I've been asked in quite a few of your emails for some history... so I'll hit the highlights (and low points) of the last 10 years, for those interested...
The site went live on February 1; I had been working for some time prior to that point in deciding what it is I wanted to accomplish with the products. I knew one thing - I wanted to see the Apollo television from the Moon, and I wanted to see it without commentary - the complete transmissions. The network coverage always bugged me - they never knew when to shut up and listen.
I had decided to do Apollo 14 first. Reason? I didn't want to do 11 first, because it was too important to tackle before I had been through one production cycle. I didn't want to do 15, 16 or 17 first because of their size and complexity. And 12 didn't have that much television. So 14 it was.
Sometime in early January I took my first trip to the National Archives (actually Archives II in College Park, MD) - spent a week there, up on the fourth floor in the moving pictures collection. The biggest problem I had that first week was focus. I would find entries on items that were interesting and just HAD to see them. I was researching 14 and 11 at the time, and I had a hard time focusing on getting just the info I needed and not using my time watching unreleated material. Going to the archives was very good. Much of the NASA documentation prior to the late 1980's was/is held at the archives.
In those very early days my biggest help was Kipp Teague. Thank you, Kipp.
I believe we started shipping Apollo 14 in late March, then Apollo 11 in April or May. All of my marketing at that point was done online, just in discussion boards, etc. I had decided that the next project would be Apollo 15. Our first 6 disc set. I opened that set up for preorders in late June, and placed my first advertising on Space.com starting on July 1. We released Apollo 15 in September and Saturn 1 and 1B in November. We had planned on releasing Saturn V and Apollo 8 for Christmas. I worked around the clock to get the masters complete, even shipping them to the replicator via a special service that moved human organs quickly to get them there in time. Then the replicator messed up both products. At least one of the discs was unplayable in each set. (They were dual layer and they printed the layers backwards). So they came out just after Christmas.
At Thanksgiving of that year the Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) featured our Apollo 15 set as a "must have DVD" of the season. Demand increased dramatically and led directly to the Fox deal.
Oh, the Fox deal. I'll just lightly pass over this section. It was rather tumultuous to say the least. Six of our products were released through Fox. We were planning on releasing them all. The first four were Apollo 11, Apollo 8, Saturn I and IB and Project Gemini. I redid the masters for all four over the summer, again working around the clock. There were times when I would just get a few hours of sleep on the floor of the office. We released the product into Best Buy, and Target, and Costco (and many others). It was great having our product in all those locations. But there were problems. This was the early days of DVD distribution. Best Buy was supposed to display them all together. They didn't. They also didn't know what section in which to place them, so they were all over. Target had DVD bins that were sized so that once our products were in them they couldn't be taken out. (There were very few multi-disc sets in those days). Ever try to get something like that fixed in a huge retail organization? I don't recommend it, for sanity's sake.
And the packaging was complex and very expensive. We released two more products (Apollo 15 and Saturn V) in the spring of 2004. I had actually prepared and submitted Apollo 16 and 17 for release through Fox, but we never released them there. At the end of the day we mutually ended the Fox deal because Fox is really good at distributing very large releases, and we're a long-term niche market. To this day there is still someone at Fox I count as my friend and is a huge supporter of what we do. Our businesses just weren't right for one another.
Since that time we finished out Apollo, completed what I consider to be possibly our best set (Mercury), and started in on Shuttle with some other interesting products along the way. Oh, I forgot to mention I also had another distributor for a short time that ended up selling a bunch of our product into stores - and never paying me for all the product I shipped. That was a good time as well. I got a judgment against them in California, but they were nowhere to be found - phones off, accounts closed. That was in 2006/2007. I'm very proud of the products we produced during this time. Apollo 13 was very complete. Reassembling the Apollo 7 television was challenging. Creating the Liftoff set was great fun.
In 2008 we began production on Live From the Moon, which was designed for broadcast sale. We have sold it in many markets around the world, but not on a network in the United States. They're all too busy with reality programming at present. I'm very proud of the work we did on Live From the Moon. I've had the pleasure of presenting it at Spacefest, The Cosmosphere and the Newseum in Washington.
Others who have been a big help - Eric Jones and Ken Glover of the ALSJ and JL Pickering of Retro Space Images. There are many others. Bill Wood comes to mind. John Sarkissian and Colin Mackellar.
Along the way we also did some aviation subject DVDs, have provided a lot of stock material to various networks and productions, advised on the restoration of the Apollo 11 EVA television, and provided information back to NASA on where various items are held.
I've learned a lot through these past 10 years. Recently for some projects (announcements pending) I've been back into the material we created for Mercury and Apollo 11. When I'm away from some of our products and revisit them, it reminds me of their complete nature and attention to getting them right. As you can see these years have been a roller coaster, but revisiting the products always makes me very proud of what is now available through Spacecraft Films. More than anything else it has been through your support, and I thank you.
