The Merchandise Guide
DVD Review
Compiled by Martin Willey

The boxes use fluorescent orange and green colour schemes with familiar publicity shots of Landau and Bain. It would have been nice to see the original logo, or more unusual photos, but that's a fan quibble. They stand out and they're not unattractive, so it's not a bad job.

Here are examples of the better picture quality- great detail and colour.

The other obvious picture problem is in Ring Around The Moon, which is much too dark. Many scenes in this episode are meant to be dark, but often you can barely see anything. The only DVD artifacts I saw were in Last Sunset's dust cloud scenes, which become very blocky at times (this may be a fault of my player). The sound did not have any obvious faults, apart from some minor warbling at a couple of points.

Fortunately, the second series episodes are far superior, and indeed clearer and more colourful than the Carlton releases in the UK. Three of the most flawed episodes (Death's Other Dominion, Dragon's Domain and The Testament Of Arkadia) were reissued with corrected prints on a special bonus disc included with the compilation MegaSet.

Although initially the extras were sparse, they were better than I expected. A&E's DVD sets for The Avengers have just a handful of fuzzy photos, but they have done a good job for Space 1999. The variety of pictures was good, with both familiar and unusual shots. There were a few pictures flopped left for right, and on later year 1 sets the quality became quite poor. Only for the last two sets did A&E add significant extras, although most were previously seen on the Carlton discs. A good effort, but those particularly interested in extras are better served by the excellent Carlton and TF1 sets. The Bonus Disc, however, is exceptional. In addition to the corrected episodes, the commentaries and Message From Moonbase Alpha are terrific extras.

Overall I was impressed by the A&E releases. The inconsistent picture is a problem, but not a serious one; the year 2 episode quality is outstanding; generally the quality is superb.