Last week we
reported about the new release date for HBO's
1st & Ten, one of the first made-just-for-cable TV Shows ever. When the show launched, it starred Delta Burke as the female owner of a professional football team, and it brought it lots of former NFL stars including a not-yet-notorious O.J. Simpson (
our first news story has a more complete look at the show's early history). As we told you with our most recent news, the first and second seasons, each with 13 episodes on 2 discs and sold separately for $29.98 SRP per box, was back on the schedule after a delay and would arrive on January 3rd.
Trade magazine
Home Media Retailing is reporting, though, in
a story by Thomas K. Arnold, that Tango Entertainment has teamed up with Wal-Mart to produce a special
1st & Ten - Complete Collection set with all 80 episodes from the run of the show (1984 - 1990/91), including the years when
Playboy playmate Shannon Tweed took over the ownership role when Delta Burke moved on to
Designing Women. Here's what the story says about this special DVD release (any bold-faced emphasis you see is our own, stressing the date and price):
Chalk up another exclusive for Wal-Mart. Arriving at the giant retail chain Nov. 15 is the HBO original hit series “1st & Ten,” which ran on the cable network for six seasons, from 1984 to 1990.
All 80 episodes of the sitcom — about a fictional football team called the California Bulls and its divorcee owner, played by Delta Burke — are included on the six-disc set, which retails for $19.96 and is released by independent DVD supplier Tango Entertainment of Santa Monica, Calif.
...John Bergeson, Tango Entertainment’s chief of sales and marketing, said his company cut the deal to get prime shelf space in the nation’s largest retail seller of DVDs.
“The exclusive with Wal-Mart offers us the opportunity to get prime in-store positioning to take full advantage of peak football season and the first big holiday buying weekend,” Bergeson said.
The TV DVD package will be merchandised in freestanding floor displays under the tagline, “Great Value, Great Gift.”
Wow, you saw that price...just $19.96! The 80-episode set is being marked with an SRP of $180.00 list price, so that's an 89% savings. There is a lot of talk about how Wal-Mart wants to have the lowest prices for the after-Thanksgiving "black Friday" sales, and this seems like a prime example. On the other end, though, we're very worried about how Tango expects to stuff 80 episodes onto 6 DVDs...that's about 13 episodes per disc now, when the season sets put 13 episodes onto two discs. We sure hope those discs in the
Complete Collection are double sided to hold more data on them, and even then we're still wondering if the data compression will still be too much. This could be a low price on a lot of TV, but on the other hand we're very worried about how the video quality will turn out...is it worth it if the video quality is videotape level? Well, we do not know yet what these will look like; and it's probable that we won't get to find out until all of you do on
November 15th, when we can buy a copy.
Here is the cover art for the Wal-Mart box. As you can tell by comparing it to the pictures in our news from last week, the key artwork is the same as on the January release of the second season set:
