Bring The Magic Home!: The Story Of ITC's Carlton Video Home Entertainment

1 - Century 22's Involvement of ITC Production

This section of the book is meant to cast my own personal views and interest for the series. As there is too much to cover in simply this one chapter, this book will see my own views and interest throughout almost every part, but more explicitly in this part. Bearing in mind, this is just my opinion, and if your's differ that's perfectly fine.

As many Century 22 followers are aware, we had done a considerable number of works based around the ITC works. These mainly consist of the productions of Gerry Anderson (Captain Scarlet, UFO, Stingray etc), but exceptions to this include Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner. Some of these productions marked with the honour of "An ITC Worldwide Distribution" are considered to be some of the finest television productions ever created. Even today, "ITC entertains the world". Among these, if not the greatest of not only the ITC catalogue but television as a whole, is Thunderbirds. My first exposure to International Rescue was back when I must have been around 3 or 4 when I was given the Carlton Video Volumes 9 (comprising The Man From MI5 and Cry Wolf) and 10 (Danger At Ocean Deep and Move and You're Dead). I still have some recollection of watching those episodes for the first time and my thoughts going through my head at this wonderful series.

 I had various pieces of Thunderbirds merchandise, including a Virgil Tracy outfit, a Thunderbirds wrist communicator, supersize Thunderbird 1, Tracy Island (the last two are I think my favourite Thunderbirds pieces of merchandise of all time), various smaller crafts such as Thunderbird 2, Thunderbird 4, pod vehicles like the Mole, various little figurines of characters (that I all sadly lost) and eventually, a free DVD from a newspaper featuring the first episode, and from my grandad's, the Volume 6 release of the Channel 5 range (Vault Of Death and Move and You're Dead). Eventually, I got the Complete VHS set from Carlton (and I watched those videos until the tapes had been played so much they were entirely unwatchable!). My next exposure to an ITC series was Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. I remember when I was 6 we picked up the Carlton Volume 1 DVD from what must have been a second-hand dealer. The series was defiantly much scarier and darker than Thunderbirds, even if I only watched the only episodes on that disc (six in total). I remember even being quite spooked by the menus and Carlton Video logo having the Mysterons take it over and blow it up. I can remember in about 2013 watching those episodes again and still finding it much darker and creepier than Thunderbirds. 

Around this time, as my Thunderbirds collection grew and grew, one very nice piece of merchandise I got was the SUPERMARIONATION cross sections by Carlton Books from illustrations by Graham Bleatham. Not only was I fascinated by the schematics of the various Thunderbirds crafts, but also the crafts and ships from the other ships from other productions. Sure I'd heard of Stingray and Joe 90 and such but had never watched them yet. I had heard of them from my parents and would read up on the other Gerry Anderson series in reference books of Thunderbirds that I had. I also had vague memories of watching UFO, Space: 1999 and The Protectors on ITV4, but also series like The Saint. My parents absolutely love The Saint! So much so that we bought the entire collection of both black and white and colour episodes on DVD. 

Technically, The Saint was my third proper exposure to an ITC series (even if I had at this time only seen the first six episodes of Captain Scarlet). I too enjoy The Saint, and was immensely popular on both sides of the Atlantic back in the 1960s! Finally, in 2016, I had the chance of watching the entire series of Captain Scarlet on the new ITV DVD release from 2015. Captain Scarlet was always my dad's favourite, and after many years of saying he wished he ought to get the entire series, we bought it. And of course, watching Captain Scarlet was just as delightful as watching Thunderbirds all those years ago. Now I was heavily into both Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet, I wished very much I would soon get around to watching the other Anderson productions.

I found watching most of the other of Anderson's productions that they have the same vibe as Thunderbirds (the same goes for Captain Scarlet too. This applies mainly for the other Anderson ITC series), and just as enjoyable. I watched them in this order; UFO, Supercar, Stingray, Space: 1999 (the first few episodes or so, then the rest of the series later), Joe 90, Fireball XL5, The Secret Service and then eventually what I've seen of The Protectors. Meanwhile, I was beginning to enjoy other ITC series at the same time such as Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), Gideon's Way, and The Persuaders. Whilst the Gerry Anderson science-fiction ITC series will always be some of my favourite series ever produced, the other ITC series I never seemed to quite get into in the same way. 

Perhaps the exception to this is Partick McGoohan's The Prisoner - it was thanks to some digging in the Carlton Video company that I saw the DVDs read up on the series (I'd defiantly heard of it before), and with its good reputation, I gave the series a watch. This led me to watch the other ITC series Danger Man, made before The Prisoner, and also starred McGoohan in the lead role. As of now, I have seen a large portion of the ITC series, or I have at least given the majority of them a go, and enjoy mainly the Gerry Anderson works (of course) and The Prisoner. Throughout this book, each of the original ITC series will have more in detail over my first experiences and how I view them today. Thanks to Carlton Video (who are now better known as ITV) we can enjoy these series today. They released a large portion of the ITC series on VHS, and on DVD.

The ITC series had been digitally remastered to improve the quality of the picture for the first time, some of which will be the first time they're released in their original format because of the video rights of certain episodes belonging to the compilation films of the Super Space Theatre package. Although future restorations would take place that looks even better than the Carlton prints, as of the late 1990s/early 2000s, these transfers looked outstanding. The source of the prints had been used for the aforementioned Super Space Theatre compilation video releases (the series that were part of the package), the various VHS releases of the 1980s and 1990s, and the BBC/Gold/Bravo Channels repeats - in forms of either 16mm or 35mm prints. For the case of Space: 1999 for the BBC2 screenings from 1996 - 1999, no new film copies were struck and the prints were digital tape copies imported from the US and converted from NTSC to PAL - these prints would be used by Carlton for the DVD releases in 2001. And the DVD releases today might not seem to have many extras compared to today's releases, but the Digital Versatile Disc had only been developed in 1995, and begun distribution in 1996. It was only until March 1997 where the disc became available to the US, and a year later to Europeans. With Carlton Video beginning to release DVDs in 1999, the DVDs were at the time very new - and vast improvements in viewing experience to the previous forms of home media.

Before we take a look at the range of Carlton's ITC catalogue, we need to understand the context of ITC and its history throughout the 1990s before they were taken over by Carlton Communications. Note, the Thunderbirds feature films were not distributed by ITC, but by United Artists, so they will have little inclusion throughout, and the book will mainly focus on the Region 2 releases...