Chris Dale Reveals the Secrets of our Super Space Theatre Blu-rays!

Prepare yourselves for an epic adventure across the universe and experience black suns, cosmic princess, alien attacks and Alphan destinations! The Space: 1999 Super Space Theatre Collectors Edition Blu-ray is currently available to pre-order! Following on from the Thunderbirds Super Space Theatre set, this is the second release in Anderson Entertainment's growing line-up of definitive boxsets of the SST compilation films based on the worlds of Gerry Anderson.

Our Super Space Theatre Collectors Edition Blu-rays bring these cult fan favourite back to life. Whether it's restoring them to meticulously high-definition or retaining their grimy, nostalgic VHS quality, our releases provide you with multiple ways of viewing these curious yet beloved feature film presentations of classic Anderson episodes! 

We recently caught up with range producer Chris Dale to learn the secrets of the Super Space Theatre Blu-rays!

Fred McNamara: Our Super Space Theatre releases form part of our continuing partnership with ITV in producing definitive collectors releases of Gerry Anderson’s classic series. How did the Super Space Theatre films become included in this ongoing line-up?

Chris Dale: I think it’s a natural progression of the work started by Network, who released HD versions of the Space: 1999, UFO and Stingray SST movies on various Blu-ray sets over the years. Since their demise in 2023 people have been asking for the remaining SST movies - particularly Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet - to get Blu-ray releases so the demand is definitely there, and thanks to Anderson Entertainment’s home entertainment partnership with ITV we’re finally able to plug those gaps!

Fred McNamara: What’s been your involvement in Anderson Entertainment’s Super Space Theatre range?

Chris Dale: My involvement with these has been largely one of supervision, making sure that the HD rebuilds of these films are as close to the originals as we can manage in both picture and sound. In other words, original movie soundtracks, original movie title sequences, etc, but of course in HD.

That in itself is a challenge, as obtaining the original NTSC masters of these movies has sadly proved impossible; it appears that at some time in the late 80s or early 1990s, the films were reconstructed from chunks of PAL episodes that had better picture quality (for the time), but without much of an attempt to accurately match the content of the original films. Thus, most of the extra music added to the films was now missing, various scenes that had been trimmed or removed for the original films ended up back in them, some scenes that should have been there were now missing, and infamously, Journey Through the Black Sun has one scene appear twice! Picture quality also became extremely variable from episode to episode. These are the versions that the various rights holders for the Anderson shows have been supplying for DVD releases over the last twenty years; useful for the movie’s title sequences, but not much else if you’re looking to make an accurate HD reconstruction! Sadly, no-one knows where the originals might have ended up, or if they even still exist.

Since the Super Space Theatre project, with all its quirks and oddities, is a rather bizarre concept to explain to someone who didn’t experience these films back in the day, my main involvement with these releases is to explain the various differences between the films and the original TV episodes, to ensure we’re creating an accurate HD version of the 1980s originals. I also source the various VHS and laserdisc releases which provide the original movie soundtracks and act as a guide for our editor to assemble the new HD edits from. The editing itself is harder than it sounds, as there are inherent problems in syncing 24fps HD video with soundtracks taken from 25fps sources, so we have to run several QC passes to check that the sound isn’t drifting at any point. It’s a long process but I’m really pleased with how the Thunderbirds movies came out, and am looking forward to tackling the rest!

Fred McNamara: Network Distributing managed to do its own release of Space: 1999’s SST films a few years ago. Are there any significant differences with this latest release, or is this more of a chance for those who missed out before?

Chris Dale: Anderson Entertainment is committed to producing a full Blu-ray collection of all the Super Space Theatre movies, so the Space: 1999 ones would have been done at some point as part of that. Given that 2025 is the show’s fiftieth anniversary year, and with the bulk of the work already done for the Network set, it seemed both appropriate and time and cost-effective to follow our Thunderbirds release with Space: 1999! When it comes to the films themselves, the only major change we’ve made with our Space: 1999 set compared to Network’s is to drop the new opening titles sequences made for the 4:3 versions of Cosmic Princess and Journey through the Black Sun (the latter of which featured a couple of spelling mistakes) in favour of upscaled versions of the original 1980s movie title sequences.  

Otherwise all of the previous extras have been ported over, including the Italian feature Spazio 1999. We’ve also included the 35mm print of Destination Moonbase Alpha which was previously only available on Network’s The Bringers of Wonder Special Edition taster release (essentially rendering that disc obsolete) as well as The Super Space Theatre Story documentary (first released on our Thunderbirds SST set), VHS versions of Cosmic Princess and Journey through the Black Sun, the first home media release of The Return of Victor Bergman short film - and a brand new compilation film, Prisoners in Space!

Fred McNamara: Our upcoming Space: 1999 SST release comes with a newly produced compilation film made up of Dorzak, Devil’s Planet, and a dozen other episodes! What can you tell us about Prisoners in Space?

