New Secrets of Isis release

You gotta be kidding me! Classic Media is doing the same thing to Secrets of Isis that they did to Lassie, Release only a tiny fraction of a Series. I'm glad I got the BCI Set of Isis (As well as their other Animated Series) when I did, as now they sell for a King's Ransom!

I'd suspect it's the equivalent of disc 1 of the BCI set (minus any extras). Perhaps they're just testing the waters, and if it sells well enough, there will be follow-up volumes...

I, too, am glad I have the BCI one (I got a complimentary one as I supplied some of the materials for the bonus features of all of BCI's live-action Filmation releases).

There were only 22 half hour episodes produced. You could easily put 11 eps. per side on a DS/DL disk. This article on TVshowsonDVD has a *bit* more info but also doesn't mention specifically if it's the entire run or only a few eps. The implication is that it's the entire run but I'm thinking we'll not know for sure until after release day. I'm hoping for the full run as I put off purchasing this one until it went OOP and overpriced. I'd jump on the full $7.93 price *if* it's the full run.

So glad I picked up the BCI set - it was better produced and offered more extra features than many of the most popular prime time shows of its era. It's just a shame they couldn't get Joanna Cameron to participate.

You could do that, but I doubt very highly they'll give you a dual-layer disc with the whole run for 8 bucks. Would hardly seem worth paying for the rights. I thought I'd previously seen somewhere (months back) that it was essentially a "volume 1" release. I'd say there's no more than 5-6 shows on this.

 

 

If I am not mistaken Classic Media owns the rights to the entire Filmation library so they already own this show.  Classic Media acquired Entertainment Rights (who owned the Filmation library) awhile back so through ownership of that company they now control the rights to all Filmation shows.

 

As for this release, I have noticed that they have put out these dinky 1 disc releases for several Filmation shows including Ghostbusters (animated) & Groovie Goolies.  The only series thus far that has gotten a substantial release from them is She-Ra where they put out a Complete series set and a volume 1 release.  Why would they bother with these best-of releases, collectors of these shows want the whole thing and I doubt very many will buy these 'volume' releases they are putting out.

SECONDED!

IMO Classic Media is one of the STINGIEST Companies in existance when it comes to releasing what they own on DVD. One TV Series they own has almost 600 Episodes, yet they have released only about 5% of that show on DVD. AFAIC, they can
ROT IN THEIR
CORPORATE GREED!

Isis was very profitable for BCI when they released the complete series. I'm a little confused as to why Classic Media would want to do just a handful of episodes when they could sell many more units by releasing a complete series. I hate to say this, but support Classic Media by buying this release. If it sells well, you may get another volume. But personally. I would scrimp, save and buy a good used copy of the BCI release. $70 is steep, and outrageous, but its such an awesome set(with lots of special features). I'm kicking myself now that I never stuck with my plan of buying 2 copies of all live action Filmation shows(1 to open, one to keep sealed) especially seeing that Ark II, Space Academy, Jason of Star Command were all around $15 new Isis around $20.

Man I miss BCI.

I've done this on three occaisions. The first was when Volume 4 of Speed Racer was released on DVD. As a Gimmick the Set included a Die-Cast Miniature of the Mach 5 Race Car. The second was when the Movie Cars was released on DVD, Best Buy had an "Exclusive" which contained Die-Cast Miniatures of Lightning McQueen, "Doc" Hudson, Fillmore and Mater The third was when The Simpsons Movie was released on DVD, it contained Figurines of the Simpsons Family.

Any Collector worth their salt knows these kinds of Collectables best keep their value if they are kept UNOPENED! So I bought TWO Copies of each, one to watch the Show, and one to keep. As for the Collectables that were in the boxes I HAD to open to get the DVD, they all look good on my Xmas Tree!

I don't miss BCI one bit. I'll never forgive the incompetent employee who gave the Password DVD a film look, pre-dating Shout!'s poorly produced AITF S7 set by two years. The reason for their demise was that they did it to themselves.

I never got into the 'game show' BCI releases. From What I understand they didn't sell that great. But the entire run of their Filmation releases(animated, and live action) were flawless.
And as David Levine stated, yes they did do it to themselves. For every great seller like ISIS, they released all other Filmation releases that just broke even or lost them a lot of money. But it is the bold approach to pleasing the fans of the long lost Saturday morning favorites from the 70's, and animated after school shows from the early 80's that won them awards. They could have been another Mill creek(no special features, wretched packaging, terrible compression issues) but instead they treated each Filmation property like solid gold.
For this they will be remembered, and not forgotten.

Well, I will give them credit for one thing: It's not their fault that their TPIR DVD was lackluster. Bob Barker is a very arrogant man. It would have been a much better DVD if it wasn't for him and his ignorance and arrogance.

I agree the Password foul-up was inexcusable and is part of a stupid mindset that seems to exist among some people who think a "film" look is somehow better for videotaped material, which is the only explanation for why no one realized the mistake that was being made. That set alas is totally unwatchable from my standpoint when I already have the same episodes from GSN replays that look a million times better.

THe Isis set was their crowning achievement but my one quibble other than Joanna Cameron's lack of participation (which I know was beyond their control) was not giving us the option to see the "closing morals" from S1 that were found from videotaped sources attached to the episodes they were done for. Don't get me, wrong, I'm glad they were included but I would not have wanted to just have them all unspool in one supplement section. I'm still toying with the idea of eventually re-editing the episodes to include the correct closing moral with each episode.

That would be Lassie?

Yup!

I thought I read that the issue with the Password set was a mistake/foul-up, not something that was intentional. I do agree the quality on that was shocking, though: some of the episodes I also made off-air recordings from GSN, and those are vastly superior in picture quality, despite satellite TV's compression issues.

