Message-ID: <1031@decwrl.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 10-Mar-85 06:04:14 EST
Article-I.D.: decwrl.1031
Posted: Sun Mar 10 06:04:14 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 12-Mar-85 10:31:16 EST
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 >  From:	dec-vlnvax!schneider	(Daniel Schneider)

 >  ... Last night on Channel 38 in Boston, there was a commercial offering
 >  STIII:TSFS and the first 10 episodes of the series, complete and uneditted.
 >  The movie was $29.95 and the shows were a rip-off - $14.95 each!  I know
 >  that I'll start taping my favorites for myself at approximately $1 per
 >  episode (1 tape for 6 episodes approx....  By the way the store
 >  that I rent tapes from has a limited selection of episodes to rent, all
 >  commercially produced, and they've had them for at least a few months.

I would have no qualm with your comment about the price of the ST episodes
if you had said, "I can't afford to pay $14.95 per, so I'm going to tape
them off the air." But to say that the $14.95 price tag is a "rip-off"
indicates that you aren't living in the real world. Consider:

(1) Each episode is 50 minutes long, so two episodes would be 100 minutes,
with a cost of $29.90. THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK is a 100 minute movie with a
price tag of $29.95. Same price per unit time. Why is the per episode price
a rip-off, but not the movie price? And the price for TSFS is considered a
bargain basement price! The list price for each of the first two films is
$39.95 (recently, along with other selected films, put on sale by Paramount
for $24.95 each). And *that* is cheap in comparison with Warner, CBS/Fox,
MGM/UA, et al., which price most of their features in the $60-80 range.
Paramount is the only major studio that is pricing their movies even close
to reason.

(2) Compare the $14.95 per 50-minute episode price of STAR TREK with the
$39.95 per 50-minute episode price of THE PRISONER. Which is the rip-off now?

(3) By taping off the air, you may be able to get 7 (without commercials)
episodes on a T-120 at SLP, but:
	(a) The reproduction of the off-air episodes at SLP will be
	noticeably inferior to the commercial product recorded at SP.
	(b) Cutting out the commercials as you tape leaves noticeable
	glitches at the stops and starts, and you will end up losing
	some "real" material trying to do it on a VHS, because a VHS
	machine removes the tape from the heads when the machine is
	stopped after pausing.
	(c) The above two points may not bother you, but how about
	your being at the mercy of the stations, who cut the episodes
	to ribbons? With some of the episodes, the stations even cut
	material that help to make sense out of the resolution. The
	big selling point of the commercial cassettes is that they are
	*complete and uncut*.

As for those already available TREK tapes: yes, they have been around
for years, except that there were only eleven episodes available (five
tapes with two episodes per, one being both parts of "The Menagerie"
plus "Space Seed" all by its lonesome, issued when THE WRATH OF KHAN was
released theatrically). And the price, I believe, was in the $60 range
per cassette ("Space Seed" was probably around $40). Compare *that* to
the $14.95 price of the current tapes! Sure, they're available for rent
in many places, but I'm sure that most of the bigger stores will carry
the current releases for rent as well.

--- jayembee (Jerry Boyajian, DEC, Maynard, MA)

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