Walk into any branch of HMV and browse along to ‘J’ in the TV Drama DVD section, and you should find a couple of volumes of Jupiter Moon courtesy of Oracle Home Entertainment (unless they have sold out and are awaiting re-order, of course). If I’ve been there before you it may even be prominently displayed on top of a Jonathan Creek Boxset.

It may seem like a simple process to put a TV series onto DVD, and maybe it is. However there are always things to sort out and plan. I can’t comment on the problems of rights issues, or the technicalities of DVD production, but I can tell the story of my exact involvement and the oddities of DVD preparation.

Back in the autumn of 2003 Richard Derrington informed me that William Smethurst and Matt McCarthy (as Andromeda TV) had recently acquired the rights for Jupiter Moon from its long exile in post-BSB-"merger"-nightmare-land. Shortly after, William rang to tell me this news and that they now had a new distributor, London Films International (LFI), who were keen to do something with the property.

London Films International is a very big distribution and production company. The BBC’s classic drama I CLAVDIVS was actually co-produced by LFI, and so this was very good news indeed for Jupiter Moon.

Jupiter Moon’s former distributor since the "merger" was Southern Star, a backwater of the Murdoch empire that ran TV Stations in Asia. Jupiter Moon had languished there with no promotion, only generating sales to those that actively sought it out (although there were a few). William told me that LFI were very keen to promote the series heavily and that they were gearing up for a big push at Cannes, and they were also looking towards pushing for a DVD release.

This was exciting news, the ultimate! Okay, so no one had actually picked it up, but it was being touted as a very real possibility. Not only could Jupiter Moon be returning to TV, but it could soon be ours to own on nice shiny disc.

Now we have been spoilt, we Doctor Who fans, and I was determined that this should not be just a vanilla release. I sent William a list of possible extras for a potential DVD release, both expensive and cheap, and he wrote back to say that he would discuss them further if anyone showed an interest.

It was February 2004 that I learnt that Eureka Video had taken out the option. They were impressed by the list of things that I had suggested to William and they got in touch with me to discuss it further. Eureka were a small independent DVD company, but they could see that Jupiter Moon had untapped potential, and although they could not throw money at it, they were keen to see that the discs were as good as they could possibly be.

However things are not as straightforward as one might think, and there were a few hurdles to get over first. Firstly the dreaded subject of edited features raised its ugly head. The suggestion was that they could edit down the episodes into "feature films" concentrating on one storyline.

The series had apparently been re-edited at one point into fifty 50 minute episodes, with each weeks worth of episodes being condensed into a third of the time, for overseas sale (I think I am right that it was Italy who were interested in a tighter 50 minute series). I was slightly concerned that this version might somehow get released (I had similar fears when a VHS had been mooted in the mid 90’s), but thankfully William was aware of the cult market, and that "as broadcast" was what the collectors wanted.

Secondly was where to start. Well Episode One, obviously, thought I, - but no…

William suggested that we start in the middle of the run, and then do the earlier episodes at the end. It may seem like a silly decision, but it was seen that the middle run of episodes were far more commercially viable and exciting. I agreed that the episodes in question were some of the best the series had to offer, but I also told him that the very early episodes were also very good. I was unsure as to how a collector's market would react to a first volume starting at Episode 56 (or whatever), and I told him that if we could get to Episode Eleven in the first sale, then there shouldn't be a problem.

William wasn’t sure, but said he would review those early episodes again, the real concern was possible "volume 3 fatigue". A week later he got in touch to say I was right, and that he had forgotten how much incident was packed into those early episodes. I was certainly of the opinion that once we entered the episodes in the 30's (Volume 4) then we would be home and dry for the rest of the run. After a meeting with Eureka, and after getting a confirmation that they could include eleven episodes in the first release, Jupiter Moon on DVD would start with Episode One – phew!

I had originally envisaged the DVD releases as being budget discs with six episodes per release, hopefully with an RRP of £15, which would give an online discount price of around £10. With this in mind I was thinking of a two volume launch with some offer to tie the two together. I was amazed when Eureka stated their intent to release double disc sets with ten episodes a piece (although eleven on the first volume). The proposed RRP was £25, but later came down to just under £20. After doing the maths based on the online price of £15 I realised that this was actually cheaper overall than my suggestion. It was at this point that I realised that the series was in safe hands.

