SERIES 3 ON DVD AT LAST!

It's been a long time coming, but we're proud to at last announce the arrival of the little-seen third Star Blazers series to DVD. "The Bolar Wars" has had something of a checkered past, and although we at Voyager Entertainment have offered it on VHS along with all our other videos, it is only now that we finally have the resources to give series 3 the attention it demands. To understand why this is the case, let's review the steps that were taken on the way to this goal.

The first two Star Blazers series, as we all know, were animated separately in Japan (in 1974 and 1978, respectively) but were imported and transformed into Star Blazers as a single, 52-episode production (in 1979). Therefore, the production standards were the same on all 52 episodes; the same staff, the same cast, the same audio/visual techniques, etc. The third series, by contrast, was created in 1981 after Star Blazers had already debuted in America and was at the peak of its popularity. You might think, therefore, that it would have been a natural step to immediately import series 3 and add it to the lineup. Unfortunately, that was not the case.

Owing to circumstances that quite frankly defy explanation, attempts to produce an American version of series 3 in the early 1980s, when it would have made the greatest impact, were unsuccessful. It wasn't until 1985 that producer Claude Hill obtained the broadcast rights to all three series and the checkered flag was finally waved. By this time, the staff and cast of the first 52 episodes had long since gone their separate ways and Hill was unable to locate them. In standard TV production, exhaustive records would have been kept to prevent just such an occurrence, but because the earlier work was done outside the auspices of an actors union, the critical documentation simply didn't exist.

Instead, Hill turned to his old friend Peter Fernandez. You might not recognize that name offhand, but you have almost certainly heard Peter's voice. His acting career goes back to his childhood, and continues to this day. But of the hundreds of films and TV shows he has worked on, none has brought him more fame and adulation than that other anime masterpiece, Speed Racer. Peter rounded up his fellow cast members from those days behind the wheel, added some new members to the pit crew, and the rubber hit the road at (just to complete the analogy) mach speed.

We'll be forthright and acknowledge here and now that many diehard Star Blazers fans were disappointed that the original cast didn't have the chance to participate in "The Bolar Wars." Even today we get requests to amend the situation and re-record series 3 with the original actors. For better or worse, this cannot happen for many reasons. There is the lamentable fact that not all of those actors have resurfaced, and some are no longer with us. There is also the much more technical obstacle of rooting out all the independent music and sound effects tracks (called M&E tracks in the recording biz), which is now virtually impossible.

But negatives and positives always have a way of balancing each other out. We don't have the original voice cast in series 3, but we do have a cast of equal standing and even greater experience. We also have a spate of new characters with no earlier "imprinting" to detract from their performance. We also have far less editing to contend with, since television standards in 1985 were less restrictive than in 1979, so we get to see some very intense story moments that wouldn't have made it to the air at an earlier time. And, after all is said and done, we have an English version of series 3 rather than none at all.

After the series was produced, however, a new chain of events conspired to interfere with it at the distribution level. As it turned out, too much time had gone by since the initial broadcast of Star Blazers. Despite its popularity, it had all but disappeared from television (save for occasional, scattered reruns at off-hours) and few broadcasters were interested in reviving it, even with all three series ready to go. Thus, very few cities got to see "The Bolar Wars" (Chicago chief among them) and even then it had only a single airing before it vanished once again.

The good news is that the story only begins in 1985. It continues today, thanks to the advent of home video and the acquisition of all the Star Blazers programs by Voyager Entertainment. The even better news is that thanks to today's technology, we can offer a better viewing experience than has been possible before now. Here's why this is important:

When series 3 was produced, it was decided to eliminate all Japanese text and captions by cropping them out of the video picture, thereby compromising both image quality and the artistic composition of numerous scenes. Other edits were made by freezing a single frame of video to cover a scene that would otherwise fall outside the language barrier. Additionally, no new opening title was created for series 3, and the titles for series 2 were re-used instead. Conversely, TV standards had relaxed somewhat by 1985, and most scenes containing physical violence were untouched. All these and more editing "artifacts" can be seen on Voyager Entertainment's VHS edition of "The Bolar Wars."

In the time since our VHS release, however, a fresh set of digital video masters became available to us, and we decided to utilize them for this very special DVD release. This means the screen text will still be visible, the video picture will not be cropped, and the original main and end titles will be restored. Now that Japanese animation has achieved a much wider acceptance than was the case in 1985, we're confident that viewers will not be confused by the occasional evidence of this program's Japanese origins.

Over and above these technical considerations, we've put Tim Eldred on the job once again, and it's his responsibility to oversee the VHS-to-DVD transformation of "The Bolar Wars." Tim knows as well as anyone how difficult it has been to find series 3 over the years, let alone dig up the sort of data that has long been available for series 1 and 2. Therefore, he's resolved to not only meet the standards he set on our earlier DVD's, but to surpass them. To that end, he has designed a completely new menu system that gives you command of Argo's bridge, through which you can view the episodes and learn more about the characters, spaceships, locations, and more. There will also be an exclusive onscreen interview with Peter Fernandez and Corinne Orr (who supplied all the female voices) and, for the first time on any of our DVD's, special hidden bonus features. Finally, Tim has created for us a stunning original series 3 poster, coming soon to our online store. (Watch this space for further information.)

Part I of "The Bolar Wars" contains the first five episodes (of 25). It will be available in stores and on this very website in January, 2003.