Hello!

We’ll be back to the regular flow of incredible, world-shaking disc reviews presently. We went thin across this last weekend because we were away at a favorite spot. A 50th anniversary year is a good time to make a round-up of visits mit der loved ones, and the City By The Bay is my personal favorite away from home place in the U.S.. It’s just as un-affordable as Los Angeles, but many times more photogenic.

I’m crazy about that bridge, our own 7th wonder of the world. The weather seems to change every 20 minutes, so the bridge makes a fresh impact every time. I’d like to be able to sit a hour staring at it.

I won’t start listing the films that feature the Fort Point below … the day was cold so we pitied the poor Civil War- era soldiers that were stationed there long ago … the place is colder inside than out, and for some reason the wind howls through the inside harder too. The interior is not as big as it looks in this wide-angle photo. How they ever landed a helicopter in there, I’ll never know.

 

Of course, going up north is also an opportunity to visit the old Mustang, which daughter #1 is keeping up quite nicely.

 

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And that brings us to a round-up of upcoming discs that caught our Eye … we’ve some real goodies to look forward to.

Since today’s review is an anti-nuke picture, we’ll start with Severin Films’ announcement a few days back of a pair of movies that were England’s biggest contribution to the Civil Defense controversies of earlier decades. Peter Watkins’ game-changing faux-documentary The War Game was produced for the BBC but barred from airing and became a short feature; it’s probably the most potent ‘public service message’ ever produced.

The Reagan/Thatcher-era shocker Threads goes much further to describe the ways that a nuclear exchange would destroy the fabric of civilization. It’s also a must-see, for those that can take it. We should expect that the promised 4K encodings, from original film materials, will present both shows in a new light.

We still have our noses to the web feed to learn when Severin plans to bring out its hinted-at 4K disc of Cy Endfield’s Zulu Dawn, the last of the big-scale colonial epics. Severin’s long-term planning has brought us at least one ‘miracle disc’ every few months in the last couple of years.

 

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Sony just announced a 4K disc of the Schneer/Harryhausen/Juran The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, which is of course going to get a lot of attention. After being worked over several times in the last 20 years, they finally delivered a really satisfying Blu-ray a few years back, you know, the one where the Roc chick regained its best color.

The buzz I’ve heard is that a new 4K scan and remaster will be hard pressed to look better that what we already have. We’re eager to see what the remastering experts can do with it, and hope that they can keep the colors and grain in check. No radical revisions, please … but we’re sure we’ll like whatever we get.

Note that the cover poster touts the ‘sheer magic’ of Dynarama. That proves that the art came from the 1975 reissue. For 7th Voyage the process was called Dynamation. The term Dynarama was confected for The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.

 

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Also without a nailed-down release date is Film Masters’ promised color remastering of the George Pal Destination Moon, which has had trouble looking good on home video. This is not a remaster from Technicolor elements. That would be fantastic, and we aren’t holding our breath for any such miracle. But the clips we’ve seen on the web look very promising.

The release includes Film Masters’ own version of Monogram/Walter Mirisch’s Flight to Mars to sweeten the deal. We of course love to see a super 4K remaster of the Lippert/Neumann Rocketship X-M with its top-rank music score by Ferde Grofé. All three pictures were tied up for decades by the Wade Williams Collection; hopefully other Williams holdings (Kronos! Kronos!) will be surfacing soon as well.

 

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And then there are discs that we only dream about. These are not expected in English-friendly versions.

Gary Teetzel forwarded some information about a string of new Toho 4K releases. We never buy Toho discs because they’re domestic products with no English-language tracks or subtitles. It was a thrill in the 1990s to play a no-English laserdisc of The Mysterians because it was the only ‘Tohoscope’ video available. Perhaps some of these will be picked up for distribution here. There have never been Region barriers between U.S. and Japanese discs.

We’re of course curious to see how these favorites would fare in 4K. From right to left we read Rodan (1956), The Mysterians (1957), Mothra (1961), Gorath (1962), Atragon (1963). Although we reviewed it, Gorath hasn’t been released here in any form. It’s the final film in Ishiro Honda’s space trilogy.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson