Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Xena on blu-ray? Not exactly says the wizard

Earlier this week, the website TVShowsonDVD.com reported that Legendary Heroes (aka, the most evil Xena merchandiser in the world) had plans to release Xena: Warrior Princess onto Blu-Ray at some point. Once again, someone at Davis Merchandising (aka, Legendary Heroes) got it wrong. Xena will not be coming onto Blu-Ray any time soon.

Legendary Heroes has the habit of letting their employees speak about stuff without knowing the full details. I'm reminded of the time they tried to sell me Xena prop swords because they had to make room for new stock because of the movie that was coming out in the fall (this was circa 2005).

Um, yeah. Sure.

This is not to say that this is necessary a bad thing. Given the quality of film the first two seasons were shot on (16mm), it would make for a disappoint early season release. Given the slap them onto DVD quality they did with the regular DVD releases, Blu-Ray wouldn't improve the quality of the video transfer that much. (In fact, it'd probably be disappointing.) It would not improve in the later seasons because they'd have to do some work on restoring the footage into something that'd be worthwhile putting onto Blu-Ray.

That means, cleaning the film, re-digitizing the computer graphics, redoing the sound. Not exactly cheap.

And don't expect any "bonuses." They ever paid Lucy and company from the first round. I don't think they'll be stepping up to do additional special features anytime soon.

Legendary Heroes is releasing the Highlander series onto DVD. This makes sense, the parent company of Legendary Heroes (Davis Productions), owns the rights to Highlander and have the original masters. And it's also their bread and butter.

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