:: theLogBook.com DVD Reviews ::

Alas, poor Ghost Light. The second of four adventures aired in the final season of Doctor Who, it was actually the last one filmed - making it the last BBC-produced Doctor Who to be made until the cameras began rolling on the new series earlier this year. Ghost Light has since been afforded something of a near-mythic status, hailed as a truly revolutionary turn in the show’s storytelling style…while others still scratch their heads a bit and wonder what it’s all about. (more…)

This is one of those cases where the differences between Battle Of The Planets and Gatchaman, the early animè series on which it was based, stand out in sharp, sharp relief. In the original Japanese version of the first episode on this disc, a meteor storm causes destruction on a massive scale - skyscrapers topple, and lots of people die. In the American translation of the same show…very little of the above is allowed to come through. It’s more of a major nuisance than a global disaster. (more…)

The fourth of the six original individual volumes of Battle Of The Planets on DVD offers some more interesting studies in contrast. As with previous volumes in the series, the DVD contains two episodes of Battle Of The Planets, along with the two corresponding episodes of the Japanese animè series Gatchaman, from which Battle Of The Planets was created. The long-standing common knowledge that Battle’s cutesy 7-Zark-7 robot sequences were necessitated by the surgical removal of violent Gatchaman scenes, to the tune of several minutes per episode, gets quite a boost here - in both episodes of the original Japanese show, the bad guys get to wreak a lot more carnage before our heroes arrive on the scene. (more…)

“The budget for this wouldn’t buy the coffee on a science fiction production nowadays,” says director Michael Hayes in the commentary for Armageddon Factor, and when it’s plainly obvious that the “captain’s chair” in one of the main sets is clearly a rolling office chair fixed in the middle of the set only by virtue of its wheels being trapped in a “bowl” built into the floor, it’s hard to disagree with the man who made the thing. The Armageddon Factor, despite bringing the eagerly-awaited resolution to the Key To Time story arc of Doctor Who’s 16th season, moves at a snail’s pace at times, and could have easily had two of its six episodes harmlessly excised to tighten things up. (more…)