trek fans - but apart from being both deadly dull & relentlessly noisy, Nemesis showed that the Next Generation cast could reach (and top) the kind of smugness that people accused the Original Series movies of having in their later cinematic outings. To save face when declaring that their cash-cow had dried up, Paramount concluded that the Star Trek fan base had shrunk - this brings to mind the words of Ian Faith, Spinal Tap's manager, when he said that the groups' appeal had become “more selective.”

Rick Berman and his associates have been strip-mining the franchise for years - there has been some form of Star Trek in production for the last 17 years. The inevitable cave-in is just about to happen - Nemesis bombed spectacularly, Enterprise's ratings are in decline (they are just about to bring in the Borg for season 3, in an effort to boost viewers) and even Berman has realised that maybe the format needed a rest before embarking upon the fifth voyage of the biggest TV franchise of all time. It says a lot about the state of Star Trek when, in an effort to keep it fresh, the new show is set in the past and yet STILL manages to play exactly like any other neo-Trek show. Different uniforms, slightly different forehead prosthetics, but it's still the same brand of Star Trek that has been churned out continuously for over a decade-and-a-half. In keeping with the neo-Star Trek thread, it is safe to say that the Denobulan-Latinum Goose has been well and truly asphyxiated.

How could the nail in Star Trek's coffin, Nemesis, be driven in any harder? Simple. It is going to be released to buy in the UK in August, after having a rental window of a month. It is customary that a region that theatrically received a movie after the US will have it's DVD release staggered accordingly, but with Nemesis, the UK only got the movie about 3 weeks after it's Stateside debut and people have already started to receive their copies in the US! As technology makes the world a smaller place to live, it very is depressing that regional coding, the bastard offspring of said technological age, is still being used by studios to bottleneck the global release of DVDs. It is decisions like these that make frustrated movie fans import R1 DVDs from online companies, ultimately hurting the UK sales when the movie is finally released.

Paramount may have grand plans for Voyager and Enterprise, but it seems that they have no time to brush up the Original Series for a worldwide release. They are available on DVD in America, but not in a set and with only two episodes on a disc, and with usually only a TV spot for each episode, this does not make for the definitive DVD edition of a classic series. To buy all of the episodes on DVD would have ended up costing about S15 a pop, making a grand total of nearly S600 to buy all of them! You suddenly realise that what Paramount is offering with the latter series of Star Trek is a bargain!

It looks like Paramount will release Deep Space Nine this year, Voyager next year, release Enterprise every now & again (assuming it makes it to seven seasons) and they may wait until the 40th anniversary to re-release the Original Series in a box set (Could somebody tell the-Powers-That-Be that technically, 2004 is the 40th Anniversary!) It may be tempting fate to say it, but the Original Series cast is not getting any younger - Deforest Kelly has sadly passed away and James Doohan has recently recovered from a near-fatal illness - so if Paramount is thinking about persuading them to be involved the supplementary materials for a future DVD release, they had better hurry up (although, as only William Shatner & Leonard Nimoy have been used for the special edition DVD releases of the movies, it makes you wonder if the other cast members are going to be used).

On a positive note, it is good to see that Paramount are putting a little more effort into the extras on Deep Space Nine than they did with The Next Generation. The extras on each season of the latter were so uniform that they were almost interchangeable. It must be frustrating for hard-core Star Trek fans when it comes to the lack of extras, many self-respecting fans have bootlegged material that was not included on the DVD bonus discs, including blooper reels and vintage TV spots.

Paramount steadily improved the visual presentation with each successive volume of The Next Generation, when season 1 was released, the menus were pretty basic, but by the time the final season came out, the menus really were something special, adding greatly to the flavour of the show. The packaging has been a mixture of good & bad - the R2 release having the durable plastic cases that protect the fragile cardboard innards (which incidentally resemble the credit-card holder of a Paramount exec), but is still innovative and will probably outlast the “interesting” R1 packaging.

Even if the future of Star Trek as a continuing franchise is now in doubt, but if the overall quality of the DVD continues to improve at the same rate, then few fans will complain about having to fork out for them - it's just a pity that the long-time fans of the Original Series seem to have no place in the DVD world outside of the US…