A&E UFO DVD Set 2 Arrives!

Hi all,

My A&E UFO DVD Set 2 arrived this morning. I only had about 30 minutes
to examine it before I had to go to work, so here are my initial comments.

* basically it's about the same as A&E's UFO set 1. Same style of artwork
on the cover & discs, same type of container, same type of menus. And from
my brief glimpse at the episodes, the same high quality of audio/video (and
at the corrected, slowed down speed from the PAL versions)

* the commentary tracks are as expected. Ed Bishop for SUB-SMASH, Mike
Billington & Alan Perry for KILL STRAKER. Sylvia Anderson and Wanda Ventham
for TIMELASH. I listened to about a minute of the KILL STRAKER and TIMELASH
commentaries -- KILL STRAKER seemed to have a lot of talking and very informative.
Billington's seemed a bit groggy/soft-spoken. TIMELASH seemed to be like
two giggly schoolgirls chatting about the episode they are watching. But
again, this is only from listening for a minute -- my opinion will likely
be different after I've heard all of them.

* the "Video Outtakes" would be best titled "Audio Outtakes". There's quite
a few of these, none of which appeared on the UK discs, and some of which
appeared on the French discs. For KILL STRAKER, they have the original
audio of Ed Bishop & Mike Billington talking in Moonbase, illustrated by
the video from the episode. You can see/hear that the conversation was
filmed/recorded in two passes, and you can hear the "other" actor talking
in the background with performances that haven't been heard before, plus
when they screw up a line and restart, plus the crew saying "action", etc.
There is also the original audio of 2 guards searching the liesure sphere,
again illustrated with video from the finished episode.  

* the 3 takes of SID singing (first heard on the French discs) are here.
The footage illustrating this seems like it might be something that wasn't
seen in any episode.

* the filming of the night scenes during the daytime in TIMELASH (first
seen on the French discs) is here.

* a 2-second shot of a clapperboard in TIMELASH with Henderson and Foster
behind it (first seen
in Fanderson's UFO documentary) is here.

* Some alternate audio of Tim jumping off the farmhouse rooftop (first in
the French discs) is here.

* the "photo gallery" is just like that in Set 1 -- all frame captures.
A complete waste of time, and especially dissapointing to me, as they asked
me for gallery photos and I sent them ~60 of them, none of which were used.

So that's my initial, 30-minute impression. If there are mastering errors,
I haven't had the time to find them. Assuming that there aren't, people
will most likely be very pleased, as the episodes look great, there are
3 commentary tracks, and a nice handful of audio/video outtakes (some which
have never been seen before on either the UK or French discs). There's
certainly a lot of stuff from the UK discs which is missing here, but I
still think the A&E disc still stands on its own, and has its own unique
extras.

I'll certainly have more to report tomorrow, after I've had a chance to
listen to the commentaries and briefly check the video/audio quality of
each episode.

Marc

Hi all,

Okay, I've had a chance to listen to the commentary tracks. The Ed
Bishop track is the same one that's on the UK DVD's. I never much
liked this commentary, because he says very little and doesn't supply
much information. Due to the speed differences between the US and
UK versions of the episode, it sounds like they slowed down Ed's
commentary, which makes him sound a bit drugged. (this also happened
with Gerry Anderson's IDENTIFIED commentary).

The other two commentary tracks were produced specifically for A&E by
Jeff Smart, and don't sound slowed down at all. The KILL STRAKER
commentary is certainly the funniest of all the UFO commentaries --
Mike Billington and Alan Perry have a great time making fun of the
episode, and I laughed out loud on several occasions. Also, unlike
the Ed Bishop commentary, there are very few pauses in this
commentary -- I think that both of these guys each say more than Ed
does in his solo commentary!

The TIMELASH commentary is actually the best in terms of information
from when the series was made. Perhaps the women have better
memories. :-) It also sounded like they occasionally referred to
the list of questions I thought people would be interested in,
addressing the possible romance between Lake and Straker, addressing
what happened to Freeman, how Wanda got the job on UFO, etc. There
are lot's of stories about what happened at the time, and them both
pointing out interesting details about the Pinewood backlot. It has
a gossipy flavor to it, but it's still quite good. I think this is
my favorite of all the UFO commentaries, but I think this might be
because it's Sylvia and Wanda (I suspect some people will like the Ed
Bishop commentary just because it's Ed). Again, this commentary is
quite full -- there are very few pauses and lots of talking.

