Talk:Video Gems

St. Michael

Is there a source for the info that the St. Michael DI/RoB cover was designed by Video Gems, as opposed to just being ripped off from them? There's no packaging credit that I can see, or anything like that. Personally, I reckon the Video Gems DI/RoB tape actually is the St. Michael one, and would love to merge the two pages, but I can't find anything to back this up. - Magnus Maximus 20:07, 22 December 2009 (EST)

Cropped scan from my personal collection (includes the reference number seen on Rockman's smaller scan for added proof). This was the only 1986 release of Dinobot Island/Revenge of Bruticus; since at the time Video Gems were the only company releasing Transformers on UK video, I'm guessing St. Michael simply did a deal with Video Gems to make the tape with them, albeit as a store exclusive. Video Gems only released their version of this tape couple of years later, with the episodes swapped around. --Jon T 07:33, 23 December 2009 (EST)

Thanks, that's exactly what I was expecting. Still not enough of a link to merge the pages, though. I'm pretty sure that St. Michael was an M&S-owned brand, and my theory is there was something in the contract that said if anyone wanted to have a tape be an M&S exclusive it had to go through their brand, so the two St. Michael tapes are basically just Video Gems releases under a different name. But as I said, nothing to back this up. - Magnus Maximus 10:07, 23 December 2009 (EST)

1987?

Unless anyone has a decent verifiable source that season one was still being broadcast in the UK in 1987, I'm going to take the liberty of deleting this note. I've done extensive research on UK Transmission dates (for an as-yet-unpublished project), and in that year the Wide Awake Club was showing a line-up of Jem, Flipper, The Shoe People, the Adam West Batman and Tough Ted. WACaday were still showing Transformers (split into five minute chunks and stripped weekdays) in 1987, but these seem to have been individual episodes from season two. Ryan Frost (talk) 06:26, 19 November 2014 (EST)

The website of Moving Image, a stock footage library that owns the TV-am archive used to have an online database that listed archive broadcast data for TV-am. When the original database was online, searches of the original TV-am broadcast masters indicated that Transformers episodes were shown regularly until December 1987. From memory, and my few remaining 1987 archive copies of part of "A Plague of Insecticons" and "Heavy Metal War" these were still episodes exclusively from the first season of the series, although the database for the most part did not list which episodes were shown up to 1987. A few episodes shown in late November 1987 were apparently shown complete, rather than being split across the week, and their episode titles were indicated; they were all first season episodes. TV-am never acquired episodes from season two; these remained in the realm of contemporary video releases and satellite/cable broadcasts. Although the original Moving Image database is no longer online, I did save the pertinent search results and could paste them here if necessary. Jon T (talk) 20:07, 19 November 2014 (EST)

Cheers for this info, that sounds really interesting! Yes, if you could post the info that would be really helpful! Ryan Frost (talk) 09:20, 3 May 2015 (EDT)

Nope, ignore me, found it! - cheers for the tip. Ryan Frost (talk) 15:30, 5 May 2015 (EDT)