For those of you who don’t know, Lexx is the story of a dead assassin, a half-cluster lizard love slave, a security guard-fourth class, and a head. Between the four of them, they defeat His Divine Shadow, save humanity, and steal a giant dragonfly ship that can blow up planets.
The Original Mini-Series was pretty much The Best Thing Ever. The one-hour shows - seasons 2-4 - well, not so much. (Season 4 blows.)
Here’s the thing. You can’t get the mini-series on Netflix, or just about anywhere else. And the places that do have it (ebay) charge 5 trillion dollars, approximately.’
So my question is - how much is the mini-series worth?
Am I insane to be thinking about paying $300 for this thing?
Well, Amazon has a couple of copies for around $260 so that’s slightly cheaper. And somebody on Half.com is auctioning off a set and the current bid is $113.50. But personally I wouldn’t pay that much.
Some sort of copyright thing. Whoever owns the copyright isn’t doing anything with it, but won’t let anybody else do anything either. Supposedly new copies are still getting made in Europe, but they’re coded in a way that keeps them from working in American machines.
Region encoding? The vast majority of DVD players can have this shut off. A tiny bit of googling and you’ll find plenty of sites that will let you change the region (note this is in no way shape or form encouraging piracy but as someone that moved to England from the US I’ve had quite enough of region encoding on my American and her English DVDs and since the hardware itself is set up to do this with a few programming codes I don’t think it crosses any lines) One final note some American DVDs have Enhanced Region Encoding that won’t work if you have set your region to 0 (what you want it at if you want it to play everything) most DVDs don’t have this though but you might want to invest in a cheap player to handle your imports so you don’t risk screwing up your main American DVD player.
Of course that only matters if you can find a reasonably priced DVD set in Europe through a reliable source.
Anyhoo, Lexx was somewhat cool, though that “Fire and Water” thing just dragged and dragged and I never did find out what happened afterward. Plus the whole thing was one big tease, like a no-contact strip club. If you’re gonna do porn, do porn, dammit! Bend Zeb or Xeg or whatever her name was over a table and DO HER already!
IMHO only the second and third seasons are worth watching, in particular the third.
The first season is 4 episodes. It’s not terrible but basically was a mini-series, and if you watch season 2 one of the main actors changes anyway.
Season 4 takes place on Earth. I watched them all, they were OK.
Deepdiscountdvd.com seems to be the cheapest place I’ve found. I keep waiting for the price to drop (for years) but it hasn’t. The third season is $40 which I think is fair and should introduce you to the series (this is not a hard series to get into, it is not cerebral in any way. The seasons are fairly self-contained, I started by watching season 3 anyway).
Jeez- two years ago, I was able to import it from Canada at not too much more than the cost of any other TV series, but now, amazon.com.ca is only selling outrageously expensive used copies, too. Could it be out of print?