Tuesday, July 13, 2004
Tuesday lunches with Bill W. can end up being a bad idea in the long run. Tuesdays is when the latest weekly batch of DVDs come out, and Bill likes to head over to the nearby Futureshop to snag some of the latest releases. He is a bachelor with significant disposable income, whereas I am neither. But I did see a note in a local paper mentioning the fact that my favourite cold war-era spy movie had come out on DVD, and was also on sale to boot. So I tagged along, expecting that that would be all I would get.
Then Bill W. pointed out the Sealab 2021 Season 1 DVD in the New Releases rack. I almost felt obliged to get it. This is a show that has so far as I know, never been broadcast in Canada (save possibly for those with a pirate satellite receiver), but I have been downloading shows since I was first intrigued by a mention of it in this blog about 3 years ago. I even enthused about the discovery here at the time. I managed to download shows from the first season using Kazaa and have since switched over to using a combination of Usenet and Bitorrent to snag the rest. I've shown it to some friends my age who have also become fans of the show, despite the fact that you can only view it by downloading them here in Canada.
Love the show. I had heard that the DVD was coming out, but since the show has never been broadcast up here, I figured it would never make it north of the border. So when I saw the DVD I almost felt obliged to pick it up -- I've been steadily enjoying the series for free for the past three years, so it only seemed fair to buy a copy.
Frankly the DVD itself is "okay" -- the extra features added to the disc are sparse, and a commentary track under the shows, or even a cheesy in-house "making of" featurette would have been appreciated. But the shows themselves more than make up for it, the "Happy Cake" episode probably being my favourite. There is one extra feature which is interesting, which is the failed pilot episode they tried to sell to the Cartoon Network, in which they dubbed their own voices over the original shows, a la "What's New Tiger Lily". Watching it gave me a new appreciation of the difference a good voice actor can make, and how much things have improved since the creators learned basic computer animation techniques to make their own "additions" over the original show.
Sealab 2021 is far from being the only show I like to download and watch - other ones include Penn & Teller's "Bullshit" (a show that goes around debunking everything from Psychics to Feng Shui to Bottled Water), and "Time Team" (a British show where a team of archeologists spend 3 days thoroughly investigating a dig site) - neither of which I believe are available on air in Canada. I also tend to lean toward other history and science documentaries, all of which are readily available for downloading when you know where to look. I am almost at the point where I am watching as many if not more downloaded shows than watching what's available on cable TV. Ultimately though, to be fair, I will need to buy more DVDs in the future to stay legitimate.
It will be interesting to see how sales of Sealab 2021 do up here, since they would probably point to the size of the market for shows that are currently only available to fans up here via download.
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