We're attempting to find out whether Henson are aware of the 17 episodes at the BFI. It still isn't clear whether the TVS masters have survived.
Series Three - what there is of it - is coming along nicely, and I expect to have it ready some time in March. Only seven episodes are currently available to me, unfortunately:
A further six are known to exist at the BFI, but I have no access to these, and the other eleven may or may not have survived at all.
This will be a two-disc set.
<blockquote><p><strong>TV's Frink</strong> said:</p><p><blockquote>Did Yoda ever appear on The Muppet Show??? ;-)</p></blockquote><p> </p>
He had a cameo in <i>A Very Merry Muppet Christmas</i>. Threepio, Artoo, Chewie and Luke (and his cousin, Mark Hamill!) appeared on <i>The Muppet Show</i> in 1980, presumably during the shooting of <i>Empire</i> as Luke's wearing his Bespin fatigues (Link Hogthrob: 'I like your outfit! Who's your tailor?'). It's a very funny episode - Gonzo as 'Dirth Nader'! - and Mark has a lot of fun sending himself up :-)
Ok, it's about ready to go! The set will be available from Monday January 30th - PM me for more details as usual :-)
The next release is approaching completion, and I hope to have it ready for release in the next few weeks. This is the best-preserved series of the show, with 23 of its 24 episodes available to us:
This is a four-disc set; all discs are DVD9s. I'll post further information once I have a definite release-date.
Updates! After some more research, it turns out that the BFI don't have quite as many episodes as I thought, but they definitely have broadcast-quality (and thus suitable for DVD release) copies of 17 shows which are not included on the official DVDs. They also hold two episodes which are out on DVD, plus an off-air recording of 'Bells'. Kaleidoscope also have an off-air of 'Bells', but nothing else.
This brings the totals to:
- 29 episodes now definitely exist in broadcast-quality
- 11 episodes exist on the mid-80s RCA VHS releases
- 17 episodes exist as off-air VHS recordings of varying quality
As always, if you know of any others please get in touch!
Full details of the release:
Fraggle Rock UK - Series One
The original series ran for 24 episodes. Sadly, half of these are now missing. This 3-disc DVD set collects the twelve which remain.
Includes the episodes:
While only three discs are included in this release at present, the case is designed to take a full set of four discs. If further episodes are discovered, replacement/additional discs will be made available separately.
And it's almost here! Discs will be available from December 5th - IM me for more details :-)
Series One is coming...
Progress update :-)
In terms of production, there were four UK series of 24 episodes each. The first two starred Fulton Mackay, and as far as I know were shot in 1983/1984 and subsequently aired from 84-87. After Mackay's death, John Gordon-Sinclair took over as lighthouse-keeper for Series Three (shot 1987-88, aired 1988-89) and was succeeded by Simon O'Brien for the final series (shot 1988-89, aired 1989-90).
Despite the gaps in the library, I'm producing these DVDs as four 'Series boxsets'. Hopefully other shows will turn up and I can simply update the discs :-) The first release will thus be 'Series One' and will consist of the following episodes:
Restoration is well under way on these 12 shows: the first eight are complete and awaiting final technical review, and The Garden Plot is being dealt with at the moment. This latter is proving very time-consuming as the tape is badly scratched; I've had to recreate a number of frames digitally to get over the worst of the problems.
The shows are being mastered in NTSC rather than PAL; this is partly because the bulk of each episode was shot in NTSC and partly because I don't want to have to produce two versions of each disc :-) The NTSC-shot scenes are being taken from the US DVD boxsets and the PAL scenes are being run through a motion-estimating standards-converter, the results from which are hugely impressive. As most of the PAL scenes have had to be taken from VHS recordings, there is some variation in picture and sound quality (another reason for taking as much from the US DVDs as possible!) but I've smoothed it out as much as I can.
Other than that...opening titles have been replaced on all shows; the episode title caption has been replaced digitally; the closing credit-roll has been remade (unavoidable - many of the recordings do not have their credit-rolls); and I've taken the opportunity to fix some poorly-timed edits in the originals - often when cutting from PAL to NTSC scenes the start of someone's line is clipped off; I've reinstated these. No change to programme content has occurred, though :-)
I hope to have Series One out in time for Christmas, but this is currently a moveable date due to the amount of work outstanding.
As always, if you're interested in the forthcoming DVDs or the show in general, please post here or PM me!
Cool :-) At this point I'm aiming to get Series One done this side of Christmas; I shall update this thread with my progress!
Regrettably it's unlikely that I'll be able to get hold of the Kaleidoscope or BFI episodes so Series One will consist of just 12 of its original 24 episodes. Series Two is better - I'm only missing one episode - but Three and Four are very badly depleted with just 7 and 3 respectively available to me.
Found another one! 'The Lost Treasure of the Fraggles' is listed as being in Kaleidoscope's archive: http://www.lostshows.com/default.aspx?search=fraggle
For some reason it never occurred to me to look in there...!
Captain Antilles said:
I'm glad it was cut the way it was. "You could use a good kiss" ended Han and Leia's confrontation perfectly-I personally wouldn't dream of changing it. Plus, I've got to say that Harrison Ford's acting seems a little sub-par in this clip; Carrie Fisher's, on the other hand, is great. It was also nice to see a (slightly) more expansive view of the base's corridors. Overall, nice to see, but I'm glad it's a deleted scene. I doubt this would fit in with Ady's edit.
The scene is in the novelisation, pretty much verbatim.
