Good point. M:I came along at the height of the spy boom in TV, while there was no corresponding space-opera boom. (Although M:I outlasted the spy boom, which is why it was reinvented as a mob-busting show in its last two seasons.)
Star Trek having a cheap / low budget a misnomer?
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Good point. M:I came along at the height of the spy boom in TV, while there was no corresponding space-opera boom. (Although M:I outlasted the spy boom, which is why it was reinvented as a mob-busting show in its last two seasons.)
In terms of budget this is what my 'M:I' book has to say about Mission and Star Trek
Barbara's transporation was one of the early skirmishes between the Mission unit and Herb Solow's replacement, Douglas S. Cramer. After starting his career as a television supervisor for Proctor and Gamble's daytime serials, Cramer moved to the Ogilvy and Mather ad agency. In 1965 he was hired as ABC's vice president of program development, where he oversaw the debut of Peyton Place and Batman. While in the number two position at Twentieth Century Fox, Cramer was asked by Paramount president John Reynolds to join Paramount Television. The requirements for the position were made very clear. "My job," says Cramer, "was to control costs on the three shows then on the air, and also to get new shows on the air."
"The people doing Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry and his people, were open to conversations about budgets and weren't impractical; Mannix was not as complicated, and the producers, Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts, knew how to do the show and could handle the scripts and the budgets." Cramer soon learned which of the Desilu holdovers would be his primary concern.
"Bruce had a wonderful concept of the show," Cramer feels, "put it together beautifully, but paid no attention to budget. Secondly, he traditionally wrote bigger shows than we could afford to do. They had a wonderful look, but once he decided on a location, there was no stopping him. Bruce was a madman about scripts and there would be layer after layer of writers working on them. He also left vast portions of the picture undone, even though he would go over the regular schedule. In those days Universal did hours in six days. He was doing them in eight, nine, ten, eleven days and then he would do another two days of inserts on a separate stage, and would never think of using an insert from another show. He would never use an insert again!"
Paramount's concern over extravagant television budgets seems odd in view of what was happening in the studio's feature division. No one explains the situation better than Peter Graves: "Charley Bluhdorn bought the studio and thought he could produce pictures. He was a big executive who knew how to run businesses, but didn't know anything about the picture business, and he produced some of the great all-time hits, like Darling Lili, Paint Your Wagon, Catch-22, On A Clear Day You Can See Forever. . ." These features were enormously expensive productions; when released in 1969-70, their box-office results ranged from disappointing to disastrous. "He had two hundred fifty million dollars worth of negative tied up that nobody wanted," Graves exclaims. "Nobody in the world! That's why they were cutting costs on Mission: Impossible and Star Trek, because Bluhdorn spent all the money elsewhere. So Charley said, 'Yeah, we gotta cut costs here.'"
Barbara's transporation was one of the early skirmishes between the Mission unit and Herb Solow's replacement, Douglas S. Cramer. After starting his career as a television supervisor for Proctor and Gamble's daytime serials, Cramer moved to the Ogilvy and Mather ad agency. In 1965 he was hired as ABC's vice president of program development, where he oversaw the debut of Peyton Place and Batman. While in the number two position at Twentieth Century Fox, Cramer was asked by Paramount president John Reynolds to join Paramount Television. The requirements for the position were made very clear. "My job," says Cramer, "was to control costs on the three shows then on the air, and also to get new shows on the air."
"The people doing Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry and his people, were open to conversations about budgets and weren't impractical; Mannix was not as complicated, and the producers, Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts, knew how to do the show and could handle the scripts and the budgets." Cramer soon learned which of the Desilu holdovers would be his primary concern.
"Bruce had a wonderful concept of the show," Cramer feels, "put it together beautifully, but paid no attention to budget. Secondly, he traditionally wrote bigger shows than we could afford to do. They had a wonderful look, but once he decided on a location, there was no stopping him. Bruce was a madman about scripts and there would be layer after layer of writers working on them. He also left vast portions of the picture undone, even though he would go over the regular schedule. In those days Universal did hours in six days. He was doing them in eight, nine, ten, eleven days and then he would do another two days of inserts on a separate stage, and would never think of using an insert from another show. He would never use an insert again!"
