About a month ago, the BBC was talking about closing down Britain’s longest-running and only regular astronomy television program, The Sky at Night – less than a year after its creator Sir Patrick Moore had died. Since then the show was moderated by the longtime co-hosts Lucie Green and Chris Lintott, who had actually done a very good job of keeping the program alive – but that doesn’t seem to have been good enough for the BBC bosses. The outrage over the possible cancellation was huge, including a petition with over 50,000 signatures and pleas from just about everyone to continue The Sky at Night – with success: Tuesday, the BBC had announced that the program will continue in 2014.

The rescue comes, however, at a cost – the show will not be broadcast on BBC1 anymore, instead the first showing is relocated to BBC4 with a later repeat on BBC2. Given that The Sky At Night is broadcast on Sunday after midnight at the moment, this may be an improvement and the home on BBC4 is not altogether bad, because the repeats of the 30-minute-version have already aired on this channel for some time. The shorter 20-minute version, which was always broadcast first, will also be abandoned in favour of the 30-minute format. This can be a great chance for The Sky at Night – hopefully the inevitably lower ratings will not prompt the BBC to cancel the program for good.

The announcement was also paired with the news that The Sky At Night will make a pause in January to make way for a fourth round of Stargazing Live with Brian Cox and Dara O Briain, which has been credited to create a huge public interest in astronomy and will surely be as amazing as in the previous years.

The next regular episode of The Sky at Night with the Moore Moon Marathon, will be aired this Sunday (actually Monday) at 0:30 GMT on BBC1 with the 30-minute-version first airing on BBC4 on Thursday at 19:30 GMT. For more repeats check the official website of the program.

I’m really not very good keeping up with the current news about all things DVD and Blu-Ray and I’m thinking of removing the news list entirely, but once in a while there’s something really exciting worth mentioning. This time it’s Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World – which has been out on DVD for ages and was even released on Blu-Ray in 2011, but only in the short 161-minute version. In the 1990s, the director himself had attempted to reconstruct his 192-minute premiere version with limited success and later film restorer Robert Harris lobbied literally for decades to save the original version of the movie. Now he seems to have succeeded, because a couple of days ago, Criterion announced that the movie will be released in a newly restored version on January 21st.

The press release and its thread on the venerable Home Theater Forum just about says it all – the general release 161-minute version will be accompanied by a reconstructed 192-minute version encompassing all the still available material including scenes that have been returned to the film here for the first time. The long version, previously only available on laserdisc, has been restored in high-definition, but the general release version was even transferred in 4k, all from the original 65/70mm elements in the original apspect ratio of 2.76:1 (it is possible, though, that the 4k transfer of the short version is the same as on the 2011 Blu-Ray, which would be absolutely fine). There are also a lot of amazing extras including a new audio commentary, several featurettes and archival material, but missing are the hour-long 1991 documentary and the deleted scenes (which are contained in the 192-minute version) from the MGM releases. But considering what else is there, this will be one hell of a fine release.

My only complaint is that it’s a dual-format version containing both the Blu-Ray and DVD. While I really like the approach of Criterion that everything is replicated 1:1 on both formats, this makes the set outrageously expensive. At a list price of $50 this is unaffordable for me and unless there will be some hefty discounts or I find a solution to just get the DVDs from the set, the Criterion release will be unfortunately off-limits for me. But I plan to write something about it nevertheless when it’s out!

Everybody is talking about the new space thriller Gravity, but I’m not – instead I’m taking the current hype around this movie as an opportunity to look back at another great space movie from the 1990s: Ron Howard’s Apollo 13. Even after almost twenty years since its making, the movie still holds up well and shows how a real space thriller should work – as a combination of great acting, amazing visuals and creative storytelling. Apollo 13 is neither a complete special-effects orgy or the Tom Hanks show some of the advertising wanted it to be, but a fairly accurate retelling of the real events focusing heavily on the story and characters. Today’s review of the Anniversary Edition DVD from 2005 is a heavily reworked and improved translation of my earlier German-language article, finally concluding the Spaceflight Series.

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I know it’s been a while since the last update, but I decided to take it easy for another week while I battle the effects of the autumn weather and prepare some new articles – I may have nothing for next week, but I’m working on several reviews at the moment. Meanwhile I’d like to send you once again over to DVD Savant, where Glenn Erickson is posting a lot of fabulous reviews twice a week – even if you are not particularly interested in the movies he writes about, his articles are so fascinating that they are worth reading nevertheless. Myself, I’ll be back next week with a counter-review to Gravity and then maybe some really old stuff.