I'd completely forgotten I'd posted that! :-)
Thanks for the offer, but I'm actually a (part-time) video engineer and DVD producer...so allow me to reciprocate - if I can be of any assistance to anyone on here, please ask!
Ok, that was weird. I clicked on 'reply with quote' - does anyone know why the forum did *that*? :-)
<blockquote><p><strong>doubleofive</strong> said:</p><p>When it's done, hopefully May 2012.</p></blockquote><p> </p>
Ah, I was hoping I'd missed an announcement when I saw the date on this page last night :-)
http://swrevisited.wordpress.com/esbr-facts/
I'm looking forward to this immensely!
This may qualify for a preservation project…! Those of you with long memories may recall that the UK version of this classic Henson show was set in a lighthouse and starred - originally - the late Fulton Mackay as the lighthouse-keeper.
The last episode aired in August 1990, and so far as I know the show hasn’t been seen since. The UK version of the show was a co-production with TVS, and when they lost their franchise 20 years ago their archive changed hands. It is now believed to be buried somewhere in the depths of the Disney empire; Disney have little or no interest in it, and in any event the paperwork has apparently been lost so noone knows what might be in there.
The upshot of this is that when 12 episodes were released on DVD in 2004, they were apparently the only 12 of the 96 originally produced which could be found. So far as I know, Henson currently regard the other 84 as ‘lost’ and so a full UK DVD release is simply impossible.
The situation isn’t quite this bad, fortunately. I’ve discovered that the BFI have a further 28 episodes, and VHS copies of 23 more have turned up so the total now stands at 63 episodes which exist in some form.
So, this is part-announcement and part-plea for help! If anyone knows of any other episodes that survive then please let me know 😃
Yes, it's anamorphic.
Please form an orderly queue in my Inbox :-)
The differences are as detailed in my earlier post. The official DVD releases are of the 94-minute cut of the film; nothing from the 97-minute cut is available except for on the laserdisc and VHS releases I mentioned from the early 80s.
No - the laserdisc/VHS releases came from a 35mm print ;-)
Moth3r said:
Why would you want to build a bakery on a rock in the sea? :-)
In case you wanted to make water-biscuits? :-)
Yes, that's correct. Fulton MacKay played the lighthouse keeper, called 'The Captain' for the first 48 shows; following his death John Gordon-Sinclair and finally Simon O'Brien played similar roles.
The French version of the show was set in a bakery, and the German show had a similar character to the US - an inventor. Neither country completed the 96-episode run, though - only the US and UK versions did that.
The US shows have been released on DVD by HiT Entertainment and later Lionsgate in the US, and they're starting to appear in the UK now.
Is anyone aware of the survival rate of this? I’m attempting to preserve the shows, but to date I have only been able to track down about a quarter of the 96 episodes produced.
20 were released on home-video during the late 80s, eight of which plus a further four turned up on DVD a few years ago, and I have off-air recordings of a further two for a grand total of 26.
The official word from Henson is that they are only able to locate the 12 shows which appeared on DVD - the others are missing presumed lost. Does anyone know any different? 😃
Resurrecting an old thread here...
I looked into the two cuts of TMM a few years ago, and came up with the following:
The original 1979 cut of the movie, as passed by the BBFC, ran to approximately 97 minutes. Barring a couple of UK home-video releases in the 80s (see next paragraph) I don't believe this has been seen since.
A second cut, running to about 94 minutes, appears to have been the 'standard' version of the film for the last 30 years. It was used for all home-video releases that I'm aware of up to and including the DVDs except for two: a 1982 laserdisc from Precision Video (catalogue number LVITC0011) and a 1986 VHS from Virgin Video (catalogue JH1006), which was re-issued by Palace Video (HPV001) a few years later.
Both laserdisc and VHS versions of the 97-minute cut used the same transfer: an open-matte telecine of a 35mm print done to a pair of 2" Quad videotapes, with the tape-change occuring around the 54-minute mark. The telecine was slightly zoomed-in, which is fairly common for transfers of that age. Unfortunately it was also suppressed-field, so it's fairly low-resolution. It was, however, stereo.
The print used was in poor condition, with numerous breaks and consequent loss of footage at each break ranging from a couple of frames up to several seconds. All breaks were repaired on tape. Fortunately almost all of the missing material exists in the 94-minute cut, with only a few frames completely lost.
Major differences include:
- an extended sales-pitch from Doc Hopper as he tries to convince Kermit to sign on as his spokesfrog
- an extended montage as Dr Teeth recaps the movie for the benefit of the band
- extended chase between Doc Hopper and Max and the rainbow-coloured Studebaker
- totally different musical arrangement of "Never Before, Never Again"
- additional verse in "I Hope That Somethin' Better Comes Along"
- additional shots of the giant Animal and during the scenery-collapse in the final scene
- dialog from the Muppets during the closing credits
The 94-minute cut includes approximate 5 seconds of additional reaction shots during the scene with Lew Lord, but as the 97-minute print has a good deal of material missing throughout due to damage it's entirely possible that these shots were simply lost.
Using the laserdisc and the UK DVD release, I was able to reassemble the 97-minute cut in reasonable quality and produce an anamorphic DVD master - this is the one listed on MuppetDanny's site, mentioned in an earlier post in this thread. Picture and sound were extensively restored (insofar as was possible - there's only so much that can be done with the poor-quality transfer used for the laserdisc). I also located and had transferred a 35mm theatrical trailer from the film's original US release, a 16mm TV spot and the Super8 'home movie' version of the film, all of which are included as extras.