Sealab 2021 Season One   Starring (voice): Harry Goz, Kate Miller, Erik Estrada, Brett Butler, Ellis Henican and Bill Lobley Revolver Entertainment RRP: £19.99 Certificate: 12 Available 22 June 2009

Journey to the undersea world of Sealab 2021 as all 13 episodes of the first season surface on DVD for the first time in the UK. The amazing adventures begin in the mind-boggling distant future as the crew explore the ocean’s depth, that is, when they’re not running pirate radio stations, fighting flesh-ripping aliens, discussing robotic brain transplants or going back in time...

Five years after the first season of Sealab 2021 was released on DVD in North America, Adult Swim's spoof of Hanna-Barbera's '70s cartoon series Sealab 2020, finally makes it's UK DVD debut.

This DVD release contains the 13 episodes that made up Sealab 2021's first season. For reasons unknown, the episodes are not in their original transmission order. While this won't really matter to most people, there's at least one instance where a previous episode is referenced - in this case it's referred to as having happened last week. But, because of the running order, the incident now referenced now actually happened several episodes previously.

Over the course of this season the crew become obsessed with the hypothetical notion of transplanting a human brain into a robot body; waste time looking for Murphy's Happy Bake Oven; start up a pirate radio station; Debbie's biological clock is ticking and she decides to interview crew mates in the hope that one of them will be suitable to impregnate her; Dr Quinn has a hallucinogenic trip after an accident; Murphy gets trapped under a soft drinks machine for several months; a Feng shui con man attempts to bleed the Sealab dry of its finances; the crew get trapped in a store room; and we get to see behind the scenes as the actors prepare for shooting the TV show.

Extras include Pitch Pilot (9 min, 07 sec which was the original footage that the show's creators sent to The Cartoon Network); I. Robot Alternate Endings (1 min, 50 sec which shows two different endings to the broadcast episode); Radio Free Sealab: Uncensored (1 min, 52 sec which un-bleeps the dialogue from the end of the Radio Free Sealab episode. It turns out that it's not rude at all); Little Orphan Angry: Deleted Scenes (1 min, 53 sec); and trailers for other shows.

I'm not really sure why this release has been spread across two DVDs, when the episodes and extras would have easily fitted onto one, but this is still great value for money at £20.

If you've never seen this series before then you're in for a treat.

8

Nick Smithson