Fifty-three years ago, mankind had reached space for the first time when Yuri Gagarin had made his flight and since about a decade, this event has been celebrated as Yuri’s Night all over the world. I have already written another article on my other blog about the event, but for this occasion I’d also like to bring a little something together from my archives, because this year I at least have some new English-language reviews. There is nothing specifically about Yuri Gagarin, but the movies and television series are covering the early years of spaceflight very well.

Documentaries and Dramatisations:
The Right Stuff » – The Mercury program, as told by Tom Wolfe (1959-1963)
From the Earth to the Moon » – Gemini & Apollo – the way to the Moon (1963-1972)
For All Mankind » – The Apollo Program in original footage & sound (1969-1972)
The Dish » – The moon landing from an Australia perspective (1969)
Apollo 13 » – Dramatisation of the near-catastrophy (1970)
Although I have never written about it before, I can also recommend the BBC six-part miniseries Space Race, an excellent docudrama about the beginnings of spaceflight from the perspectives of the rocket designers Sergei Korolev and Wernher von Braun.

More Fiction than Science:
Space Cowboys » – Clint Eastwood, the Space Shuttle and a broken Soviet satellite. A fond spaceflight comedy from the shuttle era.

And in closing another tip: First Orbit was made for the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagrin’s flight in 2011 with footage from the ISS, recreating his flight in space with amazing visuals and original sounds. The 99-minute movie can still be viewed on Youtube for free, but it is now also available on DVD and Blu-Ray.

I’m not posting a lot of news these days, actually I’ve pretty much given up on it save for special occasions – like this one: there had already been some rumours about a new restoration of the first Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night since the beginning of this year, but now it’s certain: Criterion will release the movie on June 24th as a Blu-Ray and DVD combo set. A new 4k transfer has been made, this time apparently in the correct aspect ratio of 1.75:1, and in addition to a remastered mono track, new stereo and 5.1 mixes have been produced with the music this time coming from the original multitrack masters and with the involvement of Giles Martin, the son of the Beatles’ producer George Martin. There will also be numerous extras, including an audio commentary, some of the interviews from the 2002 release, the 1994 documentary You Can’t Do That (which has been out of print on DVD for a long time) and a lot more.

The press release from Criterion has all the details, and the announcement on the Home Theater Forum has the full poster including the crucial information that the two DVDs of the set will include all the extras of the Blu-Ray. There will also be a single-disc DVD release, but it will be sadly missing most of the extras. The price on Amazon.com for the three-disc set is $34.99, but if you ordered early enough you were able to get it for about $25 plus shipping. A full review of the new release will be coming in July!

Arthur Conan Doyle had first killed off and later resurrected his master detective by popular demand, something ITV and Granada Television closely followed when they had first broadcast their new Sherlock Holmes series with Jeremy Brett in 1984. The first thirteen episodes were so successful that more of them were inevitable, and like Conan Doyle they resurrected the detective in The Return of Sherlock Holmes after he was supposedly killed at the hands of his nemesis Moriarty. Despite some production setbacks due to the fragile health of Jeremy Brett and a change of cast for Doctor Watson with Edward Hardwicke taking over the role, the eleven episodes and two feature-length movies of Granada’s second series of Sherlock Holmes stories were even more amazing than their predecessors. This article is again an improved translation from an earlier German review of the splendid second Koch Media DVD boxset – while it does not contain the two movies, they are mentioned in the article and will be reviewed seperately later.

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With the most famous detective of them all getting quite popular again in the last years, I think it’s time to have a look back at Sherlock Holmes’ most faithful incarnation in the form of the brilliant Jeremy Brett. The first thirteen episodes of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes were first broadcast in 1984 not by the BBC, who had no interest in Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories anymore, but by ITV. Their production company Granada had put together a first class team of writers, directors and actors to bring the master detective to life in a way nobody had attempted before. Today’s article is a translated and expanded version of an earlier German review about the DVDs released by Koch Media in 2005, but it also is an introduction to Granada’s Sherlock Holmes and its history, which will soon continue in more articles about the further episodes and movies of the series.

