Italian UFO DVD Set 1 Arrives!

Hi all,

I finally received my copy of the Italian UFO DVD the other day. So
far, I don't have any technical problems with the DVD mastering,
although like the French UFO DVDs my APEX DVD player has some
difficulty reaching some of the tracks (but the problem isn't as
severe here).

Certainly the 30 minute Ed Bishop interview here is much better than
his SUB-SMASH commentary on the A&E and Carlton DVDs. Paolo Malaguti
tells me this interview was recorded in March 2000 for Canal Jimmy.

One of my favorite extras in this set is the excerpts from the
ISOSHADO conventions featuring Ed BIshop, Mike Billington, Gabrielle
Drake, Wanda Ventham, Dolores Mantez, and George Sewell.
Unfortunately though, this extra is only about 5 minutes long, and on
top of that it's a "secret" feature which has no access via the
menus! (you can access it by going to extras in the INVASION:UFO
disc, and selecting chapter 7). This is a shame, as I would think
there must be hours of ISOSHADO convention footage which would be of
interest to UFO fans. Paolo suggests that if want to see more of
this sort of footage in Set 2, we should petition the makers of the
DVD at "[hidden email]".

Another favorite of mine is the theatrical trailers for the Italian
UFO compilation movies. It's amazing how you can take footage from a
TV series that you know inside and out, dub it in a different
language, recut it, and add different music -- and presto -- it's
entirely different! Also, it's interesting to compare the amazingly
poor quality of these trailers (which is probably some of the worst
video quality you will ever see on a DVD) and compare it with the
pristine quality of the remastered episodes.

The alternate/deleted scenes are interesting on this set, because
they not only allow you to watch the new scene, but you can also
watch a split-screen comparison of the alternate version with the
original version (the original version freezes in the parts where
there are extra scenes in the alternate version).

The video quality looks about the same as the Carlton versions. My
initial thoughts were that it might even be better due to superior
MPEG encoding. Certainly for the episodes which were crammed 4 per
disc on the Carlton/A&E discs and are only 3 per disc here.

I haven't watched much of the episodes, but it's amazing that there
are 4 audio tracks (stereo italian, italian dubbing 1, italian
dubbing 2, english). Unlike the French UFO DVDs, you can turn off
the subtitles while the English is going. And you can listen to
Gerry Anderson's commentary with or without subtitles.

The extras include the publicity/behind-the-scenes photos from the
Carlton DVDs, plus the script excerpts of deleted scenes translated
into Italian, plus there are new merchandise galleries with an
emphasis on Italian merchandise.

The PDF files of the dialog continuity scripts are of pretty poor
quality, but they are readble (barely). Presumably there was limited
space on the DVD for these, so they were scanned in low resolution,
in black & white, and with fairly high JPEG compression.

The animated menus are certainly the most impressive of all the UFO
DVDs seen so far, featuring detailed Moonbase interiors (command
sphere, corridor, and leisure sphere). When you select "extras" it
goes from the inside of Moonbase outside the window to the lunar
surface. Interestly, sometimes when you go through the window you
can see/hear glass shattering, which sometimes this doesn't happen.

And the episode scene selections are overlayed onto the opening of
the Interceptor chutes - inspired!

Marc