Gee, was that I who complained so fervently just hours ago about it being impossible to find the Battlestar Galactica DVD boxed set in retail stores?

Whoa baby! It’s a LOT of plastic!

Shortly after making my previous post, I felt compelled to search the newsgroups for any talk of the new (non-limited, non-Cylon-head) boxed set that’s coming out on 2/10/04. To my surprise, I instead found evidence of people buying the old, limited-issue boxed set just days ago. So I called up the local Best Buy. “Yup, we’ve got three of them left,” said the guy on the other end of the line.

So, I did what any responsible man would do. I went down there and got one.

What? At least I didn’t go to Suncoast. I called them first, actually. Even had a $5 Suncoast gift certificate in my wallet. But given the fact that their price was THIRTY DOLLARS higher than Best Buy’s, why would I be such an idiot as to shop there? (I know, this same attitude is what keeps monopolistic, inherently evil chains like Wal-Mart in business. But sometimes…c’mon. You just gotta sell your soul for a buck.)

So I came home, popped the first DVD (the 2 1/2 hour pilot episode) into the big screen, and enjoyed a nice relaxing bit of dinner theater. Well! I’m quite pleased. There seems to be a lot more to this series than I remember, although of course it is quite chock full of reused stock footage (Knight Rider ain’t got nothin’ on Battlestar in that department). Still, considering how very excellent much of this footage is, it’s no surprise they’d try to get all the mileage out of it that they could. The same guy who was behind the special effects of Star Wars headed up the effects on Battlestar, and indeed, at times you feel like you’re watching a deleted scene from that Lucas classic.

Speaking of deleted scenes—and other bonuses—there are scads of ‘em in this collection. Deleted scenes, bloopers, interviews with the cast and crew (and even Stu Philips, on the orchestration of the series’ soundtrack). There are 6 discs in the box—which is very nice, I might add, despite its being roughly the same size as those big old computer game boxes of yesteryear—and all of them are double-sided. This allows them to keep the video quality very high while still packing a lot of hours onto each disc. By comparison, the Star Trek: TNG DVD boxed sets are all single-sided discs with the same amount of stuff crammed onto them, so there are times when the MPEG compression is very noticeable (and ugly).

The packaging is really quite cool. As you can see in the picture, the huge old box is covered with reflective “mirror paper” and the lid is molded to look like a Cylon helmet. The multi-folded DVD set sports a nice array of artwork, and it comes with a large “collector’s book” which is really a handy episode guide. The whole thing is packed neatly in a foam casing within the box. Good stuff. For the collector, it’s worth the extra few bucks it obviously added to the price tag.

Since Battlestar, like Knight Rider, is a joint production venture of Glen A. Larson and Universal Studios—and this boxed set was released under the latter’s own label—I thought of it as an interesting glimpse into what the Knight Rider DVD boxed set(s) might look like. Hopefully they’ll have the same level of thought put into them. I imagine we’ll see four—one for each season. That is, assuming, they do get produced.

Well, it seems I’ll be watching a lot of TV this weekend! I imagine my dad might be interested to see these as well; he was the original Battlestar fan in the family. Even my boss said he wanted to borrow these from me if I bought them…