Farscape may have ended as a television series in 2004 with the four-hour miniseries The Peacekeeper Wars, but its loyal (cultish, even) fan base has refused to give up on it, begging for more and getting it in the form of comic books and a new series of upcoming Webisodes. And now, for the first time, the entire series will available on DVD in a single mega box set. To promote the upcoming release, stars Claudia Black and Ben Browder appeared at Comic-Con last week along with series creators Rockne S. O'Bannon and Brian Henson.
Have you all kept in contact since the show ended?
Black: Well, the restraining orders put an end to that. [Laughter]
Henson: Not as much as we'd like. That's fair to say. Rockne and I have spent a little more time together working on the Webisodes.
O'Bannon: Yeah, because it'sFarscaperelated.
Black: It's not through lack of choice. I mean, it's next gen for me because Ben's children text me. And I text them. They've found a way to my heart, because I love text messaging.
Browder: This is how I keep in touch. Don't you think it's time to text Claude? Find out how she's doing.
Even though the show is over, does it feel like this is something you'll never be able to walk away from?
Black: I've never wanted to walk away from it. I'm enormously proud.
Henson: It's interesting. We're in a weird industry. You tend to harden yourself pretty young, if you've been in it for a while, to what we call post-production blues. You do a movie and you're with a whole bunch of people for five months and they feel like your family and your best friends, lovers, and everything, and then you have a wrap party and you never see them again. And after about five days there's an enormous depression that hits. It's tough, and it's something that in this industry we're all used to. So it's very rare that you get an opportunity to work on a production where you do get to reacquaint yourself with all those people. So it's wonderful for us that we can stay connected to it and stay connected to each other. Because generally in this business, you end up with this horrible severing that happens at the end of production where you won't ever see any of them again.
Browder: I totally expected that at the end of season four. I thought, "Well, that's it. I'm going to leave Australia, I won't see anybody that I've worked with on a day-to-day basis. I'm sure Rock's going to be busy doing his thing and Brian never calls." It just hasn't worked out that way.
O'Bannon: The other advantage we have is the DVD release, which is an opportunity, of course, for us to get together. That's one of the advantages of all that kind the after market stuff. The series is over, it's done, but it lives on in the comic book series and the Webisodes as well.
Henson: There's this real enthusiasm. We're all enthusiastic about keeping it alive, doing the next bit. Figuring out what the next thing is.
Have you heard from fans along the way. Have they been clamoring for this DVD set?
Henson: They want more. That's what they want. They want more Farscape, which is great. And we're trying to find different ways and trying to figure out how to do that. And as Rock says, the comic books are great and they've done really well, and they tell one chapter of theFarscapestory. We're working on the Webisodes. It's tough to finance them. They're expensive, but when we can, we've got great creative, which launches the whole next chapter of Farscape. And I think that's what the fans want. They just want us to keep going. They want the characters to stay alive. And so do we.
Black: I think good things – and I hopeFarscapeis one such thing – are timeless. And we started something that had a cult following. And it's taken a while for people to catch on and say, "Okay, now I've heard about this for 10 years. Now I have to finally watch this and see what it's about." And thanks to the DVD release it gives a new generation, a new audience an opportunity to so. And it's nice. It's really validating.
Do you think the show will always be around in some form or another?
Black: That's one of the things I loved about seeing the montage at the panel was that it hasn't dated. It looks beautiful. It hasn't got that slightly shlocky factor that in 50 years we'll look at it and think, "My God, I can't believe CGI looked like that in those days." I think it looks incredibly current. So it's still going to find an audience. It's still going to find an audience.
So what's new on this DVD?
Henson: It's the first time you can get the whole series. It's got all sorts of extras. It's got basically the crème de la crème of extras that we've made over 10 years. But it's also got one piece that the fans have been asking for over and over. There was a behind-the-scenes special that Ben and Claudia hosted called Farscape Undressed and it only ever aired once. And the fans have been begging for it and asking how can we get it and they haven't been able to. So it's taken a little while for us to figure out how to logistically make it possible, but that will be included for the first time in this box set. So that's a great extra. That's the big extra that everybody's been wanting. But it'll really be mostly an opportunity to have the whole series.
When was the last time any of you actually sat down and watched the show?
Black: I don't know. Yeah, I'm dying to sit down and watch it all again, because I would like to see if I have a level of objectivity now. I do want the story to be told to me as if I'm not a participant, because I think they were interesting stories. And I want to enjoy it from a different perspective. Up until this point I haven't had the time, but if I ever was to catch it on television I know my husband would indulge me and allow me to watch and I'm sure he'd be interested too. But would definitely want to watch it for sure.
Henson: If ever there was a series to get the whole thing on DVD, this really is it. One of the criticisms of the show when we were on air was that it was such a continuous story and that it was so complex that it was very hard to drop in and watch an episodes. And if you were to go buy 88 hours of some other one-hour TV series, you might jump around episodes. You might go, "Oh, let's watch that episode." The great thing about this is it's like buying an 88-hour movie. You can start it and stop it and watch a little bit more and then spend a weekend watching it and you still haven't finished. There's really something wonderful about getting that whole story in one box set where people can really start at the beginning and never miss a chapter.
Why did it take so long for this set to come out? And why is now the time to bring it back?
Henson: Weird business oddities. We had a DVD distributor who went out of business and that had lots of the complications involved in businesses going out of business. So it's really largely due to that. And so the show had been put out in seasons, but never the last season, and never the entire series. And they were still selling. And it was a company that was illiquid and there was inventory getting sold and it was sort of a mess and we had to kind of wait for all that to kind of wash away so we could start fresh.
O'Bannon: And it's the 10th anniversary. So what more perfect time to do it than that.
Has there been talk of doing a Blu-ray release?
Henson: You're the first person who's asked us about that. We have had inquiries, so I'll just answer it honestly. There is a version of Farscape that is better resolution than what anybody in America has ever seen, because we shot on the British-Australian video format which is PAL, 625 lines of resolution. So it has better color resolution and better image resolution than American broadcast television. It's isn't high-def, though. It's 625 as opposed to 720 or 1080. So there is something better than what people have seen on TV. So it would bump up to high def and look better than a regular DVD, much better, but it wouldn't look as good as what people would think of as high def. So I'm not sure whether anybody will ever want to do it. If we were to do a Blu-ray release, which I think should happen at some point, it's never going to be high, high-def resolution. But it will be better than what people have seen on DVD. So at some point I'm sure we will revisit a Blu-ray release. I think I once budgeted it and I think it was something over $4 million a season to actually go back and upgrade the effects to high def. And that was when we still had the film in vaults. ... So maybe for the 20th anniversary?
Can you believe it's been 10 years?
RO: Only through our kids. When we were doing the show most of our kids were either non-existent or tiny and now they're--
Black: Texting me. [Laughter]