The Merchandise GuideDVD: UK
Compiled by Martin Willey
The Merchandise Guide|
Series One Special Edition (DVD): UK 14 November 2005 £79.99. Deleted May 2010, with Blu-Ray edition announced July. See also: The Complete First Series (Blu-Ray): UK 11 October 2010 £79.99. See also: The Complete Second Series (DVD and Blu-Ray): UK 28 September 2015 After Carlton were taken over by Granada, the Carlton DVDs were deleted, and rights were sold to Network Video, a division of Virgin that specializes in cult television. After the Year One boxset release, there has been much speculation. In 2007, a Year 2 boxset was announced with a release date of 10 September 2007, but to date no progress has been made on the release. The PrintsNetwork commissioned a new digital restoration of the Year One episodes. The image is remarkably clearer and brighter than the previous releases. More details. 
In addition, the soundtrack has been cleaned up from the original three track (music, effects and dialogue) elements, and is available in both original mono and a new 5.1 remix. There is also a music only track. Most episodes have all three audio tracks, but Breakaway and Dragon's Domain have commentaries which mean one audio track is sacrificed (music and mono, respectively). Menus have thick bands of red and blue; the main menu has the launching rescue Eagle (an old ITC publicity photo), the logo and moonbase; other menus show a lunar horizon with characters. Episode menus show the episode clips in a column of commlock screens. Clear and simple, but not as imaginative as the Italian discs, or the original Carlton menus. There are no subtitles for any episodes, or for the extras (unlike Carlton, which had subtitles). ExtrasApart from commentaries, most of the extras are on the 7th disc. The A&E bonus disc commentaries by Sylvia Anderson, and Johnny Byrne and Christopher Penfold (for Testament Of Arkadia and Dragon's Domain) were announced but dropped. Possible reasons are the disc capacity (alternative audio tracks had to be deleted for the two Gerry Anderson tracks), rights issues with A&E/ Jeff Smart who made the commentaries, and/or the poor mixing with the original dialogue). Zienia Merton recorded a commentary, but this seems also to have been dropped (?). The first two documentaries are reworked from The Space: 1999 Documentary (1996), but the These Episodes documentary is completely new. Of particular interest are the Clapperboard documentary, the alternative titles and the Landau/Bain intro (the picture is relatively poor quality, but still watchable). The deleted SFX shots include several alternative shots from Breakaway (one unusual shot is the Moon passing Saturn), plus alternative shots from episodes: a few have been previously seen in the Kindred/ Fanderson documentary. Several Carlton extras are missing from Network (Year One only): Horizon behind the scenes footage and Lyons Maid ice lolly commercial. There are no equivalents to the photo galleries, merchandise galleries and character/actor text biographies on the original discs. On Disc 7 are PDFs of 13 original scripts (generally poor quality photocopies) and the third Space 1999 annual (a particularly poor copy, with taped up rips). The PDF named Black Sun is actually Space Brain. There are also two booklets. "ITC Episode Guide" (24 pages) includes the original ITC guide (illustrated, p3-21) and a short Gerry Anderson article "A Television Series Is Born" (p22-23). "Production Notes" (32 pages, just 1 interior photo) contains "Back To The Future", a Mike Richardson guide to the making of Year One (p3-25, reprint from Action TV), and "Restoring Space: 1999" by Jonathan Wood on the HD restoration process (p26-31). The packaging is two cases with three discs in one, four in the other. The discs are overlapping and awkward to extract.  
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Below: menus   
Below: discs are packed overlapping 
Below: the booklets  
Below: extras- "These episodes" documentary  
Below: extras- Clapperboard 
Below: alternative titles  |
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Copyright Martin Willey ;
packaging and screen images copyright Network Video
