Wing Commander Academy DVD

Mine has supposedly shipped... I hope it doesn't take three weeks to get here.
 
I wonder how good the quality is. I hope it is better than the VHS rip or whatever it was that some dude did ages ago and that the CIC had for download.
Also I wonder if they ship it to Germany as well...
 
Yes... some dude... :D

In fact: every copy of Wing Commander Academy any of you have ever seen, unless you watched it on USA in 1996, has been the one that I taped in high school! The quality was actually pretty outstanding for an off-air VHS dub... even teenage LOAF knew to use high quality tapes at the lowest recording time setting.

I was INSANE about getting those tapes right. I would start watching TV 45 minutes before the show started just in case, my finger hovering over the record button the whole time. I actually skipped out of the SAT (American standardized test that determines your future) so I could get home to be sure I was there to see a new Academy live... and that was a good choice, because it ended up being CHAIN OF COMMAND, the best episode ever.

(Worst day ever: back in college when I was doing the second round of higher resolution transfers from the VHSes, one of them SNAPPED! I ended up having to take apart the tape, remove a little section that was ruined and tape the two ends together. Thankfully it was all commercials! But you can actually see where it starts to go bad at the end of one of the end-credits sequences...)

Also: I have a recurring nightmare TO THIS DAY in which I find out there are MORE episodes of Academy that I forgot to tape!

All that aside, the quality is certainly going to be much better. There's a trailer of the intro from the DVD online already and it's so much clearer already.

Oh my God I'm so excited. Just to hear the end credit music without an advertisement for Pacific Blue over them! YES! 15 more minutes of work, a quick trip to the post office and to pick up a sub and I'm home.

I am SO relieved that I am no longer the person responsible for preserving Wing Commander Academy! (... although I sure helped with this release, and that's a story for a different time.)

I will confirm regional coding as soon as I can, Germans.
 
Yeah it'll most definately be region coded (at least amazon.com says so). I do hope the region2 version won't take another sixteen years to come out.
 
Yeah it'll most definately be region coded (at least amazon.com says so). I do hope the region2 version won't take another sixteen years to come out.

Whatever Amazon says is no real indicator. Many releases are listed as certain regions and there's no way to confirm ahead of time if they locked the region code without actually having the physical disk in your hands and trying it out on a different region player.
 
Will there ever be other language versions? Any rumours on that?
 
The show was also bought by RTL and broadcasted on sundaymornings in summer 1997 in the Netherlands. I found out when I was over at a friends house who's kid brother was watching it. Taped some episodes on VHS too even the fighter and cat names where spelled correctly in the subtitles. Was not until 2003 I got too see the entire series in a row. RTL is originally a german company, but they probably thought it would have been to expensive to have only 13 episodes completely dubbed.
 
On the one hand, it would be nice to have Academy dubbed for a bigger audience (better late than never). On the other, if we really have to wait for a French and German version to make it to a region2 DVD box, i'd rather just take the original NOW. There aren't even rumours anyone *wants* to do a translation, and dubbing is a very time-consuming and hard work. So if there is a region lock, here's hoping the Brits insist on getting their version as soon as possible.
By the way, are there any rumours about a Wing Commander Movie Blu-ray? There is a HD version of the movie floating around i think, what's keeping them from releasing it, copyright issues? There are far worse movies out on bluray.

EDIT: Ah forget it, read up on the Blu-ray issues. Bummer.
 
Okay, I can now comment on Wing Commander Academy on DVD!

The good:

- The show looks AMAZING. You have NEVER seen Wing Commander Academy look this good. It's like watching a modern series, SO clear. I felt like I was seeing for the first time after being blind for a long period. Which has actually happened to me, so I know what I'm talking about!
- The missing footage from On Both Your Houses WAS CORRECTLY RESTORED thanks to the legwork LeHah and I did. You can tell the (two or three two-second shots) that came from the VHS master because the quality is obviously lower, but it's so much better than the alternative. Interestingly, the scenes that were missing from NBC's master copies were the front-facing in-cockpit shots of Archer from the end of the episode. Someone with a Dana Delaney fetish must have spliced them out and made off with them...
- The missing audio from Word of Honor (from the original broadcast) is intact here.
- Ahh SO GREAT to hear the end credits music without an announcer plugging "PACIFIC BLUE" over them!

The bad:

- Some of the in-flight dialogue in the earlier episodes seems quiet. I went back to the original VHSes and you could tell that the original mix had the same problem, but it's more pronounced here (because the music and sound effects and especially engine noise are MUCH CLEARER, maybe.) It's possible it's just my weird amateur sound setup, I will run some tests this weekend.

