When the press release accompanying the new Journey live CD states that this June 1981 show in Houston is considered to be the band’s best live performance, and you’re talking about a band that has toured, in various configurations, since the 1970s, it’s a bit of an eyebrow raiser. But so too is former frontman Steve Perry’s credit as the producer of the DVD and CD of that concert.

And while I’ll admit that my knowledge of that touring career is a bit limited, from this viewer/listener’s point of view, the publicity blurb on this one pretty much hits the target. (more…)

Ed Wood has had a long, strange trip to the digital promised land of DVD. To begin the journey, we need to look at the early days of the DVD revolution and a strange little offshoot known as DIVX. For those of you who don’t know what DIVX was, it was a format created by Circuit City that utilized specially coded discs that only played for two days after first being run in their DIVX-enabled DVD players. Since the price of these discs was set at about $4, it was intended to be a replacement for video rentals. Customers who wished to continue to watch the movie after the viewing period had ended could “purchase” the movie by paying an additional $20 and unlocking the movie for long-term play. The special nature of these discs not only allowed Circuit City to control how long they could be watched, but on which machines, since it they would only work indefinitely on the machines in which they were unlocked. It also provided protection against copying (to this day, no one has broken the DIVX format. Of course, who knows if anyone is trying?).

The practical upshot of this was that many studios that were skeptical about the DVD format (strange to think of that attitude today) chose to release their movies on DIVX. One of these studios was Disney. One of the films they released was Ed Wood. (more…)

Possibly the last really, really good story of Colin Baker’s all-too-brief reign as the Doctor, Revelation Of The Daleks was the last Doctor Who serial to be shown before the series took its infamous 18-month hiatus from television between 1985 and 1986. It was also the final Doctor Who to be shown in the 22nd season’s 45-minute format; little did anyone know that some twenty years later, the show would find new life with a 45-minute running time. (more…)

As Terry Nation’s space opera entered its third season – originally intended to be its last – huge changes were underway in the series’ format. Perhaps the most significant of these was the fact that Blake, played by Gareth Thomas during the first two years, was no longer a regular part of the show, which naturally invited all sorts of questions about how the show could still be called Blake’s 7. But with the first two episodes written by Nation himself almost acting as a pilot for the show’s new direction, there was little doubt that this was the same show, continued, and not a spinoff. Blake’s crew was looking for him – whenever the business of surviving not only the totalitarian Federation, but the season opener’s alien armada, gave them that luxury. As the new leading man of the series, Paul Darrow as Avon came into his own, though the first few episodes handicap him with a kind of curious morality that Avon hadn’t exhibited before, and wouldn’t exhibit again later (due to BBC bosses’ concerns that you couldn’t have such a strongly amoral character as the hero). (more…)