"China Beach" Complete-Series DVD in Early 2013 ("Almost All" Music Intact)

Interesting. Compare that to the c. $300,000 to $400,o00 they are spending on every episode of Star Trek The Next Generation to assemble and edit together *for the first time* an OCN version, plus re-composit and redo the fx, etc. And yet they are doing it and making a profit. Shows how much bigger the sci fi audience is than almost any other genre, and particular the nutty Trek audience, of which I myself am a member...

It's great they are releasing China Beach on DVD, a show I watched sometimes and liked when it was on. But with a few exceptions these days I tend to buy blu-rays. Not sure about spending so much money on something with so-so PQ.

 

Thanks for that link! I think I can live with those alterations. The show is too good to ignore, especially with those minimal changes. This isn't a WKRP situation!

My only issues are the price for the DVD set, and the fact that it didn't get a Blu-ray treatment (which I would have gladly paid the higher price for).

 

I really love this show. I think it's one of the greatest ever made. I always wonder why it only have 4 Season. This show deserved to stay longer. China Beach is the only TV series I've watched were all the casts are emotionally attached into their roles. most especially Dana Delaney - she's one great talented actress! Her roles is hard to portray and even in real life if it happened to anyone, like you can't save a patient is so much pain. Michael Boatman is a good actor, too! I just wanna give a round of applause to the writers of this show because until now, the script is tattooed in my mind. I used to remember to record this show on VHS tape and so glad that it's finally released on DVD. I got mine at yourdvdcorner.com. Well, I'm not endorsing this company but my DVD set is good, the quality is excellent with the complete episodes. I'm just so proud of this DVD set because China Beach will be forever be on my top list of great TV shows of all-time. Hoping someday, they'll do a reunion like Season 5 for the fans? What do you guys think? Daydreaming isn't bad, eh!

 

The first two seasons are now available as standalone DVD sets. S2 was released this week--I've seen it at both Target and Walmart for $25. Not bad for 17 episodes. Apparently, S3 and S4 will be out later this year.

 

One reason is that its ratings were not very good when it was originally on the air. I think ABC kept it on because they had a good deal with Warner Bros., and also because the show kept winning quite a few Emmies, so it was seen as a "prestige" show. But not a profitable one. I also don't think it did well in syndication.

 

Yes. I know "people" who worked on the DVDs, and they confirmed that the D2 master videotapes used had the 1980s/1990s Compact Video labels on it. Same masters. I'm glad they still played! 20-year-old videotapes are dicey at best.

 

FYI, the S3 DVD was released yesterday.

 

In its first season (when there were only about six or eight episodes) it premiered in the spring against competition of THE EQUALIZER and ST. ELSEWHERE in it's normal slot of Wednesdays at 10 PM Eastern.

Season Two pitted it against WISEGUY and TATTINGERS.

Season Three had it competing with WISEGUY and QUANTUM LEAP.

The fourth season saw ABC bury CHINA BEACH on Saturday nights when it was scheduled, and several episodes, including the finale, didn't air until the following summer rerun season.

Harry

 

That's not bad really and at least they tried to license the same same by a different artist rather than going for a generic bit of music.

 

Too bad WKRP was not given similar treatment...now that was a real hatchet job.

 

I have the first two seasons. And three on order. The price differential from the whole set ($280) vs buying them separately.. Season one ($16) Season two ($20) Season three ($20) is huge. Unless they charge $250 alone for four, it is a way better deal to buy them separate.
There is almost no other series I wanted as much, but never available for many years, as China Beach.

 

So how's the PQ on the DVD sets? I'd like to order them, but want to make sure it looks good first.

 

http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/61151/china-beach-the-complete-series/?___rd=1

 

By current-day standards, the picture quality isn't great. But it's good enough, and this is a show where the content is more important anyway.

 

I haven't seen any of the new DVDs, but the series was from the era when TV shows were composited on videotape, so unless they went back to the original film elements and re-did them (not happening with this series), they'll ever look anything close to HD. They'll always have that soft, mushy look about them, unfortunately. This is a series I'd like to own, but the total series price was outrageous. These season sets are much more reasonable, and I may go that route when they're all out. Meanwhile, I have about half the series preserved on DVD-R from original broadcasts that I'd taped.

Harry

 

The 4th season came out about 3 weeks ago. Looks like the whole series can be had for about $80 as individual season sets. I'll bide my time a little longer and see if I can't get all 3 sets in the neighborhood of $65.

Anyone watched the whole series on DVD yet? Is it as good as you remember (provided you enjoyed it, originally)?

 

I've never seen more than a few minutes here, and there since it's inception, but I do love Dana Delaney, and understand there's a great use of music...I may need to look into these.

 

I loved the series when it aired, but I'm fearful of the dreaded early '90s video-realm processing. I have purchased DVDs of the second iteration of MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE from the late '80s that look really awful on today's TVs. That one, too, was processed in the video realm, so it's got that smeary-colored images look about it.

I know that they've done a marvelous job of fixing STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION, but few shows have the amazingly loyal fanbase that STAR TREK does, so I can't see studios spending tons of money to basically re-do CHINA BEACH or latter-day MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE.

If the DVD prices drop after a few years in the marketplace, I might spring for it, but I'm content to wait it out.

Harry

 

Stop relying on retailers. There are plenty of liquidators on eBay, charging a fraction of the price. Remember, all I watch are discs.

Season One UPC : 610583451290

.

 

I don't think it's that much money. I'm guessing it's closer to $100,000-$200,000 per episode, and only about $75K is the actual live action scanning mastering. It's also all being done at CBS TV City, which Viacom/CBS/Paramount owns, so it's money going out of one corporate pocket and back into another pocket.

There were seven or eight different post houses in LA who all "auditioned" for the job of redoing all the old TNG shows, but Viacom opted to do it all in-house.

They remastered all the Mission:Impossible episodes in HD, and those are beautiful transfers all up on Netflix. No excessive NR, very sharp pictures, decent color.

China Beach was all done on analogue composite 1" tape, so it looks like what everybody was doing in 1990. And it was also a dark, underexposed film show, so there are moments that are pretty grainy and grungy. I never cranked the NR too high on the episodes I worked on (first season and most of the second season), but there is some there. It's all we had, 25 years ago.

At some point, we switched to digital composite D2 videotape, but I'm not sure when that was. None of this stuff started immediately; there were always transitions between doing things one way and doing them another. I think the second season may well have been D2.

 

My data, so to speak, was wrong at that point. New info seems to show that it cost c. $9 million to remaster all 178 episodes of Trek TNG, plus produce the documentaries, audio commentaries, etc. So it was more like 50k an episode.

 

Wow, $50K was a bargain. Now I see why we didn't get the job at Technicolor...

I believe when they redid the Seinfeld shows, that was close to $80K an episode, which is far more expensive and that show had very few visual effects! To me, just the VFX redo alone on TNG would be $100K+, and then another $100K for the picture & sound remastering.

 

Yeah, that seems like a low price to me too. I was amazed. But that's what two apparent insiders in the CBS/Trek world posted on Trek sites. Maybe that was the price without the VAM? The vast majority of the FX for TNG, however, are the originals. They filmed them, some even in VistaVision (the fx done by ILM of the Enterprise, etc.), but did have to re-composite them for the remaster, which in itself sounds pretty complicated. A few early cgi effects weren't high rez enough and had to be redone, such as the Crystalline Entity, the planets, some phaser effects, etc. Bottom line, however, is that they probably made a good profit on the project once you count not just blu-ray sales worldwide, but also streaming on the remasters from some sites like Amazon Prime for years to come.

The next Trek show, however, Deep Space Nine, seems to be on the bubble at the moment. That show started filming in 1992, and until c. 1995 didn't use much in the way of cgi, although one major character, Odo, was a cgi-done shape-shifter from the get go. But starting in the 4th season and from there on out increasing use of CGI was made. Some of these files, amazingly enough, still exist and were "overbuilt" in the digital world, with detail and resolution far beyond what video and TVs at the time could see. But still, some of the cgi would need to be upgraded and even built from scratch. Anyway, cost estimates to rebuild the 176 episodes of DS9 are 2-3 times what the estimate was for TNG, and since the audience is smaller the math is tough to work out.

CBS-D has vastly expanded employment for the TNG rebuild, and now that they are seemingly reaching their final weeks of work on that huge project, it seems likely that unless they start on DS9 soon that some good people from the Trek rebuild "dream team" are going to be let go—which would be a shame from my point of view. If they don't do it now, what with all that they've learned from the TNG project of how this is done, seems unlikely they'll ever do it.

Even if it cost $20 million or so to redo DS9 it would seem like a bargain to me. To make a show like that today with huge sets, an ensemble cast, top writers, award-winning make up, lots of fx, etc, would probably cost at least $3 million an episode in today's dollars. In other words, the show represents on some levels roughly an investment of half a billion dollars. All of that was likely earned back in the 1990s and early 2000s with advertisements and DVD sales, but still it seems a shame to leave it in murky SD when saving it costs a small fraction of what the show cost. But each project, I understand, needs to earn its way in some reasonable time horizon. And so right now it's looking rather iffy....

 

I think you misread my post. I was speaking of the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE re-do on ABC in 1988-1989. Those were composited on video and look mushy on the DVDs released will after the initial seven seasons of the CBS show.

ABC commissioned the show during the writers strike, figuring they could use old scripts - and they did for a few episodes. The show ran for two seasons, generally buried in bad time slots.

Harry

 

The Mission remake was a super-cheap show, shot in Australia, and I don't see them reconforming those in HD ever. They were initially done to avoid the writers' strike of the time, using the same scripts of the 1960s but swapping out character names. I don't think they were awful, but they did suffer from low budgets. Redoing them wouldn't cost a fortune, but Paramount/Viacom has a little bird running that part of the operation (cheap, cheap, cheap).