While I was watching the episodes during the commentary, and also
doing spot-checks of the other episodes, I was dumbfounded by the
spectacular video quality. Of course, we've all come to expect that
the quality is perfect on these UFO DVDs, but I guess it never ceases
to amaze me how good these look and sound! Also, on my setup, the
A&E DVDs look better than the Carlton DVD's (due to my Region 1
player being much higher quality than my multiregion player), so in a
sense this *is* the very best I've ever seen these episodes look.
There even were a few scenes where I noticed things that I had never
noticed before (even though I've watched the Carlton versions and the
Japanese laserdiscs several times)

Marc

> * the 3 takes of SID singing (first heard on the French discs) are here.
> The footage illustrating this seems like it might be something that wasn't
> seen in any episode.

I have always been intrigued by the SID singing thingy. Any
chance of some audio files so we can hear please?

> there are
> 3 commentary tracks, and a nice handful of audio/video outtakes (some which
> have never been seen before on either the UK or French discs). There's
> certainly a lot of stuff from the UK discs which is missing here, but I
> still think the A&E disc still stands on its own, and has its own unique
> extras.

This is something which seems a pretty standard practice. The
offering of different 'extras' to folks in different countries who buy
what is, basically, the same product. It happens almost
universally, even when the *same* company puts out releases in
different countries.

Why do they do this? Do they not realise that we, in country x,
want to see the goodies served up to country y and vice versa?

Galaxy Quest was another example. US audiences got a 'bonus'
in the form of the dialogue in Thermian. We in the UK didn't.

*sigh*

Dave.

>I have always been intrigued by the SID singing thingy. Any
>chance of some audio files so we can hear please?

I put up an audio file of one of the 3 takes several months
ago in my section covering the French UFO DVDs. Here's a
direct link to the SID singing file:

http://ufoseries.com/videos/frDvdSidSinging.mp3

Marc

>Why do they do this? Do they not realise that we, in country x,
>want to see the goodies served up to country y and vice versa?

Well, in the case of the commentary tracks, Carlton paid for
2 commentary tracks (Ed and Gerry's), and wasn't willing to
pay for any more. A&E got these commentaries for free, so they
spent some of their own money on 2 more commentaries. I've
heard that A&E paid far less for their commentaries than
Carlton did. A bit ironic, since the A&E commentaries are
better than the Carlton ones.

As for the video outtakes, this one's a bit of a mystery.
Presumably the video outtakes that appear on the A&E and
TF1 UFO DVDs were available to Carlton. So it appears
that Carlton Video decided not to use them. Perhaps
after all those other extras they had put on, they
decided there wasn't enough room for these? Or perhaps
they decided that they weren't sufficiently interesting?
Or perhaps it was a simply a mistake (breakdown in
communications, etc.).

Marc

It is a pity that there is not more "uniformity" in what extras appear on
each teritories' releases of the UFO DVD product. Nevertheless, as a big fan
of the series, I've ordered the US release as well as the Carlton UK set
which I already have.
My UK DVD player and TV set can emit a true NTSC signal, so I'll also try to
spot the differences between the NTSC and PAL "speed up" which has been the
long subject of debate on the mailing lists(!)

Thanks for the "first impressions" of the new DVD set, Marc. Much
appreciated.

Dan.


----- Original Message ----- > As for the video outtakes, this one's a bit
of a mystery.

Marc, do you have any clues as to how sales of the DVD's (probably only set
one at this point) are going? I'm curious how widespread the market is for
them. Surely there must be momre than jsut a handful of people buying or
they wouldn't go to the effort of producing them...

Mary


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

>Marc, do you have any clues as to how sales of the DVD's (probably only set
>one at this point) are going? I'm curious how widespread the market is for
>them. Surely there must be momre than jsut a handful of people buying or
>they wouldn't go to the effort of producing them...

I've heard that A&E's UFO DVD Set 1 has been selling poorly. We've
seen that the sales numbers on DeepDiscountDvd.com and Amazon.com
look pretty good, but that doesn't make up for the fact that most of
the video stores in the USA are not even carrying it. I get really
frustrated when I go to a Best Buy or a Borders and see the entire
A&E line of DVDs available *except* UFO. It's possible that if A&E
realized in advance how poor the sales were going to be, that they
wouldn't have bothered releasing it. But lucky for us they did!

Marc

In Northern California, it has been easy to find UFO at retail stores. I
have seen it at Borders, Tower Records and Fry's Electronics.


Ron

Marc Martin wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Okay, I've had a chance to listen to the commentary tracks. The Ed
> Bishop track is the same one that's on the UK DVD's. I never much
> liked this commentary, because he says very little and doesn't supply
> much information. Due to the speed differences between the US and
> UK versions of the episode, it sounds like they slowed down Ed's
> commentary, which makes him sound a bit drugged.

Did you do a comparison? He actually sounds a bit like that on
the UK DVDs to be fair.

>Did you do a comparison? He actually sounds a bit like that on
>the UK DVDs to be fair.

