Some one mentioned about the original TV movies which were just episodes of this TV show joined up to form a feature length TV movie, the episodes released on DVD are just the same as these movies barring a title change on the credits.
I saw no point in recreating these for the sake of a title change and joining 2 episodes together.
It has been mentioned on certain network on the TV movie orignal run Roddy McDowall shot a introduction and end to the tv movies, I did find these but the quality is quick poor and are only around 20 seconds in length to poor to do anything with.
I then found a fan editor called David Kerin did a fan edit of the tv show back in 2017 and is available via Vimeo.
I downloaded this and enjoyed for the most part but felt his clips of the original cinema movies that he included distracted me and his use of CGI genarated effects to soft and jarring and the worst was his making the TV footage zoomed in for letterboxing, the quality suffered with this.
I did however like the blending of 3 episodes and a few snippets from others a good way of making a stand alone movie.
Instead of recreating the tv movies i decided to create my own edit but some based on the Kerin edit, so I used his idea and around 80% of the flow of the episodes to recreate my own edit from my DVD set and getting rid of the bits that bothered me his over use of the original movie sequences, bad CGI that didnt fit and the letterboxing.
I created my own opening using documentry footage inspired by Buck Rogers in the 25th Century as that used it very well to create the spaceship taking off.
I nabbed a 2 second scene from the Kerin edit reframed.
New title created.
Footage that was created by a real professional and uploaded onto Youtube of what it would have been like if the footage of the ship crashing from the first movie was filmed and inserted into that movie, this was excellent and very well crafted.
As the ship in this edit and the kerin edit was the same I used some of this to create the ship landing on earth, I also used footage from Buck Rogers, Superman the Movie and farscape to achive this.
When the ship lands in the tv pilot it had credits on the screen but the TV movie did not so I upscaled and used several seconds of this.
We then have numerous edits of 3 episodes reordered and joined togther I chose some different edit points away from the Kerin edit as didn’t like some of his soft blends.
I also did a couple of my own FX shots that seem to fit the 70’s type matte effects and not the CGI genarated effects.
I like the idea of a downbeat ending to match the movies but thought the kerin edit was not quite right so I created my own take on this and gave a downbeat ending that does wrap the movie up but done what I think is a better way.
We end with words from Charles Darwin to close the movie out. I have uploaded this to the Organ.