The Merchandise Guide
DVD: UK
Compiled by Martin Willey

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 Prints

Network 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).

Extras

Apart 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.

• Network
• Year One Box Set £54.99
• DVD Times article with menu shots

Disc	Episodes	Extras
"Series One Special Edition" Box set Released 14 November 2005
Disc 1	Breakaway Matter Of Life And Death Black Sun Ring Around The Moon	Gerry Anderson commentary on Breakaway (no music only track)
Disc 2	Earthbound Another Time, Another Place Missing Link Guardian Of Piri
Disc 3	Force Of Life Alpha Child The Last Sunset Voyager's Return	Text commentary by Chris Bentley on The Last Sunset
Disc 4	Collision Course Death's Other Dominion The Full Circle End Of Eternity
Disc 5	War Games The Last Enemy The Troubled Spirit Space Brain	Text commentary by Chris Bentley on Space Brain
Disc 6	The Infernal Machine Mission Of The Darians Dragon's Domain The Testament Of Arkadia	Gerry Anderson commentary on Dragon's Domain (no mono track)
Disc 7	Concept and Creation Featurette (documentary by Kindred, 12:36m) SFX and Design Featurette (documentary by Kindred, 16:49m) These Episodes Featurette (new documentary by Kindred, 10:58m) Guardian of Piri Remembered - Catherine Schell (1:36m) Clapperboard Two Part Special on Gerry Anderson (restored and edited - to remove non-Anderson material - 38:56m) Alien Attack Trailer Journey Through The Black Sun Trailer Textless Generic Titles Alternate Opening and Closing Titles Barry Gray's Theme Demo Martin Landau and Barbara Bain introduce the US Season One Premiere (from KRON-TV, 1975) SFX Plates and Deleted SFX Scenes with Music Track (11:35m) PCs only: Selected script PDFs (13 episodes including Void Ahead) Space: 1999 Annual PDF