:: theLogBook.com DVD Reviews ::

In the late 1990s, dial-up modems moved aside to make way for high speed DSL and cable modems. As broadband access spread like wildfire into homes across the world, websites streaming audio and video quickly began replacing simple, static web pages. Those who began putting original content online found a new audience of millions of web surfers looking for ways to max out their seemingly unlimited bandwidth. (more…)

Considered by some fans to be the end of the “classic series” of Red Dwarf, the sixth season completes the total departure from the ship that gives the show its title. Red Dwarf, though mentioned on a few occasions as a ship that the characters have lost track of and are trying to relocate, is never seen even once this season, while our heroes are stuck in a Starbug shuttle whose inner dimensions seemed to be constantly growing to almost TARDIS-like proportions. And yet there’s always at least one bona-fide classic on offer (in this case, the International Emmy-winning Gunmen Of The Apocalypse) and the other five episodes are peppered with classic moments. (more…)

I remember, way back in 1993, getting my first glimpse of Red Dwarf V on a friend’s PAL-converted VHS tape just shipped over from the U.K., and getting the jokes while missing a lot of the visual detail. Until recently, a dub of that already-dubbed-and-converted tape was my only copy of the show’s fifth season. Needless to say, going from that tape to this 2-DVD set was almost like watching a whole new show that I had only heard before.

Some of my first impressions about Red Dwarf V still stand, however: despite featuring what may well be the most brilliant single story of the entire show (Back To Reality), this season is where just a little bit of a rot began to set in. The show was still funny, but this season was where someone, somewhere, decided that the emphasis on action-adventure needed to outweigh the emphasis on comedy. (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…)

Fair warning here: oddly enough for something that’s been released around the world virtually simultaneously, I’m reviewing the UK (Region 2) version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, and I’m doing it for a reason.

For the most part, the release is the same in the UK as it is in North America. The movie itself gets a crisp transfer and a great sound effects mix, and it’s almost a given that the DVD’s menu structure will be based on that of the Hitchhiker’s Guide itself. (more…)

I have such mixed feelings about the fourth season of Red Dwarf. It’s still fall-down funny in many places, and still packs enough of a conceptual SF punch that it puts whole seasons of certain Star Trek spinoffs to shame. But somehow, it began to veer away from its roots, those early shows with no budget that relied on character relationships, into something more action-oriented because suddenly the producers realized that they did have a budget. In the following season, action would take center stage in several episodes. It’s still funny - it would always be funny - but just somehow lacked the heart of the early seasons. (more…)

When it comes to full-season TV DVD box sets, it’s hard to top Red Dwarf. Commentaries on every episode by the entire regular cast of the show, documentary features that redefine the word “extensive,” and bags of other bonuses. Red Dwarf III certainly isn’t about to make an exception.

It certainly doesn’t help that this may well have been the best season the show ever had. Delicately balanced between the SF action show it was about to become, and the hilariously wordy sitcom origins from which it sprang, the third season manages to reach for the best of both worlds and comes up a winner more often than not. (more…)

Aired later the same year that its first season debuted on BBC2, Red Dwarf II proves that the first six episodes of the series had a certain universal appeal - and that the second batch of six shows could eclipse them. The second season of Red Dwarf solidifies the strengths of the core characters, while also upping the stakes in the bizarre exercise of using hard SF conventions as the cornerstone of some hilarious character humor. (more…)

As a little piece of Star Wars history, this piece of produced-for-the-internet ephemera is a bit too recent to have the collectible cachet of, say, the Holiday Special, and yet I think its status as a Star Wars collectible obscures the real joy of R2-D2: Beneath The Dome: it’s a cuttingly accurate spoof of all of those deadly-earnest Biography-style shows seen on E!, A&E, VH-1, and other networks that can’t afford to slap enough consonants and vowels together to form a name with actual words. (more…)

The first season of Red Dwarf premiered early in 1988 on BBC2, and it was a revelation - a buddy comedy that just happened to be set in deep space. While some sitcoms have used SF as a setting successfully (Quark) and less than successfully (the later UPN flop Homeboys In Outer Space), Red Dwarf was the first to hit the nail on the head, balancing the SF elements and some masterful character comedy. If not for Red Dwarf, it’s doubtful that more recent entities like Lexx would exist. (more…)