Looks like June 1st is when mine will arrive.

The set streets on Tuesday (May 29) -- most folks will have to wait until then. :)

Yeah it'll most definately be region coded (at least amazon.com says so). I do hope the region2 version won't take another sixteen years to come out.

I can confirm that it is coded for region 1.

... but at the risk of editorializing, I confirmed that by putting the disc in a region 2 player to see if it'd run. A player which /cost less than I spent on the DVD set in the first place./ So... maybe people should make similar investments. Not just for Wing Commander Academy... there's LOTS of cool region-exclusive discs out there.

Also: VEI has the license to sell this set in the US and Canada only. I've checked with NBC/Universal and Academy has not been licensed anywhere else in the world. What this means is that if you want a real region 2 release what you need to do is find a European DVD publisher and convince them to license the show. This isn't expensive for them and no labor is involved (NBC/U provides the transfers.)

Will there ever be other language versions? Any rumours on that?

No, this will never, ever, ever, ever, ever happen. Wing Commander Academy is a niche product where they're expecting to sell a few thousand units at most. The cost to dub the show into other languages would be exponentially higher than any profit they ever hope to make. (And as I say, VEI is a US distributor...)

By the way, are there any rumours about a Wing Commander Movie Blu-ray? There is a HD version of the movie floating around i think, what's keeping them from releasing it, copyright issues? There are far worse movies out on bluray.

FOX is just stupid, they obviously should do this. :) I think if catalog blu-ray sales numbers were higher we would have seen it already. (As you say, there's an HD transfer already, we just need FOX to put it on a disc and sell it to us.) I'm so frustrated that you can't buy any HD version of the movie, though. I spend a fortune renting it on iTunes again and again... which I guess is what they want.
 
Okay, I can now comment on Wing Commander Academy on DVD!

I can confirm that it is coded for region 1.

... but at the risk of editorializing, I confirmed that by putting the disc in a region 2 player to see if it'd run. A player which /cost less than I spent on the DVD set in the first place./ So... maybe people should make similar investments. Not just for Wing Commander Academy... there's LOTS of cool region-exclusive discs out there.

Of course, for us in the UK you could always unlock your DVD Player, a quick search on Google will reveal the codes to do this, then the coding is irrelevant........but I didn't say that!!

Also, I noticed I could only import One (1) copy of the DVD set on my Amazon account, so I had to order a second as a gift for someone on a different account.
 
Yeah it'll most definately be region coded (at least amazon.com says so). I do hope the region2 version won't take another sixteen years to come out.
Oggy is right, you can unlock your DVD player, I did mine a few years back. Or another possibility is if you have a desktop computer with 2 DVD drives, you can set one to be a Region 1 player and one to be Region 2. I did this before I unlocked my DVD player
 
RTL is not German, it is "Radio Television Luxembourg"
In that case, yours and my own country 90% of them, or are at least there audience. RTL has 4 main channels in the netherlands, and some digital TV-only, showing senior televesion, and even a special "krimi"-channel only in holland, so we can watch subtitled "Tatort" and "Der Alte" all day. AFAIK there is no catsnifferchannel yet..
 
Correct. RTL's most important markets are Germany and the Netherlands.
They are pretty mainstream though. so I don't expect them to send WCA anytime soon.
...But I could contact them and tell them about catsniffing. Maybe they make a show out of it. And then I can use the audience to show them how important WCA really is :D
btw: RTL crime exists in Germany too. You can rent it as payTV somehow I think.
 
Correct. RTL's most important markets are Germany and the Netherlands.
They are pretty mainstream though. so I don't expect them to send WCA anytime soon.
...But I could contact them and tell them about catsniffing. Maybe they make a show out of it. And then I can use the audience to show them how important WCA really is :D
btw: RTL crime exists in Germany too. You can rent it as payTV somehow I think.
Fandom aside, they had some broadcast rights to it, and subtitled it in the 90's. And the past years we had our own jersey shore, and it's spinoffs, but you could always propose your catsniffer mission as base for a television show, mind you "freunde: turbo" and "freunde: nitro"(the movies) were paid by this network...
 
One thing I'd love to see you Germans do: convince someone to publish original German-language Wing Commander novels. Wouldn't that be COOL? I'd have to learn German!

(I have had this idea in my head for a few years for the most embarrassing reason: I found out that for some reason there are German-only "Gilmore Girls" novels.)
 
speaking of German novels: were any of the WC books translated into German?
I prefer reading the original English ones, I just wondered because my mother asked me.
 
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