The third season of Lost is now behind is, and before our heads have a chance to stop spinning from the now-traditional end-of-season plot twists, the DVD box set has already been announced. But you won’t be watching it anytime soon: it’s scheduled for release right before Christmas, both to make sure it winds up in your stockings and to help get Lost fans salivating for the fourth season, which will begin airing in February 2008. If you want to go ahead and pre-order it, Lost Season 3 is now available in theLogBook.com Store.

Outpost Gallifrey has learned that the Tom Baker/Elisabeth Sladen four-parter Planet Of Evil (guest starring Space: 1999′s Prentis Hancock) and the 1972 six-part story The Sea-Devils, starring Jon Pertwee with Roger Delgado as the Master, are on tap for future DVD releases. Also, it has been learned that the entire Key To Time season, featuring Baker alongside K-9 and Mary Tamm as Romana, will be released in the U.K. for the first time (it was released both individually and in box set form in 2002 in North America, which has long been a sore point for British fans of the DVDs), with the kind of “extras that they deserve”, and digital remastering (which the North American release did not receive when it was rushed into release). There’s still a question mark over whether or not U.S. and Canadian fans will ever be treated to those new extras, or if the BBC is simply expecting fans on this side of the pond to buy the box set a second time. U.K. fans will get the Key To Time as a box set this fall.
Source: Outpost Gallifrey

It’s time for the European Space Agency to make the big decisions for the upcoming ExoMars mission, which is scheduled to add a European presence to the Red Planet when it lift off in 2013. ESA’s member nations were in Paris last week, where scientists asked them to approve a new design for ExoMars, which would increase its cost, its launch weight and its scientific capabilities. The new design is expensive because it adds an orbiter to the lander, whereas the original mission plan called for ExoMars to transmit its findings to American space probes orbiting Mars, which would then relay that data to Earth. A final decision from the members is expected on June 11th, which could be anything from approving the redesigned mission to scrapping the mission plans altogether.
Source: BBC News

It’s a story you’ve heard so many times before – after seven years, another Star Trek spinoff has come to an emotional end…only this isn’t one you’ve been watching on TV. The fan-made series Hidden Frontier has released its final episode, closing the books on its intricate storyline (and serving as a launching point for a new series to be set in the 24th century Trek timeline, Star Trek: Odyssey). For seven years, a group of west coast-based fans courted controversy and won acclaim for bringing homosexual and bisexual characters to the fore in a way that the broadcast Trek series never quite managed, all while shooting much of their show against green-screen, compositing meticulously-designed computer-modeled “sets” into the action. You can see the final installment here. In the meantime, a much-anticipated fan series has put its own premiere installment online, over two years in the making, and also set in the post-Voyager 24th century. Pay a visit to Starship Intrepid for a distinctly Scottish-accented take on the Trek universe; they’re making their premiere episode available via various download services and Bittorrent.

The future of the post-apocalyptic drama Jericho is as up-in-the-air as the fate of its characters. Fans have sent tons of nuts to CBS as a show of support, in a campaign similar to the Farscape “crackers” campaign. (The in-joke here is that the cliffhanger ending of the show’s first season ended with one of Jericho’s main characters saying “Nuts!” in response to a demand for surrender.) CBS’ programming schedule for next fall does not include Jericho, but fans are now turning to another network, hoping that TNT may revive the show. CBS has yet to issue a response to the campaign, but has made some vague allusions to finishing the story “in some form” – though theories on what form that could take have ranged from a TV movie to wrap up the cliffhanger, to something web-based. In the meantime, fans seem intent on continuing to innundate the network with their nuts.

A grass-roots campaign has begun among fans of ELO co-founder Roy Wood to get two of his out-of-print classic albums released on CD for the first time. The “ReleaseRoy” website has started a petition to convince Warner Bros., the labels with the rights to Wood’s ’70s albums On The Road Again and Super Active Wizzo, to release them on CD, with the petition hopefully demonstrating that there’s a ready-made audience for the albums. Both of those albums were released on vinyl only, and have been out of print for over 30 years. You can add your name at the petition site here.

Film Score Monthly is well-known for their efforts to preserve classic movie scores via remastering, pristine digital transfers, and a great package to go with each CD release. And it’s no secret that FSM, like no small number of us hanging around theLogBook.com home office, are especially big fans of the late, great Jerry Goldsmith. Their latest release shows just how far they’ll go to archive Goldsmith’s musical legacy, though some soundtrack fans may take issue with it. The latest release is Jerry Goldsmith’s first science fiction score, from the 1965 film The Satan Bug. Two reels of the original music masters, including the movie’s opening and end titles, were discovered, leading to this release. No problem, right? The bad news: many key scenes, including virtually all of the movie’s action set pieces, exist only as “music + FX” tracks previous prepared international laserdisc release. Such tracks enable foreign actors to dub the movie’s dialogue in their native tongue, while retaining the timing of the music and effects. Why this isn’t a good deal: many of Goldsmith’s earliest SF action cues are smothered with helicopters, gunfire, and various screams and crashes, becuase those pieces only existed on the “music + FX” tracks. As such, Film Score Monthly is issuing The Satan Bug‘s soundtrack – the first time this movie’s music has been released anywhere – as an “archival edition,” and are taking great pains to make sure soundtrack fans know exactly what they’re getting on this CD. Man, the things we put up to hear a little more Jerry Goldsmith. You can order your own archival edition of The Satan Bug now from theLogBook.com.