In my research for possible extras I was thinking of any possible zero-budget features. One of the main features of Jupiter Moon was its focus on the Daedalus 10 project. This was actually based on the very real Daedalus project as proposed by the British Interplanetary Society (BIS). I got in touch with the BIS to ask if they had any promo material on the project as it might be of interest to the Jupiter Moon fan, and it could get them more exposure. By a stroke of luck my email was passed onto Bob Parkinson, former scientific advisor on Jupiter Moon, and a former project worker on Daedalus itself. I passed on his details to William Smethurst who had long lost touch with him, and that is how the first couple of volumes carries an interview with Dr Parkinson detailing the design on the programme and how it was all based on very real science and design.

Another discovery of mine was Boris Masnik, the Czech visual effects supervisor who built and shot all the model footage at Barrandov, Prague. Boris had moved on after the Czech revolution and had helped set up a new international studio specialising in state of the art special effects, and he was now the Head of Film Projects. The company, Universal Production Partners (UPP), had recently finished work on the new adaptation of Salem’s Lot, and Boris was working on a new upcoming feature film.

I mentioned to William that I had emailed Boris, and he told me that they had been trying to find Boris for years. The old set-up at Barrandov was dissolved with the rest of the Czechoslovakian State many years ago and they wanted to know what had happened to the very large miniature of the spaceship Ilea. A few days later I got a phone call from Jupiter Moon’s Executive Producer Matt McCarthy, who was ringing me from the Cannes festival. He wanted Boris’ email, but I told him I had his phone number. Matt was delighted and went off to ring him.

The next day I received a very grateful call from Matt. He had rung Boris and had some brilliant news. Not only did Boris have a lot of photographs of the shoot that could be used for DVD extras, he had also, unbeknown to anyone, kept a video diary of the shoot back in 1989/90. Matt was travelling to Prague in a couple of weeks to pick up this footage, which again could be used on a DVD release.

I still don’t know what happened to the model though…

Eureka decided to release Jupiter Moon under their subsidiary company Oracle Home Entertainment. They had perused my old Jupiter Moon website and asked if I would submit the character profiles as extras material. I agreed, but after thinking about it I changed my mind. The character profiles were useful to accompany a text episode guide, but had little use on a DVD. You learnt about them from watching the episodes and I saw no reason to circumvent that. I got back in touch and said that cast profiles would be more useful and they agreed and sent me a few names to start working on.

I worked on the text extras alongside Mark Jones, one of my friends with whom I had started this whole chain of events with back in 1992. We also decided to submit on spec a series of Production Trivia notes on each episode. We did think of presenting them as a text commentary at one point, but they would have been far too sparse and so just presented them as separate text files. Oracle were delighted by them and agreed to use them on their discs.

Oracle asked me what magazines would be the best to advertise in, so I spent a month reading though all the genre magazines available. In the end they decided to use SFX and Dreamwatch, and invested in a couple of double page spreads. For these I came up with a brief history of the first half of the 21^st century (as an introduction to the series), and designed some teaser postcards playing on other genre shows or referencing other popular programmes that the cast had starred in.

The authoring house and designers used for the discs were Cheerful Scout. I recognised their name and soon discovered that they had designed the Ultraviolet DVD release some years earlier. It was great to hear that the disc design was in safe hands, and I got some very teasing emails from Oracle about the menu designs and the "marriage of the old and the new". It sounded amazing.

The clock moved forwards to the date of the first release in June 2004. Even though I had seen the covers and seen (and created) the ads I still couldn’t believe it was going to be available. I had offered to "test drive" the test disc from Technicolor, but I never saw one, so when the discs finally arrived through the door it was a heart stopping moment!

What would they look like? Would they work? Would they live up to expectations?

Yes, yes and yes!

The discs were wonderfully presented, and were quite nicely printed. The menu system was well designed with a touch of humour, and navigation was simple. Above all the episodes were unedited, in their original stereo.

Actually I said unedited and that’s not quite true. I had tried to persuade Oracle (and William) to keep the advert captions (adcaps) intact, firstly because cult collectors like that sort of thing, and secondly because it would be cheaper than taking them out. It took a lot of persuasion and eventually I got them to keep them in. However it seems that higher up at Oracle, or on advice from the authoring house, someone had them removed, as they were "irritating to the viewer". Still it was no great loss. It is the usual standard on TV releases to have them removed, but thankfully they still kept the animated adcap at the top of the disc as an introduction to the menu.

Through the wonders of laser technology and those shiny discs we can view the programme once more. Technology that might well have been invented by the series itself (actually they did appear to use CD ROMS long before they were introduced). As I write this the third volume of Jupiter Moon is awaiting release. That will be 30 available episodes by the end of 2004 - 20% of the series available to buy…

… that’s more than Doctor Who, that is!