Ahh, Survivors on R1 DVD. So satisfying.
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Did they finally release it? Cool to hear. I know we got it in Australia about a year ago at long last.
Both my sets are from the UK (original and newer 2E set)... while I consider the originals better for the extras and commentaries (thought they should be for the price), I think the best thing about 2E getting the license to sell them instead is that they obviously were far more open to non-UK sales.
After reading your posts here for a couple of years now, though, I'm seriously happy for you having your own R1 official release. :)
You can't imagine my intense joy!! And oz, appreciate that I had been watching this on VHS taped off of a PBS station. OMG what a difference in quality!! Look, I'm not saying it's Blu-Ray, but to go from grainy VHS to a digitized DVD is . . . a religious experience lol.
And oh my God I had forgotten how intense some of the scenes were! Jesus what good acting. I don't know how anyone can say that any member of this ensemble cast was bad. I love every single one of them. Greg's embarrassingly-tight shirts (& jeans! I saw his b-lls! lol) can't even deter from my enjoyment of an icon of apocalyptic cinema. THE apocalyptic production of all time.
So happy.
I'm a huge fan of post apocalyptic media and I totally agree that this is "the apocalyptic production of all time". My mother introduced me to this show, in fact, and I am eternally grateful; she used to talk about it when I was growing up, and I finally got to see it on UK import of the DVDs.
I can't think of a major cast member I disliked either, especially in the early episodes/seasons. I seriously missed some of the ones that randomly vanished from the show.
Also, I honestly think it's a shame Ian McCulloch didn't go on to even greater stardom, but his performance as Greg rivals the iconic yet realistic feel of Paul Darrow's Avon (in Blake's 7, around the same time and also partly by Nation).
I can empathize with you about the off-air-recorded VHS to DVD experience... a good number of shows I have watched for years in scratchy old video copies, and getting them finally released (not all yet, sadly) in halfway decent quality is just wonderful, isn't it? :)
Incidentally, if you're a hardcore Survivors fan and never got to see the special features on the out-of-print original (UK only) DVDs, feel free to message me sometime if you'd like to learn about them.
hey! Miss_Chievous
congrats! they finally did it eh?
I remember your lengthy thread on the subject years ago.
i've just started re-watching and come back here to see whats up ~ found a few of my own posts from way back
Yes Mark! And it's a beauty! In fact, I borrowed from the library the first disk of the remake and made it through the first hour or so . . . before I just couldn't stand it any more.
I said years ago (in the thread you just referenced) that the reason an attempt at a remake of this series would almost certainly fail was because Terry Nation's original production constituted an ensemble cast that could not be duplicated.
But I can flesh out the difference more pointedly, having sat through an hour of the remake, and report that that the producers committed the cardinal sin of failing to recognize that this is a subject best handled with a small cast, and an intimate, small, "enclosed" stage. Why? Because what matters is not how the outbreak started; what matters are the complicated emotions of individual human beings in the aftermath. The more characters you introduce, the weaker their individual journey. You cheapen their humanity by treating this story as an event, and fail to see the forest for the trees -- correction, not even the trees, let us say a bird, a beetle, a wandering sheep.
Spread the story over a landscape encompassing the entire planet, and your work product will be a mile wide . . . and an inch deep.
Terry Nation's concept obliges a very small cast -- ditch the prelude to the pandemic, how we got there is frankly irrelevant -- and needs to open with the quiet dignity of one survivor.
We don't need explosions, car chases, or Public government announcements.
We don't need aerial vistas of London, emptied.
We don't need to see rooms and rooms of dead people.
Just focus on Abby -- keep the language down to a minimum, for we will all write our own script as we watch her emerge from her sickbed -- and then build quietly, slowly, as she confronts the existential questions raised by her personal survival.
I do not wonder the remake failed; it was so irredeemably cheapened by the failure of whoever produced it to give the viewer the space he needs to make the journey with the cast (as opposed to passively witnessing it) as to foreclose any attempt whatsoever to personalize the questions it raises to his own individual humanity.
I just couldn't stand it. It was glib, with lots of action -- almost as if the producers were too frightened to give it the quiet treatment it received in the capable, sensitive hands of Terry Nation.
We do not need explosions for this story to be compelling; we need to be permitted to journey with a small cast of characters, and become one of them as we both contemplate what a future without any technology abandons us to.
Get the R1 Original friends. Even the worst acting you judge the series deficient in (and I acknowledge none myself) is trumped by the Maestro who wrote and directed it, Terry Nation.
mc
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