The Complete UFO Megaset
by Gerry Anderson
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DVD details
Director: Gerry AndersonDVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; Mandarin Chinese (Published)
Format: Box set, Color, DVD-Video, Full Screen, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 1352 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2003-10-28
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: A&E Home Video
DVD Reviews of The Complete UFO Megaset
DVD Review: Gerry Anderson's first live action show
Summary: 4 Stars
Gerry Anderson had done several shows using marionettes like THUNDERBIRDS and CAPTAIN SCARLETT but UFO was his first series using live actors. UFO only lasted one season and plans for a second season were changed to become SPACE 1999. As a fan of the series, watching it in first run syndication in the US, I was delighted to be able to buy the DVD of the complete series at a great price and also get some extras too. If there was one thing I thought they should have done different it would be to have actual TV stills from UFO instead of using video captures from the shows. I look forward to rewatching all the episodes again.DVD Review: Great for old sci fi buffs!
Summary: 3 Stars
All in all a pretty good show, if you like the 70's version of scifi. The show only has two seasons, the second season with a slightly different cast. The writing is better in the first season, and there a problem with the sound. When the music plays it is a bit loud. It is about as loud as when a commercial comes on when you are watching regular TV (other wise I might have scored it a higher rating). But all in all a good show.DVD Review: Sound issues
Summary: 3 Stars
Well, I am enjoying this series except that somehow in the mastering of this they have managed to screw the sound up... sometimes loud, sometimes so soft it is ridiculous. Sometimes my tv is on 24 for the sound and the voices are fine but the music is loud, other times I turn the sound up to 44 just to barely hear the people speaking.
That sucks.
DVD Review: A Great Megaset!
Summary: 4 Stars
Overall UFO is a classic dealing with humanity a lot more than aliens. Never the best of everything but all pretty good this is a cult classic for fans of Sci-Fi. The copy looks great on an upscaling DVD player. Enjoy!DVD Review: Simply Beautiful
Summary: 5 Stars
UFO is quite simply one of the best exports from Great Britain. The show centers on Commander Straker who runs Shado, a secret worldwide organization established to protect the world from an ongoing alien invasion that the general public is unaware is going on. The Shado organization has a manned moonbase with spaceships, an orbiting early detection artificial intelligence satellite (SID), a fleet of submarines that can launch fighter airplanes, a fleet of land rovers, and a set of aircraft and orbital launch vehicles to ferry the stars of the show. All of this vast and secret infrastructure is commanded from an HQ located under, get this, a working movie studio. Commander Straker's secret identity is that of some kind of studio executive. So this lends to all kinds of pretty women and cool cars etc.
The show's theme song steals the entire show - it is quite simply amazing even for today's standards. The show is tightly written and does not suffer from some of the shortfalls of foreign shows from this era: that is, its plots don't degenerate into 1960s mumbo jumbo so common to the era and aren't as slow as the molasses in January. The show is tightly woven, well directed, and the entire show feels solid.
I must say though that the stars of the show, particularly the males like Commander Straker, Colonel Freeman, and Colonel Foster would have to be classified as male shovanist pigs and jerks by today's standards although likable in their own ways and fair in all respects and popular with the ladies of the time. All kinds of sexual and male shovenist innuendo permeate the show like sending the women to fetch coffee etc. The women wear the smallest of skirts and skimpiest of outfits and they are extremely attractive women at that but why would men be dressed in regular clothes and women have to wear skirts so short that their underwear shows? Yes in some shows the men wear similar minimal outfits but it is always the ladies who wear the skimpiests of outfits the most. It is fair to say that the show featured some beautiful and very talented ladies like Delores Mantes, Antonia Ellis, Gabriella Drake and I am sorry to say that seeing these gorgeous women wearing the minimal outfits they were wearing on this show, in part would force me to acknowledge that I too have some male shovanist pig in me (they are that beautiful and yes they can turn even honest humble men to sin)....Finally, there is also ample smoking throughout the show by almost everyone.