Yep. I just did an A/B comparison with the Carlton SUB-SMASH
commentary. On the A&E version the pitch of his voice is
lower and he's talking slower. It's been slowed down. It's
really unfortunate, because both the Ed Bishop and Gerry
Anderson commentary sounded a bit sluggish originally.
Having them slowed down even further make these commentaries
almost intolerable! :-(

Also, I've had a chance to properly spot-check all the
chapters on all the episodes on A&E's UFO DVD Set 2,
and the audio and video quality is fine. There are no
PAL-speedups, no audio screwups in the mastering
phase, and these all are the new digitally remastered
versions. All appears to be fine.

I did notice a mistake on the back of the packaging though
-- it says that the SUB-SMASH commentary is by Gerry
Anderson. No Ed Bishop commentary is mentioned on
the packaging!

Marc

Hi all,

I've updated my "What's New" page with my summary on A&E's UFO DVD Set 2:

Link -> http://ufoseries.com/new.html

MMarc

If I'm not mistaken, there were plenty of UFO boxes for sale at the Gerry
Anderson appearance in NYC this past summer and it seemed to me that many of
the people who were buying boxes were buying UFO. But to date, I have not seen
them locally.

Anthony
----- Original Message -----
From: "Marc Martin" <[hidden email]>
To: <[hidden email]>
Sent: Saturday, January 04, 2003 11:17 AM
Subject: RE: [SHADO] A&E UFO DVD Set 2 Arrives!

i just saw one at J & R on park row in lower manhattan

Bruce

On Sat, 4 Jan 2003 19:07:52 -0500 Anthony D <[hidden email]> wrote:

> If I'm not mistaken, there were plenty of UFO
> boxes for sale at the Gerry
> Anderson appearance in NYC this past summer and
> it seemed to me that many of
> the people who were buying boxes were buying
> UFO. But to date, I have not seen
> them locally.

I should have noted that I don't live in NYC. :)

Anthony
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bruce Sherman" <[hidden email]>
To: <[hidden email]>
Sent: Saturday, January 04, 2003 7:13 PM
Subject: Re: [SHADO] A&E UFO DVD Set 2 Arrives!

Marc Martin wrote:

Oh, the Mike commentary is in set 2 - been searching set 1 for it.
Sheesh! I just NOW got my set 1 and set 2 is out! <sigh>

<<
The other two commentary tracks were produced specifically for A&E by
Jeff Smart, and don't sound slowed down at all. The KILL STRAKER
commentary is certainly the funniest of all the UFO commentaries --
Mike Billington and Alan Perry have a great time making fun of the
episode, and I laughed out loud on several occasions. Also, unlike
the Ed Bishop commentary, there are very few pauses in this
commentary -- I think that both of these guys each say more than Ed
does in his solo commentary!
>>

Heh, Mike is just waaaay cool. 8^)
Gotta get it, gottagetit now. <grrrrrrr>

<<
Why do they do this? Do they not realise that we, in country x,
want to see the goodies served up to country y and vice versa?
>>

Yes, Dave, they DO realise it - they want us to buy ALL the various
releases.

-- Y

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http://yuchtar.users4.50megs.com/
http://home.earthlink.net/~nunzie945

I see Amazon.co.uk have also knocked the price of the Carlton sets to
£19.99. I'm not sure if this price includes VAT or not? But still not
a bad discount.

The Lunadude

I'm curious to know does any one have a handle/info on the Japanese
UFO DVD's that are due later this year?

I'm kinda looking forward to these, as a serious record collector the
Japanese have a reputation of providing impeccably presented/packaged
product - I have no reason to believe that a Japanese produced UFO
boxed set will be anything other. Although, I can't see them making
any serious picture quality improvement over the Carlton produced
DVD's. But the extra's an freebies that may come with such set may be
interesting to say the least.

Does any one have a source for Japanese DVD's ? With the Carlton DVD's
being widely avaialable [now at knock down prices] I can't see them
being imported.

The Lunadude.

Well spotted! - when www.amazon.co.uk throw the postage charges on it, it
does push the cost up(!) But even so, sounds like a very good deal!
Incidentally, if anyone is a fan of the Gerry Anderson Supermarionation show
"Joe 90", www.play.com has a stunning price of UK pounds £29.99 for the
complete DVD box-set!

Dan.

----- Original Message -----
From: <[hidden email]>


I see Amazon.co.uk have also knocked the price of the Carlton sets to
£19.99. I'm not sure if this price includes VAT or not? But still not
a bad discount.

The Lunadude

Well, the sets are coming later this year...and are going to be very
expensive. The Thunderbirds sets (there are two) were $268, each!
Excellent packaging, cool extras...almost $300?
A reliable source is CD Japan, <A HREF="http://www.cdjapan.co.jp/">
cdjapan.co.jp</A>
I've bought from them, and they are great.

Ken