Missing Dad's Army episode animations coming to DVD
- An extras-packed DVD of Dad's Army animations will be released in November
- Dad's Army - The Missing Episodes features five editions of the sitcom
- Wiped by the BBC, audio recordings in various formats survive, to which animations have now been made
Dad's Army - The Missing Episodes is to be released on DVD, containing new animations and original archive material.
The single disc release will be available to own from 27th November, following broadcast of five new animations on Gold.
Pre-orders are now being accepted for £14.99.
Airing under the title Dad's Army: The Animations, the four-part series comprises of three episodes from the sitcom's second series and two short Christmas specials, the latter airing as one programme. Soundtrack recordings for the specials survive, as well as early 1970s radio remakes of the three Series 2 episodes, to which the new animations have been made.
In the case of the three radio adaptations, the recordings have been comprehensively restored and edited, with mimic actors supplying small supplementary material to match the original television scripts.
Written by Jimmy Perry and David Croft, Dad's Army Series 2 originally aired on the BBC early in the spring of 1969. Large numbers of episodes were wiped by the broadcaster soon after they were shown, with three of the six editions in Series 2 remaining lost. All other editions either survived or have been recovered from other sources in the intervening decades.
The DVD will also feature a range of bonus content, including original BBC1 continuity, previously unreleased archive footage, a cut scene from the original series, a new documentary about the making of the animations, and a previously unreleased colourisation of Room At The Bottom - a Series 3 episode made in colour but only now surviving in black and white, with an introduction by star Ian Lavender.
Dad's Army: The Animations airs weekly at 8pm on Gold from Monday 6th November. All three full-length episodes were remade in 2019 as Dad's Army - The Lost Episodes, which is available on DVD and Blu-ray.
Dad's Army - The Missing Episodes
Between 1968 and 1977, the BBC broadcast 84 television episodes of Dad's Army. Across nine series and seven Christmas specials, the programme continues to be one of the most beloved of all British sitcoms. However, not every episode of Dad's Army still survives in its original format. Five episodes were never formally archived by the BBC and are today presumed lost. No footage is known to exist from any of these episodes. They are collectively some of the most sought-after of all lost television programmes.
Happily, audio-only recordings have survived of all five of these lost classics. These audio recordings (starring Arthur Lowe, John Le Mesurier and Clive Dunn) have been painstakingly reassembled and restored and are now used as the basis for a series of new animated episodes of Dad's Army - featuring all new hand-drawn black and white animation, synced up to the words of the original actors.
These new animated episodes give audiences a chance to enjoy five original episodes of this much-loved comedy classic for the first time in over fifty-years.
First released: Monday 27th November 2023
DVD- Distributor: BBC
- Region: 2
- Discs: 1
- Minutes: 102
- Subtitles: English
- Catalogue: BBCDVD4562
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Dad's Army - The Lost Episodes
From the original scripts - including David Croft's original camera directions - come three lost Dad's Army episodes, remade with a new cast.
One of Britain's favourite sitcoms, Dad's Army ran for eighty episodes over nearly ten years and is rarely far from our screens - but three episodes (all from Series 2) were lost many years ago in cost-saving archive purges and haven't been seen since 1969. Now, using Jimmy Perry and David Croft's original scripts, those three episodes have been faithfully recreated for Gold to mark the 50th anniversary of their original broadcast.
Kevin McNally leads as Captain Mainwaring, with Robert Bathurst as Sergeant Wilson, Kevin Eldon as Lance Corporal Jones, David Hayman as Private Frazer, Mathew Horne as Private Walker, Timothy West as Private Godfrey and Tom Rosenthal as Private Pike.
The episodes are Series 2: Episode 3, The Loneliness Of The Long-Distance Walker; Episode 5, A Stripe For Frazer; and Episode 6, Under Fire.
First released: Monday 25th November 2019
Blu-ray DVD- Distributor: Network
- Region: B
- Discs: 1
- Minutes: 87
- Subtitles: English
- Catalogue: 7958306
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- Distributor: Network
- Region: 2
- Discs: 1
- Minutes: 84
- Subtitles: English
- Catalogue: 7956066
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