"freaks And Geeks" & "undeclared"

[Afrobean]

Originally Posted by djgeneral

A poster in here said "it wouldn't sell well"...are you kidding me? The show still has a huge following and the original DVD release sold very well.

#1: TV shows don't do well on Blu-ray. At all. Even modern hits and classics don't do very well compared to how well movies sell on BD. A cult TV show from the 90s that was canceled before one season would not only likely not sell well, but a studio would see it as a foolish investment. If it did happen, there would likely be an artificially high price point set in effort to offset the lower sales they would be expecting.

#2: This show used a LOT of licensed music for broadcast and rights were not secured for home video. This meant that it cost Shout Factory a lot of money to get the music. This meant it cost a lot more to buy this on DVD than many other season sets of other shows.

#3: Fox wasn't even going to put this out on DVD. As I recall, Fox didn't even air all of the episodes. It only happened because Shout Factory saw the fanbase and invested a lot of money to get distribution rights. And this, again led to higher than normal prices to help Shout recoup their investment.

#4: The show was designed for SD. Assuming it was shot on film and camera negatives were properly archived, they'd need to invest a lot of time, effort, and money to rescan all the film and recut every episode in HD. Since the show has no future in syndication, remastering like that would be done almost exclusively for a BD release, meaning the cost of remastering would likely be passed along to the BD buyers.

#5: It's already seen at least two releases on DVD (one of them only being special packaging, I think), and the big fans likely already bought up DVDs. To put it out on BD now would mean encouraging a lot of people who own at least one DVD copy already to buy the show all over again... ostensibly just for better picture quality. And how many people do you think care that much about picture quality on a low budget comedy drama TV show.

It's not going to happen, OK?

PS can you cite numbers on how well the DVD sold? I wouldn't be surprised to hear it turned a profit for Shout Factory, but it always seemed to me that the release was kind of limited. As though they knew they were hitting a niche and that they didn't need to put it in a lot of stores, because fans who wanted it would hunt it out, and established fans would be almost exclusively the only buyers.