Terrahawks: The Home Video Range

PART 3 - The Resurging Terrahawks Interest

Since the passing of Gerry Anderson himself on 26th December 2012, Anderson Entertainment has striven to revive Anderson's productions. Granted there was plenty of memrobillia from the 1980s of Terrahawks such as figures, models, soundtracks, and videos along the way, as well as the rare-to-find DVDs and Fanderson 2002 audio music. Anderson Entertainment was able to secure new distributing rights from ITV in early 2015 to release a new wave of Gerry Anderson memrobillia. Terrahawks (Jamie Anderson's favourite of his father's series) was at the forefront of this revival of Anderson mania. Because I think Terrahawks is Jamie's favourite series, I believe it has had so much interest and revival that has been invested back into the series (and for a good thing too!). 

Already at this stage, Anderson Entertainment had released a new set of Terrahawks merchandise from original 1984 novels and posters to the announcement of new Big Finish adventures on 19th April 2014. This continuation of the series saw many returning faces to record the new Big Finish audios that was made in conjunction with Anderson Entertainment. The stories are a continuation of that of the original series and was met with a wide appraisal from fans of the series. The audio episodes ran from 2015-2017. A brand new pilot spin-off was created in the form of Zeroids Vs Cubes, and Anderson Entertainment over the next few years released t-shirts, hoodies, books, and audio adaptions of novelisations, as well as a mask of Zelda. The Gerry Anderson Youtube channel publishes regular content about the series from FAB Facts to interviews, news, technical breakdowns and even free episodes! Several original puppets and models from the series were even held for auction in 2020.

On 1st July 2013, Network Distributing released a special documentary about the 1983 Terrahawks production. This film gives an insight into the creative process of such an endeavour and is complimented by interviews with Anderson and other members of his production team. This seemed hopeful for fans that potentially more is to come from Terrahawks in the coming years on DVD and potentially a new restoration for Blu Ray. Following the Youtube Channel's release of A Christmas Miracle in December 2014, Anderson Entertainment received many requests inquiring about a restored Blu-ray release and saw a lot of interest on forums where people speculated about the future of the series. Whilst the negatives appeared to no longer to exist, Anderson Entertainment tracked down film prints from which HD restorations could be made. 

"Given that the series was shot on the inferior 16mm format, without negatives to work from we were skeptical that any serious improvement could be made. However, we think you will agree that the sample presented here is very, very promising indeed and gives the series a new lease of life. The restoration of any series is a time-consuming and expensive process, but we hope that the work here will be the beginning of what will eventually become a fully restored blu-ray release. Over the course of the previous two years we have been fortunate to turn up all manner of materials, ranging from prints laying around at Bray Studio, through to a long-forgotten box at an accountancy firm that contained sought-after tapes and films. We have found rushes, and off-cuts and all sorts of interesting bits and pieces. Sadly, as far as Terrahawks goes, at the time of writing we still have six casualties. The episodes Gold, Play it Again Sram, Thunder Road, Time Warp and Zero's Finest Hour only survive on 1-inch videotape. Furthermore, the version of Two For the Price of One that is available to us on film is cut". 

Fanderson (the Gerry Anderson Appreciation Society) also claimed to have a number of their own prints which have also been transferred to HD and look amazing. It is not known whether these transfers were used for the Network Blu Rays, which I doubt they were because they were Fanderson's exclusive prints. Fanderson exclusively screened the Expect The Unexpected show on 12th October 2013 at Holiday Inn, Maidenhead, which was intended to help celebrate the show's 30th Anniversary. Announced in the Summer of 2013, special guests included Steven Begg, Terry Adlam, Mark Wollard, Gary Tomkins, Mary Anderson, John Lee, Judy Preece, Steven Woodcock and Jamie Anderson. The event included a dinner and an opportunity to meet many of the cast and crew from the series attending. This run included a screening of Two For The Price Of One, which was exclusively remastered by BBC Resources from Fanderson's own prints.

This HD Demo was published in December 2014 and compares the restoration from Happy Madeday. "A brief demo showing the DVD version of Happy Madeday and a brief test HD restoration demo of the same episode. For the previous DVD release old 1 inch tape transfers done in the 80s were used. These were of varying quality ranging from serviceable to almost unwatchable. Happy Madeday was one of the better looking episodes on DVD, but we think even this quick test shows the enormous potential for improvement. Bearing in mind the limitations of YouTube compression, plus the potential for a fully-funded restoration, a Blu-ray release of the series should look stunning".

And indeed, it would not be too long until the announcement that Terrahawks would soon be arriving on Blu Ray with vastly improved picture quality in 2016...