There are countless documentaries about film history, but few achieve a sense of wonder like When The Lion Roars, Turner Pictures’ magnificent account of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s history. With the brilliant Patrick Stewart as host and a mountain of interviews, filmclips and a lot of other historic footage, it is a documentary like no other. First shown on Turner Pictures’ cable stations TNT and TCM both in the USA and in Europe, I was very glad when Warner finally released a DVD in 2009, just in time before I decided to rescue my own old VHS recordings. Despite the less than perfect technical quality, owing to the video post-production, this is a wonderful DVD release preserving one of the best documentaries about Hollywood ever made that should be in the collection of ever film enthusiast. This review is based on the original German version from 2009, translated, slightly updated and improved.

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This is one of these movies you might have someday seen on tv and then it never surfaced again – that’s excatly what happened to me with Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen. Everybody knows that Peter Ustinov played Hercule Poirot lots of times, but his one and only appearance as Charlie Chan in this comedic take on the oriental detective is mostly unknown. Sporting a great supporting cast and a both funny and dramatic script, the movie is not the embarassing failure it is often referred to, but a great production which doesn’t take itself too seriously. Unfortunately its bad reputation has prevented Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen from getting a proper DVD release, but there’s at least one Canadian disc which I was really glad to find years ago. Today’s review is new for DVDLog, because I wrote the initial German article, now expanded and improved, before this website even existed.

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The autumn and winter season on the BBC has already kicked off with new episodes of QI, but there are two more interesting series starting next week and one is already running.

This almost completely went by me – it seems that Brian Cox has been very busy filming a new three-part series called Science Britannica about the history of british science. The first episode airs on Wednesday, September 18th at 21:00 GMT / 22:00 CET on BBC2 and there’s also a very short trailer on Youtube. This series promises to be very interesting, because Brian Cox has always had a huge interest in the beginnings and evolution of science and often referenced to it in his previous programs.

David Attenborough is also back with a new two-parter called Rise of the Animals: Triumph of the Vertebrates starting on Friday, September 20th at 21:00 GMT / 22:00 CET on BBC2. It’s about the evolution of the vertebrates and takes a similar approach as First Life, utilizing CGI in addition to real footage to show how extinct species evolved.

And there’s also Sound of Cinema: The Music that Made the Movies, a three-part series presented by author, composer and silent film music expert Neil Brand about the history of music in movies. The first episode has already aired on BBC4, but the last two episodes are aired Thursdays at 21:00 GMT / 22:00 CET and there’s also a repeat of the first episode later tonight on 22:35 GMT / 23:35 CET.

There is, however, no definitive word yet on an airdate for the long-awaited third season of Sherlock, the brilliant contemporary adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s victorian detective. A short teaser trailer has been posted by the BBC on Youtube and was also shown after a repeat of series 2 recently. There are rumours that the series will be broadcast at the beginning of 2014, which is quite possible considering that the BBC has said that the series’ production was only finished on September 1st.

Regular readers of this website should know that I have a particular fondness for the works of Tim Burton and when his stop-motion remake of Frankenweenie was announced some time ago, I instantly knew that it would be a very special movie – and I was right. It took me some time to see it, but it was really worth the wait. Far from being just an expanded version of the original, Tim Burton has transformed the movie he was once fired for from Disney into a delightful stop-motion world paying homage to the horror and monster classics of the 1930s and 1940s. While the movie is absolutely brilliant and together with Dark Shadows is one of Tim Burton’s best recent works, the DVD is somewhat of a disappointment with its lack of extras – but the technical quality is flawless and the movie is certainly watchable. Today’s review is the first new one for quite some time, even if the disc’s release was a while back.

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There are many documentaries about the race to the Moon in the 1960s, but not many make really good use of the vast film archives of NASA. But today’s next entry in the Spaceflight Series does this extensively and exclusively –  Al Reinert’s For All Mankind is the most fascinating and astounding documentary about the historic American spaceflight programs. Completely consisting of original NASA footage, which was carefully selected to represent all the flights as one single mission, the documentary shows the experience of spaceflight and moonwalking like no other. This review about the wonderful Criterion DVD re-release is just a straight translation of my earlier German article from 2010, but just because there was nothing much to improve or add.

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The autumn season on british television is starting earlier and earlier each year and I almost had not noticed that Stephen Fry’s and John Lloyd’s brilliant quiz show QI is starting again next week on BBC2 with the new Series K. The weekly broadcasts start next Friday on 22:00 GMT / 23:00 CET, with the extended 45-minute XL version now following on Sunday at the same time – but watch the schedule, the BBC often likes to stir up the program at the last minute. That’s why nobody had noticed that the “lost” episode of Series J (you know, the one with Jeremy Clarkson) was broadcast on Tuesday, but the XL repeat is shown tonight at 22:15 GMT / 23:15 CET.

You can read more about QI on the official website, which was totally overhauled and greatly improved last year and there’s also the Facebook-Page and the Twitter-Stream. Fingers on buzzers! :-)

The Space Exploration Series continues today with From the Earth to the Moon, which even fifteen years after its premiere is one of the most amazing American television productions of all time. After the success of Apollo 13, Tom Hanks, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer had joined forces again to tell the story of the moon race in twelve hour-long movies, which felt more like cinema and less than just television. Treading confidently in the footsteps of Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff, the series brilliantly covers almost everything about the Moon race, bringing wonderful actors, great scripts and a first-class production with real enthusiasm together. Today’s post is a translated and heavily expanded review of my original German article from a couple of years ago about the American DVD re-release from 2005.

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Today DVDLog is coming back from the summer break with a continuation of the Spaceflight Series, which I had started a few weeks back with The Dish and Space Cowboys. While these were more of a fictional kind, for today I have translated and extensively rewritten my earlier review of Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff, the seminal movie about the early days of American spaceflight. In spite of its title, the film is actually not a painfully patriotic story, but a surprisingly realistic, exciting and sometimes even funny depiction of the early space race from an American perspective. Today, the movie is already thirty years old and the DVD I reviewed in this extensive article ten years, but they are both highly recommended.

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Since the weather is absolutely not cooperating and the heat makes coherent writing really difficult, I’m putting DVDLog on a summer hiatus. I have occasionally done this before and this doesn’t mean I am going to abandon the website, just that I won’t be writing any major long reviews at the moment. The occasional shorter post may appear, but for now I will keep my activities very limited here. But you can always follow me on Google+ or Facebook and see what I’m up to on all my websites, although I’m only really active over on my photography blog at the moment. Here on DVDLog I’ll be fully back when I have re-acquired my writing groove after the warm weather.

Two years ago there was the astonishing announcement that Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, one of the most amazing science television series, is going to be remade with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson as the new host. Yesterday, the first trailer surfaced at ComicCon and while it doesn’t provide any dialogueyet , the visuals are breathtaking and look like the original series reborn with current technology. So, in lieu of a new article, which I have to postpone because of the hot weather, here’s just this amazing trailer this week.

Note: the trailer originally posted yesterday was taken down for unknown reasons, the above is a copy from another source. There’s another trailer on the Fox Youtube channel, but it’s shorter and edited differently.