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I would very much like to have written something about the new version of Cosmos with Neil deGrasse Tyson, which premieres this evening on American television, but sadly I don’t have access to any channels it airs on here from Germany. Because my thoughts on the new series will have to wait until a DVD release, instead I’m taking a look back at Carl Sagan’s original from 1980, which I had already reviewed a couple of years back in German. Today’s review is an improved translation of the original article mostly about the series itself, but also about the low-priced, but still amazing British DVD release. I know that Cosmos is available on Youtube somewhere, at least in countries where it is not blocked because of the music rights, but if you want to watch the series in the best quality possible, this DVD is the best alternative to the still extremely pricey US release.

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Almost exactly one year ago I had announced that DVDLog will be slowly transitioning completely into an English-language site and since then I have been writing exclusively in English. But the website template and the pages were still in German, something which I finally managed to fix yesterday – and it wasn’t as easy as it looks! Everything except all the old reviews, the review index and the caselist is now translated. The last two are going to need some more work, especially the unmanagable behemoth of the review index, which I still need to split up into German and English reviews and remove all the dead links and older reviews. I will keep a backup of the original list around, though.

I also moved everything over to the DVDLog domain, meaning that there will be no more linking over to Bibra-Online.de for the reviews and some other pages. This is only for new articles, because I don’t want to try a risky search and replace in the blog database – the old files are still on the server for “backwards compatibility”, but new ones will only be uploaded to the DVDLog domain to keep everything under one roof.

Now I just need to go back into writing mode, but don’t forget that I’m running this website alone, so I might not get back into the one-review-a-week rhtyhm very soon. I also still write on my old website at Bibra-Online.de and post photos on my Photography Blog, which is actually the most active of the bunch at the moment. You can also circle me on Google+ or follow me on Facebook and Twitter for all my website activities and the RSS feed of this webseite also works!

I haven’t been to the cinema in a long time and probably won’t be going any time soon because of the high prices and the non-availability of original English versions around here, but that is not going to stop me from having a look at one of my favourite movie genres once in a while. I really love animated movies and I’m always interested in what’s going on in the business, but I wrote an Animation Update article once in Spring 2012 and never followed it up. Let’s see if I can make this into a semi-regular feature since I’m not really in the mood to write long reviews at the moment and there also won’t be much Oscar coverage from me this year – except for a little bit of genre-specific speculation at the end of this post.

Originally, Pixar was not really keen on turning their hit movies into franchises, with the notable exception of Toy Story. This attitude has changed a lot over the last years and now a whole load of sequel seem to be arriving. Monsters University is one of them and even a movie that was actually not expected at all, arriving twelve years after its predecessor. Going for a prequel instead a sequel might have been a good idea, but unfortunately the movie’s dazzling visuals and entertaining characters are not able to weigh against the lack of good storytelling. It’s still a watchable movie though, but the Pixar magic is just not there. So the first completely new review of 2014 is, for once, not a fully positive one – even the DVD release is not all it could have been despite a flawless technical presentation.

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It’s February already and this means I really have to get DVDLog out of the Winter hiatus slowly. As an introduction to 2014 and a preparation to a coming review, I’m pulling out a DVD from 2002: Pixar’s fourth movie Monsters, Inc.! It’s one of their best early efforts and while not completely without faults, one of the movies almost completely foreign to the studio’s usual fare. I only saw it in 2002 when the DVD came out because I had missed it in the cinemas, but while I was never a big fan of Toy Story and A Bug’s Life I always liked Monsters, Inc. – probably because of the great voice cast and the wonderful animation, making up for a slightly weak script. The DVD release from 2002 also has some small faults, but is still amazing today with its enormeous amount of extras.

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There was already a short trailer and some mentions on Twitter, but it seems I missed the official announcement: Brian Cox’ and Dara O Briain’s Stargazing Live is going into round  4 next week on January 7, 8 and 9 at 8pm UTC/GMT or 9pm CET on BBC2. The three one-hour broadcasts are as usual followed by an additional half-hour talk called Back to Earth – and of course the Stargazing HQ is again the Jodrell Bank Observatory. Considering the great success of the previous year’s broadcasts, this will be definitively worth watching.

Unfortunately the series has, typically for a BBC live production, never been released on DVD, but all episodes from 2011 and 2011 and the first one from 2013 are still up on Youtube at these links:

• Stargazing 2011 – Episode 1 | Episode 2 | Episode 3
• Stargazing 2012 – Episode 1 | Episode 2 | Episode 3
• Stargazing 2013 – Episode 1

Note: The website is still on semi-hiatus, so unfortunately no new reviews until the beginning of February.