Paramount's concern over extravagant television budgets seems odd in view of what was happening in the studio's feature division. No one explains the situation better than Peter Graves: "Charley Bluhdorn bought the studio and thought he could produce pictures. He was a big executive who knew how to run businesses, but didn't know anything about the picture business, and he produced some of the great all-time hits, like Darling Lili, Paint Your Wagon, Catch-22, On A Clear Day You Can See Forever. . ." These features were enormously expensive productions; when released in 1969-70, their box-office results ranged from disappointing to disastrous. "He had two hundred fifty million dollars worth of negative tied up that nobody wanted," Graves exclaims. "Nobody in the world! That's why they were cutting costs on Mission: Impossible and Star Trek, because Bluhdorn spent all the money elsewhere. So Charley said, 'Yeah, we gotta cut costs here.'"
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That makes me mad, that Star Trek was in a vise because the money was squandered on ill-conceived movies. And didn't the same exact thing happen to Space: 1999 ?
It’s safe to say if Roddenberry and company could have done more with TOS they would have. But from the get-go they understood something of the challenges they would face, evidenced by Roddenberry’s suggestion they could cannibalize pre-existing sets, props and costumes. Star Trek was something that really needed to be looked at differently, as it would be when TNG came along, but back in the day it was faced with a pre-existing mindset that science fiction wasn’t something to be taken seriously. And, in fairness, no one could have had any real inkling how big it would get, at least not until it went into syndication.
TOS was a lavish production for its day and I think that’s reflected in how it still holds up.
Did NBC contribute any extra monies to help defer some of Star Trek's production cost?
The reason I ask is that, in my book, CBS bends over backwards to help pay for some of Mission's enormous production costs, even going so far as to offer to help pay Martin Landau's salary demands, which would have made him one of the highest paid actors on television at that time, during contract negotiations at the start of the fourth season.
Of course, negotiations didn't work out and Landau and Bain quit the show, and Leonard Nimoy was brought in as Landau's replacement.
The reason I ask is that, in my book, CBS bends over backwards to help pay for some of Mission's enormous production costs, even going so far as to offer to help pay Martin Landau's salary demands, which would have made him one of the highest paid actors on television at that time, during contract negotiations at the start of the fourth season.
Of course, negotiations didn't work out and Landau and Bain quit the show, and Leonard Nimoy was brought in as Landau's replacement.
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No. In fact Lew Grade had success with the Return of the Pink Panther and The Muppet Show, both of which were filmed or in production during Space: 1999.
It was only after Space: 1999 was off the air did the studio close after the flop Raise the Titanic.
What Star Trek did was make it's own stock footage. Except for "Mirror Mirror", every episode after "The Cage" that depicts the Enterprise with spikes on the nacelles a budget choice to reuse stock footage. The Woden was a reuse of the Botany Bay. Even TWOK made use of the Klingon ship footage from TNG in the Kobayashi Maru (that was Harve Bennet's mandate to save money). GEN reused footage of the BoP explosion from TUC.
This doesn't even include the reuse of model passes with minor alteration. The Mutara Nebula was reused for almost every nebula. The Sam camera angles for the Enterprise were used in every TOS era movie and TNG.
NBC was notorious for being tight-fisted (Every season, I Dream of Jeannie's season finale was intended to double as a possible SERIES finale. The producers were never quite sure if the show would be renewed from one season to the next.)
S1 of IDoJ was the last season to be filmed in black and white (NBC didn't think the show would last beyond one season and hence, didn't want to spend the money needed to film it in color like every other show at the time). S2-5 were filmed in color.
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The level of care is what stands out…where Lost In Space overused magicians flash powder, Trek had decent transporter effects and energy beam animation—which was rare until Toho surpassed them in terms of animation.
I actually don’t remember much in the way of directed energy weapon discharges for TV programs. I think Filmfax did some nice stories about that before they went under.
