Which one of us is Aukon? Zargo?
Camilla???
With a surfeit of news, the premiere of the Sarah Jane Adventures and Blink, one of the seasons best episodes, as the subject of our commentary, the Three Who Rule had plenty to shoot their mouths off about. And shoot they did, though not always on topic. Enjoy! (feed, web, direct download)
Wel, at the very least, I'm "Not Adric," so I won't get held in thrall of those villainous vampires. :)
I'd just like to add my own two cents regarding the Davros box set coming out on DVD in the U.K. in November. It was stated in RFS that the "Remembrance of the Daleks" Special Edition DVD included in this set merely added a couple of documentaries and reinserted video effects that were mistakenly omitted in the original U.K. release. And that's it.
That actually completely misses the point of this new Remembrance release. The video represents an entirely new transfer and clean up with a new 5.1 soundtrack. The Doctor Who Restoration Team, at the time of the original DVD release, did not realize that the McCoy episodes were in rough shape, and therefore had not allocated a budget for cleaning up the video. This new release was to rectify this oversight.
As an added bonus, the U.K. release will reinstate the Beatles songs that were removed from the original due to copyright reasons. (The copyright issues remain outside of the U.K., so any international versions of the DVD will again likely have the Beatles songs absent.) There are no plans to release this new version of Remembrance as a single outside of the Davros box set.
I think one of the more exciting aspects of the upcoming Silurians/Sea Devils box set is what may have been done to improve the video quality of the Silurians.
A little background. The BBC lost/junked their broadcast quality colour copies of the Silurians. Eventually, they managed to recover a black-and-white film version of the story, and a poor quality color copy taped off air in the U.S. Neither of these two copies are optimal. The former is sharper, but has no colour; the latter has colour, but is blurrier and degraded due to the PAL to NTSC standards conversion it went through.
About a decade ago, the image from the black-and-white copy was combined with the colour information from the U.S. tape to restore the story. The image was not exactly broadcast quality, but was still very watchable and even released on VHS.
Today, with more modern computer processing and better reverse standards conversion from NTSC to PAL (first used in the "Claws of Axos" DVD release!), the BBC is able to recombine the two sources to create an even better restoration. This is, I believe, what we will see on this new Silurians DVD. The Restoration Team has stated that the first episode is now indistinguishable in video quality to other Doctor Who's of that era. The image degrades in the middle (due to the video quality of the sources declining) and improves again towards the end of the story.
Is there anything those Axons can't do?
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