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.