There are countless documentaries about film history, but few achieve a sense of wonder like When The Lion Roars, Turner Pictures’ magnificent account of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s history. With the brilliant Patrick Stewart as host and a mountain of interviews, filmclips and a lot of other historic footage, it is a documentary like no other. First shown on Turner Pictures’ cable stations TNT and TCM both in the USA and in Europe, I was very glad when Warner finally released a DVD in 2009, just in time before I decided to rescue my own old VHS recordings. Despite the less than perfect technical quality, owing to the video post-production, this is a wonderful DVD release preserving one of the best documentaries about Hollywood ever made that should be in the collection of ever film enthusiast. This review is based on the original German version from 2009, translated, slightly updated and improved.

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This is one of these movies you might have someday seen on tv and then it never surfaced again – that’s excatly what happened to me with Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen. Everybody knows that Peter Ustinov played Hercule Poirot lots of times, but his one and only appearance as Charlie Chan in this comedic take on the oriental detective is mostly unknown. Sporting a great supporting cast and a both funny and dramatic script, the movie is not the embarassing failure it is often referred to, but a great production which doesn’t take itself too seriously. Unfortunately its bad reputation has prevented Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen from getting a proper DVD release, but there’s at least one Canadian disc which I was really glad to find years ago. Today’s review is new for DVDLog, because I wrote the initial German article, now expanded and improved, before this website even existed.

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The autumn and winter season on the BBC has already kicked off with new episodes of QI, but there are two more interesting series starting next week and one is already running.

This almost completely went by me – it seems that Brian Cox has been very busy filming a new three-part series called Science Britannica about the history of british science. The first episode airs on Wednesday, September 18th at 21:00 GMT / 22:00 CET on BBC2 and there’s also a very short trailer on Youtube. This series promises to be very interesting, because Brian Cox has always had a huge interest in the beginnings and evolution of science and often referenced to it in his previous programs.

David Attenborough is also back with a new two-parter called Rise of the Animals: Triumph of the Vertebrates starting on Friday, September 20th at 21:00 GMT / 22:00 CET on BBC2. It’s about the evolution of the vertebrates and takes a similar approach as First Life, utilizing CGI in addition to real footage to show how extinct species evolved.

And there’s also Sound of Cinema: The Music that Made the Movies, a three-part series presented by author, composer and silent film music expert Neil Brand about the history of music in movies. The first episode has already aired on BBC4, but the last two episodes are aired Thursdays at 21:00 GMT / 22:00 CET and there’s also a repeat of the first episode later tonight on 22:35 GMT / 23:35 CET.

There is, however, no definitive word yet on an airdate for the long-awaited third season of Sherlock, the brilliant contemporary adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s victorian detective. A short teaser trailer has been posted by the BBC on Youtube and was also shown after a repeat of series 2 recently. There are rumours that the series will be broadcast at the beginning of 2014, which is quite possible considering that the BBC has said that the series’ production was only finished on September 1st.

Regular readers of this website should know that I have a particular fondness for the works of Tim Burton and when his stop-motion remake of Frankenweenie was announced some time ago, I instantly knew that it would be a very special movie – and I was right. It took me some time to see it, but it was really worth the wait. Far from being just an expanded version of the original, Tim Burton has transformed the movie he was once fired for from Disney into a delightful stop-motion world paying homage to the horror and monster classics of the 1930s and 1940s. While the movie is absolutely brilliant and together with Dark Shadows is one of Tim Burton’s best recent works, the DVD is somewhat of a disappointment with its lack of extras – but the technical quality is flawless and the movie is certainly watchable. Today’s review is the first new one for quite some time, even if the disc’s release was a while back.

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There are many documentaries about the race to the Moon in the 1960s, but not many make really good use of the vast film archives of NASA. But today’s next entry in the Spaceflight Series does this extensively and exclusively –  Al Reinert’s For All Mankind is the most fascinating and astounding documentary about the historic American spaceflight programs. Completely consisting of original NASA footage, which was carefully selected to represent all the flights as one single mission, the documentary shows the experience of spaceflight and moonwalking like no other. This review about the wonderful Criterion DVD re-release is just a straight translation of my earlier German article from 2010, but just because there was nothing much to improve or add.

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The autumn season on british television is starting earlier and earlier each year and I almost had not noticed that Stephen Fry’s and John Lloyd’s brilliant quiz show QI is starting again next week on BBC2 with the new Series K. The weekly broadcasts start next Friday on 22:00 GMT / 23:00 CET, with the extended 45-minute XL version now following on Sunday at the same time – but watch the schedule, the BBC often likes to stir up the program at the last minute. That’s why nobody had noticed that the “lost” episode of Series J (you know, the one with Jeremy Clarkson) was broadcast on Tuesday, but the XL repeat is shown tonight at 22:15 GMT / 23:15 CET.

You can read more about QI on the official website, which was totally overhauled and greatly improved last year and there’s also the Facebook-Page and the Twitter-Stream. Fingers on buzzers! :-)