Category: Video

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Blu-Ray Movies Video

Babylon 5: The Road Home

1 min read

Order in the StoreBabylon 5 has had a rough road with revivals and spinoffs. The original five-year series seemed to complete the telling of its story by the skin of its teeth, and got a few TV movie victory laps as a treat. And then… it didn’t go so well. Crusade, a spinoff intended for its own 5-year story arc, was DOA by the time it premiered. The Legend of the Rangers, a further spinoff piloted at Sci-Fi Channel, repeatedly lived for the One, died for the One, and racked up a mere one in the ratings. In the 21st century, a direct-to-home-video relaunch with hints of promise fizzled. In the meantime, the original Babylon 5 cast was losing key players at an alarming rate, making any further reunions increasingly unlikely.

Unless you do it in animation. … Read more

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Blu-Ray Video

A Disturbance In The Force: How The Star Wars Holiday Special Happened

1 min read

Order this CDI’m one of those oddball Star Wars fans who enjoys the storied – quite possibly infamous – 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special, but more than that, I try to introduce new people to it. Much like the pre-digital-era Mystery Science Theater 3000 mantra of “keep circulating the tapes!”, I make it a point to share the horrors weird disco-era fun of the Holiday Special with those who haven’t seen it. Am I in violation of copyright? Sure, probably. But this is an instance where I’m proud of it. It’s a tradition to watch it every year – yes, right around Life Day (November 17th) – and rope someone new into the show’s orbit. I am a carrier of fan culture. … Read more

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Blu-Ray Movies Video

Searching For Skylab: America’s Forgotten Triumph

1 min read

For good or ill, it seems like a lot of documentary films – especially those on niche subjects that aren’t current political-hot-button darlings – have to go the crowdfunding route to even have a chance to come into existence. There’s usually a director/producer/writer at the heart of it who has a vision, and maybe some contacts and inside info on the topic, and not nearly enough money. Their only hope is to find an audience of others who share the same interest. Either a wide audience whose members can pitch in a little bit, or a narrowed audience with deeper pockets, is the project’s only hope. Searching For Skylab is one of those projects, and fortunately it found its supportive audience, because it’s virtually the only documentary on the topic that anyone’s made without the film being bankrolled by the agency that launched Skylab. … Read more

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Blu-Ray Star Trek TV Series Video

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds: Season One

2 min read

Order it from theLogBook.com StoreStar Trek: Strange New Worlds is a unique entity in the pantheon of Star Trek spinoffs. For all intents and purposes, this show exists because the fans demanded it. Though Captain Christopher Pike, Number One, and a younger, less experienced Spock first appeared to the public in the 1966 Star Trek two-parter The Menagerie, itself brilliantly built around footage from Star Trek’s unsold 1964 pilot The Cage, Pike and Number One only made comebacks in “expanded universe” media of uncertain canonicity after that. An alternate-universe Pike, played to perfection by Bruce Greenwood, figured prominently in the first two J.J. Abrams-produced movies, but…wasn’t that in the same lane as those comics and novels that, while they might have been authorized products, weren’t official where the ongoing TV productions were concerned? And yet it wasn’t like anyone was going to recast Jeffrey Hunter and Majel Barrett and try to build new stories out from The Cage on TV, was it?

That is, until Star Trek: Discovery did precisely that in its second season, with Anson Mount’s Pike and Ethan Peck’s Spock serving as regulars for that season. Rebecca Romijn recurred as Number One as well. One episode hearkened back to the events of The Cage, and another confirmed that Pike’s grisly fate retold in The Menagerie was an unavoidable certainty. And there’s the real challenge of picking up Pike’s story between his only two appearances in the classic 1960s series: we know what happens to him. He will suffer a fate that’s both as bad as it looks – and better than Pike himself knows, because thanks to some timey-wimey visions in Discovery’s second season, he knows precisely what will happen…but only the bad part. Is there any story to be told between those two established fixed goalposts in Star Trek lore?

Strange New Worlds demonstrates that the answer is “yes”, and does so wonderfully. … Read more

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Blu-Ray TV Series Video

The Invisible Man: The Complete Series

2 min read

Order it from theLogBook.com StoreOh good, there’s finally a good home video release of David McCallum’s brief TV stint as The Invisible Man.

Every part of that statement probably demands some explanation. McCallum, then late of The Man From UNCLE and, just prior to this series, the BBC’s acclaimed WWII drama Colditz, starred in a well-regarded TV movie and subsequent series that reimagined H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man for a prime time schedule that Mission: Impossible had previously dominated. Developed into this new TV format by hot, up-and-coming writer/producers Steven Bochco and Harve Bennett, McCallum’s Invisible Man was a spy-fi piece, in which his character, David Westin, used his seemingly incurable invisibility to investigate crimes both international and domestic, to engage in occasional acts of both espionage and good samaritanism, and to keep wooing his lovely wife, who was his partner at work and at home. (It was the mid ’70s, a show like this had to be at least a little shagadelic.)