The latest Doctor Who audio drama is available from Big Finish, and once again listeners are getting two stories for the price of one. In Eddie Robson’s I.D., the sixth Doctor (Colin Baker) discovers something sinister brewing beneath a 32nd century human colony. Sara Griffiths, who once appeared in the 1987 Sylvester McCoy story Delta And The Bannermen, guest stars. Along with the three-part I.D., the same 2-CD set includes a self-contained, single-episode story, Urgent Calls, also starring Baker. I.D. / Urgent Calls is now available from theLogBook.com Store.

Can you make the mental adjustment from “Mike and the Bots” to “Mike and his buds”? The Film Crew is betting on it. The trio of MST3K alumni Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett is reuniting to do what they do best: tear the hearts, and any other exposed organs, right out of bad B-movies. Instead of being stranded in space to watch bad movies, the Film Crew is forced to slave away in a basement to create commentary tracks for movies that don’t already have them. The first release, a Rue McLanahan potboiler called Hollywood After Dark, will be released on July 10th, having won a fan poll as the most anticipated of four movies that have already been “riffed” MST-style. The second Film Crew DVD, Killers From Space, will follow in August. You can pre-order both of the Film Crew’s first two tours of duty now in theLogBook.com Store.

It looks like “fair and balanced” doesn’t necessarily include the balance of the Force. At Celebration IV, the convention celebrating the 30th anniversary of Star Wars this week, Steve Sansweet revealed that Fox News got the story wrong when it recently claimed that Star Wars TV movies were in the works. (Chalk it up to wishful thinking, but I was equally guilty of passing that news along here. – ed.) A live action TV series is still in the early stages of pre-production, but no TV movies are forthcoming. Further details of the series may emerge during Celebration IV, and if so, we’ll let you know.

The Golden Globe-winning series Heroes arrives on DVD this August, and the demand for its first season is expected to be so high that studios and retailers are literally shuffling the schedules for their other DVD releases to get them out of the way. The extras are especially promising, including a never-before-seen 73-minute producer’s cut of the pilot episode, featurettes focusing on the show’s stunts, special effects and the artwork at the center of several episodes, and dozens of deleted scenes. You can pre-order the first season of Heroes now in theLogBook.com Store.

Tim Russ back on network TV. Star Trek: Voyager alumnus Tim Russ is back on network TV; he’s featured in a non-SF comedy series called Sam I Am which has been picked up by ABC.

Elevator labeling action. A new Atari 2600 homebrew is just around the corner, and programmer Bob Montgomery and AtariAge.com are inviting budding video game label artists to design its “look”. The game, Elevators Amiss!, involves a hapless maid rushing from floor to floor of a hotel and avoiding being crushed by elevators, which seem to have a mind of their own. You can see more about the game, view the entries to date, and submit your own designs here; the contest runs through May 30th.

SG-1′s final 20 hourly missions are already on their way to their DVD; just weeks after the show’s ten year run ends on Sci-Fi Channel, the entire season will be available on DVD, complete with the customary extras that fans have come to expect from the SG-1 DVD range – “Directors’ Series” close-ups on the making of individual episodes, commentaries, and a first for SG-1 DVDs, deleted scenes from the season’s 20 episodes. You can pre-order Stargate SG-1 Season 10 now from theLogBook.com. Two direct-to-DVD movies are also in the pipeline, and we’ll have pre-order information for those as soon as possible.

Oldergames has announced that pre-orders are being taken for the three new homebrew games they’ll be showing off at this year’s Classic Gaming Expo. Commodore 64 fans can look forward to Silo 64, a fast and furious, post-apocalyptic two-player shoot ‘em up, while Sega Saturn fans are getting Lost & Found 2, the follow-up to another popular Oldergames title. Another sequel game is available for owners of the 3DO system, Icebreaker 2. Visit Oldergames to place your orders; the games will be shipped when they return from CGE in late July.
Source: Oldergames

…you run! The next two UK Doctor Who DVD releases are available for pre-order. Robot is Tom Baker’s first adventure, and features DVD commentary with the man himself, as well as featurettes about his selection for the role and his introduction, and the new title sequence which identified Doctor Who for the rest of the 1970s. This summer sees the release of the oft-maligned Colin Baker story Timelash, perhaps most notable for featuring Paul Darrow of Blake’s 7 fame as the villain of the piece, and Darrow joins Baker for the commentary on that story. You can order these, or any other Doctor Who stories on DVD, right now in theLogBook.com Store. Coming in August, the BBC has announced a 2-DVD box set consisting of the Davison-era adventures Time-Flight and Arc Of Infinity, with bonus features heavily focused on TARDIS traveler Tegan (Janet Fielding), who pulls off the unique stunt of leaving the TARDIS and then rejoining the team in the course of those two stories. Fielding makes her first on-camera interview appearance in the extras for those two future releases, which will also be among the first to acknowledge the Big Finish audio adventures. August 14th will see the North American release of Robot and Survival.

Pre-orders are now being taken worldwide for Crowded House‘s eagerly anticipated (well, at least by us Crowded House fans out here) new album, Time On Earth. The band’s first studio album since 1993′s Together Alone, Time On Earth reunites Neil Finn, Nick Seymour and Mark Hart with new drummer Matt Sherrod. The band has also announced an international tour, though much of the U.S. leg of the tour concentrates on the northern states. You can pre-order Time On Earth from wherever on Earth you are right now in theLogBook.com Store.