I was mulling over twin peaks in general; I was first directly exposed to it through the season 1 dvd... and i reckon many of the eeries feelings that it evoked were in part due to what i feel is the superb menus on the dvd...i would love a cd with just the weird 'soundscapes' that are featured. anyone know if Lynch had a hand in these? since the sounds dont actually feature in the series, but they feel so appropriate...whoever added them really had a good feel for the series

Ah, yes I loved those menus. I wished they'd kept them for the Gold Box set (maybe expanded on the same idea for different DVD's too), but some people didn't like them and thought they moved to slowly... I'll always have a soft spot for that DVD set.

popping in the 1st disc..the heartbeat sound....the 'breaking' the heart. and just that slow, soothing, yet discomforting drone. awesome!

Well keep in mind also that the S1 set and the S2 and Gold Box sets were put out by two completely different companies. I would imagine that CBS/Paramount really had no desire to mimic the Artisan set completely, especially when it came to costs. The S2 set was about the same retail price as the S1 set, yet one only had 7 episodes while the other had 22. The reason being that Artisan created a very high quality DVD set and spent a lot of money doing so. CBS/Paramount could have done the same thing for S2, but we'd be sitting here crying right now because the price would have been upwards of $80-90, easily. (In another thread last year, I did a breakdown of retail price-per-episode...the Artisan set was like $5.70 per ep...using that as a baseline, 22 episodes on a set of the same quality should theoretically cost $125!) Since it was no guarantee that S2 would be a big sell, or even a moderate sell, CBS/Paramount was wise to not go that route. Especially since they were already in the process of creating the Gold Box release. Granted that didn't give us the really cool menus of the S1 Artisan set, but I think what we got was definitely a fair trade.

Not to mention that there's also the possibility that the menu design and menu music from the S1 set was actually copyrighted and belonged to Artisan exclusively.

~ Amanda

"Just fear me, love me, do as I say and I will be your slave..."

No. Sorry Amanda. You got your sums wrong. For a start although the first set contains 7 episodes and the second 22 episodes the calculation doesn't work. First off, in Europe we got the pilot with the first set so that's more than 7 episodes. You count episodes instead of disks. There are four disks in set 1 and six in set 2. That means the second set would have been more efficient in terms of cost per menu than you figure it. Also you divide the prices counting the packaging, transport, VAT/sales tax, etc per episode not per set. These are one-off costs that don't multiple exponentially the number of episodes you have. 11 episodes don't have more packaging and freight costs than 7 - after all, the 7 episodes are on 4 disks and the 11 episodes on 3 disks!

The true cost is way below $125 if the costs had been extended from set 1 to 2.

I agree that the first set is fantastically atmospheric and the second dull - but that is partly down to the contents of the series. The menus and packaging aptly reflects the contents!

Monty

Well first off, I'm not talking about Europe. But if you'd like, adjust my calculation for the inclusion of the pilot (and adjust my retail cost of the set as well, as I believe the European S1 was slightly more expensive than the US one).

Second, complaints abounded with the second season of TP because of video quality loss due to CBS/Paramount cramming so many episodes onto each disc (compression, etc etc etc). My calculation is based on if we were to get Season 2 exactly how Artisan's Season 1 package was, with 2 eps per disc. As I stated above, I had that same discussion in another thread...there, though, people were complaining about the quality of the entire box set of S2, so I pointed out how much it would cost if S2 were EXACTLY like S1. I was lazy and just took my cost calculations straight from that thread. My apologies for not adjusting all the costs. I'm just used to trying to defend CBS/Paramount yet again for something they apparently didn't do to please the TP fans. :)

~ Amanda

"Just fear me, love me, do as I say and I will be your slave..."