Previously released on DVD and Blu-Ray in the United States, The Invisible Man’s previous Blu-Ray release was a textbook study in, quite frankly, how not to put a pre-HD television series on Blu-Ray. Fortunately, this set corrects that error, but introduces a few quirks of its own. … Read more

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Blu-Ray Star Trek TV Series Video

Star Trek: Prodigy – Season 1, Episodes 1-10

1 min read

Order this CDAt a point when there have been new Star Trek series of one kind or another – or, more recently, of every kind spread across a calendar year – there’s literally a show for every Star Trek fan, or future Star Trek fan, in the audience. And while all five (!!) of the current series have come to exemplify the compassionate, positive, inclusive Star Trek ethos to varying degrees, perhaps none of them is more purely Star Trek than the animated series Star Trek: Prodigy – despite the fact that its opening two-parter seemed like it was as far away from Trek as you could get. In the copious bonus material featured in this two-disc set of the first half of the 20-episode first season, Prodigy’s creators, Dan and Kevin Hageman (of Trollhunters fame) describe Prodigy as an “on-ramp” for younger viewers to begin exploring the rest of the Star Trek franchise. The first ten episodes, and the bonus material accompanying them, leave virtually no room to argue with that assessment. … Read more

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Streaming Video

The Gizmoplex

1 min read

The original run of Mystery Science Theater 3000 ended just before the new millennium, seemingly confining the show’s trademark rapid-fire movie riffing to the 20th century. To classify this as something that depressed me for many years would be underselling it just a little bit. YouTube arrives, and plenty of people tried their hand at riffing on pop culture, both long-form and short-form, and all of them came up short compared to MST3K – many were simply too snarky, too sweary, too mean-spirited, and just missed the point, often by light years. There was only one Mystery Science Theater, and it was gone. And then even a lumpen attempt in the early aughts to revive Mystery Science Theater by its own rightsholders, in a manner that seemed weirdly derivative of Homestar Runner among other things, came and went. Was no one going to do the Satellite of Love justice? Or was the 21st century just too Dark & Gritty (TM, pat. pend.) for the gently-snarky-but-generally-sunny humor of one of my favorite television shows ever? … Read more

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Blu-Ray TV Series Video

seaQuest DSV: The Complete Series

2 min read

Order this CDUniversal’s home video operation has been cranking out rescanned, remastered Blu-Ray sets of its back TV catalog – The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman, Knight Rider, The Incredible Hulk, Quantum Leap – with aplomb, and you know, good for them. It’s neat to see these old shows get a little bit of TLC, and as most of them hail from an era when special effects were primarily opticals achieved on film, it’s an easy proposition to just rescan the film at HD resolution. But with seaQuest DSV, we’re in different territory. The late ’80s saw a shift to a videotape workflow for most post-production, which made shows such as Star Trek: The Next Generation possible within a budget, even if the show’s footage was shot on film. Once that film footage was telecined over to videotape, the entire post-production process was done in the videotape realm. And with the advent of Babylon 5 and its 100% CGI effects pipeline, there were portions of shows that only ever existed on videotape and never touched film even once. seaQuest DSV, which premiered in the fall of 1993 (months after Babylon 5’s premiere, and an Emmy win for the Video Toaster-based effects of its pilot movie), is like that: its underwater “exteriors” were creatures of the digital realm, outputted only to videotape and edited into the show in post production. They don’t exist on film and can’t be rescanned at a higher resolution, because they exist only at the resolution of videotape. This set becomes a case study in how ’90s TV – especially ’90s genre TV – might make it to Blu-Ray. … Read more

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Blu-Ray Doctor Who TV Series Video

Doctor Who: The Abominable Snowmen

1 min read

Order it from theLogBook.com/StoreThough it’s a Blu-Ray release bringing back to life the second multi-part story of Doctor Who’s classic fifth season (affectionately known to longtime fans of the original series as “the monster season”), The Abominable Snowmen is currently the end of the road for this kind of release: the fully animated re-creation of classic B&W stories whose original episodes are missing either in their entirety or partially. In the case of The Abominable Snowmen, only the second of six episodes still exists, so the animation has a lot of heavy lifting to do. Fortunately, thanks to the show’s legion of fans dating back to the original broadcasts in the 1960s, there exist audio recordings of every episode, so after some restoration of that audio, the audio side of the audiovisual of this story is already in the bag. That leaves the episodes themselves to be recreated visually to match the soundtrack – like creating a new cartoon to match a 50-year-old audio track. … Read more

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Blu-Ray Movies Star Trek Video

Star Trek: The Motion Picture: Director’s Edition: The Complete Adventure

1 min read

Order it from theLogBook.com StoreI’ve made no secret of the fact that, in a world where every Trekkie worth their weight in salty dodecahedrons worships at the altar of The Wrath Of Khan, I have been, and always shall be, a Motion Picture guy. I’ve never seen it as plodding or “motionless”. The characters never seemed wooden to me, the sets and uniforms never seemed colorless. And finally, there’s a version of the movie that seems to show everyone else what was in my head all along – this is not a bad movie at all. … Read more