In other respects and as some kind of dichotomy, the show is quite ahead of itself with women assuming leadership roles and holding very serious positions with minorities holding the same types of leadership roles that you'd find in a modern society. In Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's defense, it is conceivable that this future world they invented was just a very open and permissive society much like the 60s but even there, some of the gender bias is evident.
Aside from not having as much metaphysical physics nonsense or a slow plot, the psychadelic 60s do bleed fully into the show in virtually every other area in a much more pervasive way than it did with Star Trek or how the 70s permeated BattleStar Galactica or Star Wars. As an sidenote in typical Gerry Anderson fashion the 70s permeate fully the show space 1999 which is a show that Anderson did after UFO, so this was probably intentional with UFO but with Space 1999 much more of the metaphysical stuff bleeds in.
Regarding the UFOs, the show revolves around having to mobilize the defense sytems to shoot down these silvery spinning UFOs on a regular basis. There is always concern about UFO aliens infiltrating Shado and sometimes we do get to see some actual aliens who as I remember appear to come from some kind of ecologically devastated world (so the environmental aspects get fit into the show on some tangential manner).
Overall, UFO is fantastic and if you watch all the episodes, you get a feel for why Straker is so serious and such a jerk per se; it all has to do with the weight of such a burdensom command on his shoulders and it comes out that Shado is virtually built through his tenacity. You get a real good appreciation for Straker, also, you get to identify with this great artistic performance of the late Ed Bishop who plays Straker very well and we can't forget the great performances by George Sewel, and Michale Billington who play great memorable supporting characters. I first saw the series as a child and just remember the cool special effects, which are still fantastic, but watching the show on DVD brings out the complex plots (well complex for 60s TV) and quite a few other elements I missed as a child. By contrast, watching Buck Rogers in the 25th century, while still a guilty pleasure for me, tends to bring about uncontrollable laughter at how low the roundkicks were and various other aspects of that great show. UFO though is much more serious and dark and delves into the fallacies of humanity.
The DVDs are nice but don't have a ton of extras, you get the DVDs and that's about it. If you saw Star Trek, you need to see UFO. If you saw Space 1999, UFO is better in my opinion. Don't expect Buck Roger's comedic fare, this show is pure Drama set in the psyschadelic 1960s - odd mix but Straker pulls it off.
Description of The Complete UFO Megaset
UFO was Gerry Anderson's first live-action TV series after a decade of producing such children's animated classics as Stingray (1963) and Thunderbirds (1964). The premise of UFO, which ran for a single season of 26 episodes in 1970, was like a more serious version of Anderson's Captain Scarlet (1967): in the near future of 1980, a high-tech secret organization, SHADO, waged covert war against mysterious alien attackers. Ed Bishop played the American head of SHADO--he had been previously featured in Captain Scarlet and Anderson's Doppelganger (1969)--though in all other respects this was a thoroughly British production. As with all Anderson series, UFO evidenced remarkable technological inventiveness and groundbreaking production values, coupled with startling lapses in fundamental logic too numerous to list.Much more adult in story and content than earlier Anderson productions, and surprisingly dark with its pragmatic view of human nature and downbeat endings, the show now seems like a forerunner of The X-Files and the equally short-lived Dark Skies (1996). Barry Gray's memorable theme and atmospheric music greatly enhanced the overall impact. Stylishly made, though terribly sexist by current standards and featuring eye-catching costumes more fitted for a campy dress party than the front line of a futuristic war, this cult classic eventually evolved into Space: 1999 (1975).
The UFO DVDs have been beautifully designed and produced. The mono sound is exceptionally strong, and the restored and remastered picture is almost unbelievably good for a 1970 TV show. With barely a flaw anywhere, the episodes look so clear, colorful, and detailed that they could have been filmed last week. This eight-disc megaset features all 26 episodes. --Gary S. Dalkin
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