I was in e-mail correspondence with BCI (and Andy Mangels) during the production of the set (after all, several of those morals came from my collection), and the reason they were presented that way had nothing to do with BCI, but was entirely the judement call of the then-current rights holder, Entertainment Rights (ER). Andy told me that ER were extremely particular about anybody making edits/deletions to the content that they provided on their master tapes. That is why, for instance, the re-constructed end credits for the Freedom Force episodes play out after the E.R. ending title card (as that allows their 'episode' to play out unaltered from beginning to the end) instead of before, as it should have been.

I'm not disputing that the Password situation was a foul-up and not intentional. I think though, the reason why no one spotted that foul-up was in part because there is an attitude to think that if it looks like "film" it's no big deal to them or that it will somehow look "better" to their untrained eye. This is the same mentality that led a lot of critics to claim that the video on AITF S7 which was fouled up in the exact same fashion somehow looked superior to all previous releases that did it right!

Appreciate the Isis closing moral issue, but maybe what could have been done was to present the correct closing moral after the end credits for the particular episode?

My memory is a little fuzzy on that particular question, but I think the reason they're all lumped together into a "package" (rather than located on the same disc(s) as the actual episodes) is because they didn't have a moral for every episode. I think I was told they had toyed with the idea of putting them on the same discs as the actual episodes as bonuses there (but still NOT incorporated into the episodes, given ER's preferences and the noticeably inferior picture quality), but nixed the idea since only about half of them were located in time for the DVD release.

Something a lot of people may not have previously known: several of the morals (at least half a dozen) come from Joanna Pang's own off-air Betamax tapes from the 1970s! At the time, she had a friend who owned a VCR (a betamax) record her TV appearances for posterity. These tapes are not only the source for several morals, but also for the Shazam/Isis Hour openings. Naturally, she didn't have her friend record any of the second season episodes, since she wasn't in them.

Yes, I could tell that some were missing. Ironically, the one specific moral I remembered from my youth was one of the missing ones (from Season 1). But I still think fans would have preferred just attaching them to the respective episode post-credits because to be honest, having them separated kind of lowers the rewatch factor for me when I know that theoretically I *could* watch the episode "uncut" in that sense, but I'd have to do the complex arrangement I did one time before which was put the morals disc in a separate machine and cue the right one while watching the main episode on another machine.

Don't forget, due to Hallmark's contempt for the materials, the only masters that exist for this show are early 1990s PAL standard transfers from the 16mm films, which means these episodes had to undergo standards conversion (along with probably 90% of all other Filmation shows released since the 1990s) before being released over here, so that might account for some of what you're seeing.

also, this is the exact same number of episodes (and the exact same episodes) as disc 1 of the BCI set. I'm not at home to double-check whether the BCI disc 1 was dual or single layer, though, but when I looked up the old DVDTalk review of the BCI set, it wouldn't surprise me if the episodes there look exactly the same:

I do not think BCI pitch-corrected the audio for any of their Filmation releases. The sound, as I recall, matched my own off-air PAL format tapes from 1990s Sci-Fi Channel (UK) showings, so it plays 4% faster than it did on CBS.

The only BCI Filmation release (at least, of the '70s material) that should play at the correct speed would be The Ghost Busters, since that show was shot on tape instead of film.

The BCI disc 1 contains 8 episodes. Joseph's list for the Classic Media release has 7 episodes. It is missing episode 5 "The Outsider"

I don't know how to check if the BCI disc is dual-layer or single.

Can confirm that there is indeed no pitch correction on the Isis BCI discs based on my personal and private "re-editing" project of putting the closing morals back into their respective episodes in which the lower pitch for the theme music is quite evident.

Jeers to Hallmark for butchering the source elements. Just what was it that offended them so much about that thirty seconds of content per episode???? Did they think their European viewers would get confused by the "see you next week?" from Joanna if they were showing these every day??

Actually, it is fairly common practice to take out references to "next week", "tonight", "tomorrow", "on last week's show" etc. references for syndication. Happens all the time. Also, I suppose there's the case to be made that "hammering home" the moral could be seen by some as redundant, but it' far more likely the "see you next week" is what got it cut.

It's not just the UK copies that were missing the morals, though. I've seen copies of 16mm film prints from US collections of certain Isis episodes that have the moral edited out ("Seeing Eye Horse" is one), so this practice probably started even before Hallmark got their mitts on the show.

I agree, junking the film prints was very short-sighted, as was converting them only to PAL and not NTSC also. But then again, Hallmark had no intention of US syndication (given the circumstances of their relinquishing the archive, I suspect they only syndicated these shows in Europe because perhaps they thought they could get away without paying Writer's Guild royalties for foreign airings, thinking no one in the US would ever know about them, or be able to prove them. They were wrong, as my friend Russell Bates can testify!).

Also, we are all also merely going on a years-presumed assumption that Hallmark junked the films. I was told a few years back that even a couple years after Entertainment Rights acquired the library, they still hadn't catalogued everything and had no real idea what they had or didn't have, so there is an outside chance that film prints might exist but just aren't catalogued.

I wouldn't hold my breath, though.

How simpler it would have been just do a fade-out before Joanna would say "See you next week!" or a smaller edit!

Related to what you say, I can remember for years when watching "Gilligan's Island" how the closing credits would usually have a snip to obscure the word "week" or "each week" in the song.

Adding things up for my re-edit project it looks like the only two first season episodes for which the morals were missing are "The Outsider" and "No Drums, No Trumpets" (which is the one I still have a distinct memory of watching! Part of her lesson was about how sometimes in competition there can be such a thing as a good loser and a bad winner)