Quantum Leap coming to Blu-ray from Mill Creek on Feb. 7, 2017

I'm excited and evidently they managed to work out an agreement to restore most of the music!

Quantum Leap: The Complete Series Blu-ray »

I doubt this will have any new special features and will probably have the maximum amount of episodes possible on the Blu discs. I'm hoping for a decent bit rate. Yes, I could wait for 4K but I honestly don't think we will see some series ever get 4K releases.

The MSRP is $99 so hopefull it will come down but still less expensive than the DVDs were originally priced.

I have the release from OZ of the first season (region free) and it looks extremely good and includes the special features from the first season set ported over. Don't know if this will ha e it as it's not mentioned in the press release.

 

The website TVShowsonDVD says there's a DVD release as well which also has the original music restored.

Quantum Leap DVD news: Announcement for The Complete Series | TVShowsOnDVD.com »

 

I will be happy if they got the licensing cleared up for the entire run. I hated the replacement music--it was intrusive if you knew what was removed.

 

Seems like there's not a lot of interest.

 

Well, this is an unexpected release.

 

I agree. That's one of the reasons I purchased the first season of QL from Australia. I had heard Mill Creek go the license but they did such. Shoddy job with some Hammer titles that made me afraid. It's over 18 discs which means it might get a decent bit rate IF they use dual layered discs. Here's hoping.

 

Oh, boy.

 

This was one of my favorite shows when it aired. I'll definately be getting this.

 

Yes, I liked it, too. But, I remember getting tired of it by the last season and really disappointed in the series finale.

 

The series finale sucked for one reason--they elected not to close off the series because they thought they might get another renewal for a sixth season. By season five, the show had run its course.

The first four seasons were kept fresh by sharp writing, the duo of Scott and Dean and some truly challenging episodes (I'm thinking of the Vietnam episodes and the Oswald-JFK episodes and the ones where he jumped into his own past) however I feel that the series began to run out of steam by late season five and Bakula was exhausted (as o recall it also cost him his marriage).

 

Yes, I had to buy PAL DVDs to get the proper music.

Not exactly: "The vast majority of the ORIGINAL MUSIC has been restored for our release!"

"Unchained Melody" or not?

 

They haven't exactly been forthcoming about what didn't make it yet.

 

I worked on pieces of Quantum Leap around 1989, and my memory is that the show was show and cut on film, so rescanning it should not be that big a deal. I bet it'll look 279 times better in HD than it did 25 years ago. By an amazing coincidence, the original colorist on that show, Danny Bernadino, is working at Universal Digital Services, so there's a chance he may have actually done the new mastering. I'll have to find out what the inside word is.

 

There was a rumor that Quantum Leap and Magnum PI's film and SD video masters both burnt up in the Universal fire, but (the rumor goes), HD transfers had just been completed a couple weeks earlier for release in Australia...
I certainly don't assume any rumor to be more than rumor, but I wonder if your friend will have the real story of whether or not these shows were almost lost.

 

I haven't looked at the other seasons but season one looks extremely good. The issues I have here are minor but issues nevertheless. 1) No episode guides (if they wanted to be cheap they could print it on the inside cover) 2) ALL the discs except season 1 (only two discs) and season five are stacked. I mean, really? I would have paid a couple of bucks more for holders that could handle four discs si gle stacked for the rest. Also, each season (2 for example) has half of one season with the two of the other discs (3 discs 1 & 2) for the NEXT seasn. Sloppy packaging--pretty to look at but sloppy. Yes, I know BD discs are less likely to scratch but, really?

 

I suspect that's true because the master for "Troian" still has the reframed, zoomed in section for the last eight minutes which, I suspect, may have been pulled from a different master for some reason that was designed for widescreen Exhibtion (although Metflix shows it in the proper aspect ratio).

Looks to me like they did minimal fuss. The color's are fade on some episodes and one episode has a teal lol that was, I'm sure, totally u intentional due to changes to the film over time. The contrast is off on one episode that was shot day for night and looks too bright but otherwise these look pretty good for a no nonsense transfer without any restoration done. I do wish that Mill Creek had included subtitles (I know they would have paid for them to either license them or create them but it would have been worthwhile based on the average age of the audience). The menus are static but I have no issue with that. I do wish, again, that they would have licensed the podcast commentary tracks inline (althiugh I just synced them up to,listen to it) or generated at least one new one for the pilot, the leap home and Vietnam era ones. I would love to hear Dean Stockwell's thoughts on working on the show.

 

Great to know you worked on the show.

I've been watching the Blu-ray set over the last few months and have enjoyed it -- it's the first time I've seen the series in over 20 years since I recycled all my VHS tapes of it. The image quality is, indeed, nearly pristine (save for FX shots and stock footage), and I'm so glad the music has been restored. My only complaint about this set though (and all previous DVD releases), is that they kept the original rerun leap-ins instead of editing on the leap-ins to the next proper "new" episode. I always felt it disrupted the flow of the series when Sam would leap into, say, seven new episodes in a row, and then the eighth would be a rerun...

 

That leads me to believe that they used syndication versions of the series along with a mistake in the episode set at the graveyard...

 

All they have to do is hire competent people who take the time to do this stuff right. It's actually not that hard -- it just takes good people and time (and a reasonable budget). Why one would be off compared to the others... I dunno. I can tell when I've worked on big syndication projects, we always left one episode out and available to the other mastering engineers so that they could put it up and get a feel for how the color was "supposed" to look. Nowadays, we can copy over digital files and stills and compare the new show to make sure it's all in the same ballpark.

 

There's an entire day for night sequence in one episode where it isn't presented on the BD as day for night.

 

Doh. I have been guilty of almost doing that (particularly in one memorable occasion on the remaster of The Longest Day), but in every case I caught it before it went out and made it look night-ish.

 

Actually, the syndicated versions of the episodes were more of a mess. Scenes were edited out to shorten the running times, the Season Five version of the "saga-cell" and the Season Four version of the title sequence were used for all 97 hours, and the Pilot was split into two parts. At least the Blu-rays have the series as close to complete as possible.

 

The Quantum Leap syndicated versions I worked are were intact, uncut, and at the correct speed. But what they do with the master tapes after we use them... I gots no idea. Universal definitely had the master tapes in their vault. Unfortunately, that was the vault that burned up in June 2008.

 

I remember both USA and the Sci-Fi Channel re-ran the show several times in the mid-to-late 90s, so maybe they made whatever alterations they wanted once they got the tapes?

 

Here’s hoping that Night Gallery gets a BD release. With all of the extra work that universal went to restoring it, I’m hoping that it would turn out decent. Additional I’d love for us to get thcome commentary tracks as well.