Chris Dale: Prisoners in Space takes those two episodes from Year Two and combines them into a single story, with Koenig stranded on Entra while Helena and the others are on Alpha dealing with Dorzak, cutting between the two in the same way that many TV dramas have an A plot and a B plot. In order to sell the illusion of this being one continuous narrative I’ve also incorporated audio elements from other episodes, added a couple of scenes from elsewhere in Year Two, and constructed a new scene cut together from parts of others - meaning you’ll see a few Alphans turn up in Prisoners in Space who weren’t in either Dorzak or Devil’s Planet!

Fred McNamara: How did Prisoners in Space originate?

Chris Dale: I was asked to create a new Space: 1999 compilation feature for this set, and at first wasn’t sure about the idea. As much as I love the Super Space Theatre movies of old, it was often difficult to ignore the fact that these were originally individual television episodes bolted together, particularly when the story abruptly shifted gears every twenty-five or fifty minutes. With forty episodes to choose from, there was no end of possible combinations, but the trouble was in finding two that fitted together naturally. I skimmed through that list of candidates, but it wasn’t until the end of Year Two that I found the perfect choice with Dorzak and Devil’s Planet; two episodes filmed simultaneously, with mostly different casts, both of which feature Commander Koenig on a mission away from Moonbase Alpha. It then seemed obvious that with minimal changes these two episodes would work well not just paired together but actually melded together into one continuous narrative, with both storylines playing out simultaneously.

Fred McNamara: Was it a challenge to stitch together all these episodes into a mostly seamless viewing experience?

Chris Dale: In narrative terms Dorzak and Devil’s Planet edited together relatively smoothly; I soon hit a rhythm of alternating between one scene from one episode, then one from another – and incredibly that first edit didn’t need any restructuring when it was done. The soundtrack was the real challenge, as music bridged many scenes in the original episodes and so I couldn’t cut from a scene in Dorzak that had music playing straight into a scene from Devil’s Planet that didn’t. Some scenes therefore had to lose music (without losing dialogue or sound effects), others had to gain it, and so on. The 5.1 audio mixes Network produced for their Blu-rays were of great help here (as were the show’s various soundtrack albums), as they provided all the necessary clean elements needed to make that work.

Some of the challenges I particularly enjoyed was finding a way to make the characters in Dorzak aware of what was going on in Devil’s Planet without having them get too distracted by it, and it was also fun to add some extra music to certain scenes in classic SST style. It’s certainly given me a new appreciation for the people who put the original 1980s compilations together, and the challenges that come with trying to make different stories work together as one!

Fred McNamara: It looks like a certain indestructible superman will be the focus of the next Super Space Theatre release from Anderson Entertainment. Can you tell us anything about that or any other future SST releases?

Chris Dale: Yes, Captain Scarlet is next on the SST roster! Captain Scarlet vs the Mysterons and Revenge of the Mysterons from Mars (in that order!) will finally be getting HD editions, which I’m particularly excited about as the former is my favourite of the Super Space Theatre films! And it looks like there may be space on the set to create another new film…

As for the rest, we’re planning to do all of them: The Incredible Voyage of Stingray, Invaders of the Deep, The Amazing Adventures of Joe 90, and Invasion: UFO, but we haven’t yet discussed what will be after Captain Scarlet. Invasion: UFO is one I’d particularly like to see (and hear) done properly, as every DVD and Blu-ray release that has included it in the last twenty years has used the 1990s rebuilt version with episode audio only rather than the original movie soundtrack (which featured a lot of non-Barry Gray library music). There were also two different edits of that film with slightly different endings, so we’d be aiming to offer both and create the definitive HD release of that film.

Before Network’s sad demise we had also planned to produce HD versions of all six Terrahawks compilation features, so perhaps they might turn up at some point…and it’s not impossible that we might look at Anderson shows that didn’t get the SST treatment – the four Subterrain episodes and the four Space Spy episodes would make good Fireball XL5 compilations!

Fred McNamara: It’s been over 40 years since these compilation films were produced. Why do you think the Super Space Theatre films’ popularity has lasted for so long?

Chris Dale: It’s amazing to think that the movies are now older than the Anderson shows would have been when they were first created! I think their longevity is a testament to the hard work of Robert Mandell and David Hirsch in creating them in the first place, but also simple nostalgia. For a long time the movies were the only way to view the episodes that they featured (aside from a TV broadcast) and people got used to them. Now, with all the episodes that were used in the films now available to watch in HD whenever we want, the movies have gained a new lease of life as an alternative way to enjoy these classic stories – and it’s always nice to have alternatives!

Certainly if I’m in the mood to watch some Captain Scarlet, my inner child that rented that Captain Scarlet vs the Mysterons VHS from the library every chance he got back in the 1990s still wants to put that on - so it’s nice to now be in a position to help bring that, and all the other Super Space Theatre titles, to Blu-ray!

Get your Super Space Theatre Collectors Edition Blu-ray sets for Thunderbirds and Space: 1999 and be transported to worlds where a mission can become a nightmare, or where human extinction on Moonbase Alpha may be seconds away!

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