Sorry for double-posting but I thought nobody would read this if I just edited my old post.
Battlestar Galactica: The Complete Series - Ultimate Edition (UK Version) ReviewMy box arrived today and I've already started watching S1 (currently at the fifth episode; planning to watch the whole series again in English since I only know the German translation for now). I also took a closer look at all the content and would like to give you an insight about what to expect from the box.
Box/Interior Design:The box consists of several parts. It's basically a cardboard wrapping with a big plastic window on one side. Nothing special. This package contains the actual DVD container and a plastic Cylon Centurion. The Centurion is held in place inside the wrapping by a plastic conductor. The DVD container is made out of metal and has a nice Centurion painting on one side (the rest is black). It can be opened like a locker and has an interior out of foam plastic with four slots (one for each season pack). The season packs are basically transparent red jewel cases which are stripped together by tape. This sounds very filigree but it's actually pretty solid. Each of this packs has a cardboard cover which indicates the season and fits into one of the four slots of the foam plastic.
Conclusion: In my opinion the design of the box is quite good since it provides fast access to the designated DVD. The outside cardboard wrapping isn't that solid though and it's also pretty big compared to the actual DVD container. It doesn't fit on my shelf so I took out the plastic Centurion and the DVD container and put them onto it. The cardboard wrapping resides in my locker.
4/5Physical Extras:As I mentioned before the box includes a Cylon Centurion. Forget about the picture on Amazon he doesn't look even near as good. He's about 10 inches high and completely out of grey plastic with some black and red colour on armor and visor. He also has some fake bullet impact holes on his chest. Although you can move most of his body parts I wouldn't recommend to do so because he seems very filigree to me. To sum up the "model" (it's more like a cheap toy imo) isn't worth buying this box for if you intended to do so. Beside the Centurion there are also three booklets, two big and one smaller. The smaller one gives an overview about the main characters and also lists all the DVD content. The bigger ones are called "So Say We All" and "By Your Command" and tell you a little bit more about all the important characters on the show. There is also a summary of the events up to the discovery of the first Earth. This summary includes major spoilers so it's only for people who haven't watched BSG for a while and want to catch up with the story.
Conclusion: I'm not that happy with the physical extras. The Centurion is frakkin' crap and the books don't have much too offer. You might need half an hour to read/watch through them. It would have been nice to have some posters or something.
2/5The DVD's:Ah, the most important part. The DVD's seem to be straight from the previously available packages (miniseries/seasons/Razor) since they don't have a common "complete series" design. The box includes all four seasons as well as the miniseries and razor. There is also a ****load of commentaries, trailers, podcasts, deleted scenes and other stuff. It's practically everything a BSG fan could ask for. However, there are two major flaws. The first one is that there are no webisodes. They are advertised in the small booklet and I know the US version has them so it seems they just took the booklet from the US version. For me it's no that much of a deal as you can find them all over the internet but since it's called a complete collection I'd expect them to be on the discs. The second one is more annoying to me. There are no extended episodes. Not even Razor is extended. I don't know why this happened since the US version of the box has all the extended stuff. What reason could they have to keep them out of the UK version? I might also add that the only available subtitles are in English but I expected that since there are going to be collections for other countries in their respective languages afaik.
Conclusion: To be honest I don't care about the webisodes but the missing extended versions really annoy me. Since this is called a "complete collection" the DVD's only get
3/5.
DVD Quality:I don't want to go into detail about the resolution etc. It's just DVD quality so you all should know what it looks like. The picture is a bit grainy but I heard that this is an affect they intended to have so I won't judge it. To have a reference it looks good on my 47" Full HD TV. Maybe this is also due to the upscaling mode of my HDDVD-player (yes I bought it before Bluray had won) which should increase the image quality slightly on big resolutions. The sound is fantastic on a 5.1 system. Not much else to say about it.
Conclusion: 5/5Final Verdict:The box features a lot and I can recommend it for all those of you who haven't seen the show before (shame on you!) or just want a complete box due to its cheap price (less than 100 € on Amazon atm) compared to what you really get (over 60 hours of entertainment). Non-US residents who consider themselves as collectors should buy the US version if they don't care about the higher price (taxes, shipping) due to the lack of minisodes and extended episodes in the UK version. I give the complete box a
3.5/5.
I hope this might be helpful for some of you considering to buy the box. If you want pictures I can take them just tell me what you want to see.
