Back in July I reviewed the first series of Shaun the Sheep, finally closing one of the gaps in my fondness for all things Aardman. Originally I wanted to review Series 2 earlier, but varying prices kept me from ordering it until now and because of a lack of other options I chose to make it the last review of the year. I know it’s not much and not even a particularly new disc, but the second series even ends with some Christmas-themed episodes, so it’s only fitting to have a look at the continuing adventures of Aardman’s plasticine sheep. The BBC DVD release of the second batch of fourty episode does not have a lot of extras, but image and sound are even better than before and for a price of about £10 for such a nice boxset I’m certainly not asking any questions.

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With this little end-of-year update, DVDLog will be going into a winter hiatus until the end of January, when I’ll be back with more reviews and hopefully some other improvements. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, everyone – as usual, there are some more season’s greetings over on my other blog!

Rumours of this website’s demise, etc… I had great plans for DVDLog this December, but for a whole lot of different reasons none of these really worked out and I’m still sitting on a pile of un- and half-finished material. This happenend mainly because I lost my writing mojo a little again, but also because of the low influx of new DVDs at the moment. But this does definitively not mean I’m giving up here, quite the contrary – the plan is still to review a few new discs, translate more of my older articles into English and maybe write some other posts about movies and television.

I will try to do at least one little review before the holidays and maybe write another article – I hope I can get this done before the week is out. But I’m not sure if I will be doing the traditional DVD Recap this year, since there are only very few discs worth mentioning. Perhaps I’ll do it later in January after a winter break, which I will need to recharge my batteries, make some adjustments to the website like translating the menus and cleaning up the review list – I hope I can get back to a semi-regular update rhythm at the latest in February. 

But I’m not gone! I’m actually a little busy elsewhere – I’m posting daily images over on my Photography Blog and sometimes over on the original Bibra-Online.de website about everything from Space & Astronomy to Vintage Computers and Webdesign. And of course you can follow all my shenanigans on my Google+ stream – and on Facebook and Twitter, but I’m not as active as on G+ there.

The unusually dark and violent Rise of the Guardians made me wonder if Dreamworks Animation had lost its touch, but with their next movie, The Croods, the studio really made up for it. Despite being the Aardman movie that wasn’t and a production delay for about a year, the movie turned out amazingly well and embodies everything that the studio stands for: a solid story, great characters and wonderful animation. This is more than just a run-of-the-mill cave-family-movie, it’s an entirely fresh and original take on a simple idea. The DVD release is a bit of a disappointment, tough – the distributor switch from Paramount to Fox apparently means that Dreamworks has given up on the commentary track, but at least the movie looks as good as possible and there are even some deleted scenes as extras.

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He was one of the truly great ones of Germany’s political cabaret – last night, Dieter Hildebrandt sadly died at the age of 86. Only yesterday there were reports that he was gravely ill, before he seemed almost indestructible and had been on stage until quite recently. Although his presence was limited to German-speaking audiences, I’m writing this article in English to give everyone an impression how great his influence had been. So far there has been only one English-language obituary about him, but he also deserves to be recognized outside of Germany.

When I finally bought Dreamworks’ latest two animated movies, Rise of the Guardians and The Croods on DVD, I assumed that both would follow the long tradition of the studio of having an Audio Commentary with the filmmakers as one of the extras, but only the first movie had one. It seems that the distributor switch from Paramount to 20th Century Fox had one unfortunate casualty – the commentary track, an extra which had been around even longer than the DVD itself, going back almost to the 1980s with the emergence of the laserdisc and the capability of storing more than one soundtrack on an audiovisual medium. In today’s article in lieu of a dvd review, I’m looking at the probable fate of the audio commentary and introduce some of my favourite commentary tracks.

Dreamworks has had a lot of success with their animated movies and so far I loved almost all of their movies with some exceptions. I had high hopes for Rise of the Guardians, but it turned out that their collaboration with children’s books author William Joyce is one of their rare failures. While the movie has an amazing concept, great characters and voices and dazzling visuals, the story is disappointingly weak and a surprising amount of violence makes this feel not like a Dreamworks movie at all. In today’s somewhat longer-than-usual review, I tried to get to the bottom of what went wrong with Rise of the Guardians. This final joint DVD release from Dreamworks and Paramount is, however, absolutely fine and while some extras from the Blu-Ray are missing, the most interesting material has been ported over.

