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In 1999, former Atari programmer Howard Scott Warshaw (E.T., Yars’ Revenge, Raiders Of The Lost Ark) gathered some of his erstwhile game-making cohorts to embark on a home-made documentary about the pre-crash years at Atari. Warshaw, now an independent filmmaker, still stands by his claim that being an Atari programmer was the most amazing job he’s ever had - and by the end of the first half-hour installment on this disc, it’s hard to not believe him.

The four half-hour episodes on the DVD (paradoxically produced in the order 4, 1, 2, 3 - Mr. Lucas would be proud) detail the working environment at Atari, the perils of dealing with management and huge wads of cash, the difficulty in particular of programming the Atari 2600, and the simple joys of creating games the way Atari
used to (and the way that few companies or programmers do now). (more…)

Masterful yet flamboyant gentleman thief Arsene Lupin III and his accomplice Jigen rob a European casino. But when Lupin discovers that he’s only gotten counterfeit bills, or “goat bills”, he decides to go after the source in the tiny country of Cagliostro. When he discovers a mysterious ring and the forced marriage of Lady Clarisse and Count Cagliostro, the mastermind behind the counterfeiting operation, Lupin and his compadres manage to put a stop the to the evil count and his plans, and end up revealing a hidden treasure. (more…)

As is the case with the DVD release of the 1996 Doctor Who TV movie, the four movies that kicked off the saga of Lexx are available on DVD overseas only due to a tangled web of distribution rights in North America. When the Lexx movies premiered (over a year before the weekly series appeared), distribution rights in the U.S. went to the Showtime cable network - and Showtime has hung onto those rights ever since. While the rest of Lexx is gradually becoming available on region 1 DVD, there’s no indication we’ll ever see the movies outside of Canada-only releases, and in the meantime the North American VHS releases have been packaged like low-budget direct-to-video flicks, with no indication on the packaging that the four movies have anything at all to do with the series proper. (more…)