I actually don’t remember much in the way of directed energy weapon discharges for TV programs. I think Filmfax did some nice stories about that before they went under.
Well, yes, nearly every show does that, especially FX-heavy ones, so it hardly needs to be said. I was talking about what TOS didn't do and wondering why it didn't.
Joss Whedon generally did the same with his shows. It strikes me as a good practice in general, since renewal is never guaranteed, so it's always wise to prepare for both possibilities.
And again, I think it's misleading to suggest that renewal or cancellation is exclusively a matter of the network's choices. It's primarily the audience and advertisers that make that determination. If a show is a hit with the audience, advertisers will pay premium rates for ad space during the show, and that will be a crucial source of funding. It only becomes a budget problem for the network if the ratings aren't strong enough to offset the overhead of production.
The WB was always leery about Buffy the Vampire Slayer (It didn't test well with focus groups. The show would go on to become a monster hit.)
The less said about Fox's treatment of Firefly, the better ...
Nothing to do with it. As I said, it's just a good idea in general to make finales work as either season or series finales, since nothing is ever guaranteed. Whedon usually did that with all his shows, regardless of the network, and it was a wise thing to do.
People always want to paint networks as the bad guys, but I say again: audiences determine the fate of shows. Making TV is not free. It's very expensive and very risky, and success is always the exception, not the rule. Every network, every single one, has to cancel shows all the time because the audience isn't there. Networks aren't villains looking for excuses to cancel shows -- they're investors willing to gamble on shows. If a show gets made in the first place, it's because a network believed in it enough to take a chance on it and risk a lot of money to get it made. They want their shows to succeed, which is why they pay to put them on the air at all, but it's a competitive business and there are always going to be more losers than winners. If a horse loses a race, it's not because the racetrack sabotaged it, it's because that's just how competition works.
Lower Decks poked fun at Trek's propensity for reusing sets. (Voyager's Borg costumes were holdovers from First Contact. Paramount just had them lying around.)
Fox DID sabotage Firefly. (They aired the show's second episode first. It was bounced around and preempted to the point where the audience was never able to find it.)
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Its executives at the time made bad decisions, yes, but not out of active malice, simply out of the basic fact of life that not every decision is going to be the right one. Networks try things that they hope will improve a show's chances. Sometimes they make good choices, but often they make terrible choices that backfire. Again, it's a risky, competitive business. Everything is a gamble, and that means there's no guarantee that anything you try will succeed. It is irrational to expect every entrant in a competition to be entitled to succeed unless actively sabotaged. That is fundamentally misunderstanding how competition works.
I get that they may not have know if the series was gonna come back, but only one episode seemed like a potential real finale was the actual final episode filmed: Hurricane Jeannie - when Dr. Bellows discovered Jeannie's secret. Instead, they made it a dream and aired it two episodes before the end of the season, running the lackluster The Chili King instead. Probably to keep the syndication energy up. Having a true finale seemed to hinder The Fugitive
I'm up there with ya, I ordered the Imprint IDOJ blu rays and am looking forward to making up for the horrific Mill Creek set.I'm probably the board's biggest Jeannie fan.
Sony/Columbia never kept their masters (TV on home video didn't exist back in the 80's and 90's).
They made the DVDs from their syndication copies (it also explains why I Dream of Jeannie: Fifteen Years Later is available on DVD while I Still Dream of Jeannie is not)
I was referring to Lew Grade deciding to spend his money making Raise the Titanic instead of Space: 1999 Year 3, which is what I've read from the very reliable @Ssosmcin.
If I may interject: Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, Lost in Space, and I Love Lucy were all coming out on VHS in the 1980s to very early 90s. I had some of them.
Also, Bewitched looks pretty damn good in the original Sony DVD sets. I have the Blue Box, which combined all eight seasons into one economical package. The later Mill Creek edition, I don't know but I've heard the quality is lesser and some scenes may be missing.
But I can't believe the fine Sony presentation of Bewitched came from worn, 16mm syndie prints. Did they?
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