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About a month ago, the BBC was talking about closing down Britain’s longest-running and only regular astronomy television program, The Sky at Night – less than a year after its creator Sir Patrick Moore had died. Since then the show was moderated by the longtime co-hosts Lucie Green and Chris Lintott, who had actually done a very good job of keeping the program alive – but that doesn’t seem to have been good enough for the BBC bosses. The outrage over the possible cancellation was huge, including a petition with over 50,000 signatures and pleas from just about everyone to continue The Sky at Night – with success: Tuesday, the BBC had announced that the program will continue in 2014.

The rescue comes, however, at a cost – the show will not be broadcast on BBC1 anymore, instead the first showing is relocated to BBC4 with a later repeat on BBC2. Given that The Sky At Night is broadcast on Sunday after midnight at the moment, this may be an improvement and the home on BBC4 is not altogether bad, because the repeats of the 30-minute-version have already aired on this channel for some time. The shorter 20-minute version, which was always broadcast first, will also be abandoned in favour of the 30-minute format. This can be a great chance for The Sky at Night – hopefully the inevitably lower ratings will not prompt the BBC to cancel the program for good.

The announcement was also paired with the news that The Sky At Night will make a pause in January to make way for a fourth round of Stargazing Live with Brian Cox and Dara O Briain, which has been credited to create a huge public interest in astronomy and will surely be as amazing as in the previous years.

The next regular episode of The Sky at Night with the Moore Moon Marathon, will be aired this Sunday (actually Monday) at 0:30 GMT on BBC1 with the 30-minute-version first airing on BBC4 on Thursday at 19:30 GMT. For more repeats check the official website of the program.

I’m really not very good keeping up with the current news about all things DVD and Blu-Ray and I’m thinking of removing the news list entirely, but once in a while there’s something really exciting worth mentioning. This time it’s Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World – which has been out on DVD for ages and was even released on Blu-Ray in 2011, but only in the short 161-minute version. In the 1990s, the director himself had attempted to reconstruct his 192-minute premiere version with limited success and later film restorer Robert Harris lobbied literally for decades to save the original version of the movie. Now he seems to have succeeded, because a couple of days ago, Criterion announced that the movie will be released in a newly restored version on January 21st.

The press release and its thread on the venerable Home Theater Forum just about says it all – the general release 161-minute version will be accompanied by a reconstructed 192-minute version encompassing all the still available material including scenes that have been returned to the film here for the first time. The long version, previously only available on laserdisc, has been restored in high-definition, but the general release version was even transferred in 4k, all from the original 65/70mm elements in the original apspect ratio of 2.76:1 (it is possible, though, that the 4k transfer of the short version is the same as on the 2011 Blu-Ray, which would be absolutely fine). There are also a lot of amazing extras including a new audio commentary, several featurettes and archival material, but missing are the hour-long 1991 documentary and the deleted scenes (which are contained in the 192-minute version) from the MGM releases. But considering what else is there, this will be one hell of a fine release.

My only complaint is that it’s a dual-format version containing both the Blu-Ray and DVD. While I really like the approach of Criterion that everything is replicated 1:1 on both formats, this makes the set outrageously expensive. At a list price of $50 this is unaffordable for me and unless there will be some hefty discounts or I find a solution to just get the DVDs from the set, the Criterion release will be unfortunately off-limits for me. But I plan to write something about it nevertheless when it’s out!

Everybody is talking about the new space thriller Gravity, but I’m not – instead I’m taking the current hype around this movie as an opportunity to look back at another great space movie from the 1990s: Ron Howard’s Apollo 13. Even after almost twenty years since its making, the movie still holds up well and shows how a real space thriller should work – as a combination of great acting, amazing visuals and creative storytelling. Apollo 13 is neither a complete special-effects orgy or the Tom Hanks show some of the advertising wanted it to be, but a fairly accurate retelling of the real events focusing heavily on the story and characters. Today’s review of the Anniversary Edition DVD from 2005 is a heavily reworked and improved translation of my earlier German-language article, finally concluding the Spaceflight Series.

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I know it’s been a while since the last update, but I decided to take it easy for another week while I battle the effects of the autumn weather and prepare some new articles – I may have nothing for next week, but I’m working on several reviews at the moment. Meanwhile I’d like to send you once again over to DVD Savant, where Glenn Erickson is posting a lot of fabulous reviews twice a week – even if you are not particularly interested in the movies he writes about, his articles are so fascinating that they are worth reading nevertheless. Myself, I’ll be back next week with a counter-review to Gravity and then maybe some really old stuff.