Captain Power-Complete Series

Captain Power, Sci-Fi's Most Misunderstood Gem!
First things first, lets get the most important point out of the way. Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future was NOT a childrens program. The producers never entended nor claimed otherwise. Unfortunately, like all sci-fi/genre TV programming of the '80's, it was treated as one no matter the content. In all fairness, having a title like "Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future," being bankrolled mostly by money from Mattel, and being saddled with a Saturday AM timeslot in most markets didn't help the situation.

Having said that, if your looking at this as some kind of prehistoric "Power Rangers" for the kids, look elsewhere. Though more than tame by todays family viewing standards, it's important to note their is blood, violence, character death, four-letter language, and even some implied sex. I'm not saying this is sci-fi Sopranos here, but it is very much a product of the syndication market of the time.

Now if your looking for an engrossing series...

Good buy for any fan.
At long last Captain Power is available on DVD. That's the good news. The bad news is that its a mixed bag of low quality video and good effort extras. To start, the box set is a nice clam shell design with a nice 6 page booklet filled with some pictures and art work. In the booklet creator/producer Gary Goddard has written a lengthy journal entry about the show and the DVDs. He mentions that the video on the DVD is the highest quality they could make for this release. So what we get is the complete series spread across 3 discs with a fourth discs for extras. That's an average of 8 episodes per disc. I don't know if having that many episodes per disc matters, or if its just the age of the source material, but the video quality is mediocre. I want to say its VHS quality, or at least that was my initial reaction. I tried to enhance the video with up scaling and various settings on my blu-ray player, but none seemed to give the picture much of a boost. The sound is good, but occasionally...

Not so much a review, but a question.
I was thrilled to get this set in the mail a couple of days ago, and couldn't wait to begin watching it. The video quality is about what I expected, but I have to admit that I'm more than a little surprised (and disappointed) about the audio mix. I've watched two episodes thus far, and the music/sound effects are SERIOUSLY drowning out the dialogue. And without any subtitles or closed captions available on the disc, it's sometimes impossible to tell what the actors are saying. There don't seem to be any audio options on the set, so I can't really modify the sound setup. I'm quite curious if anyone else is experiencing the same problems as I am. Anyone?

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