Review of Champions, The: Volume 4

Introduction

Endowed with the qualities and skills of superhumans, Craig Sterling (Stuart Damon), Sharron Macready (Alexandra Bastedo) and Richard Barrett (William Gaunt) are ‘The Champions’.
With these gifts given to them by a lost civilisation in Tibet, they are able to use their fantastic powers to their best advantage as the champions of Law, Order and Justice working for W.I Tremayne (Anthony Nicholls) at the secret international agency, Nemesis.

Episodes include:

Episode 11: The Dark Island
The Champions are sent to a mysterious island when three agents fail to return and all surveillance of the island is thwarted. What secret is this island hiding and will the Champions be able to discover what really is going on?

Episode 12: The Fanatics
Richard Barrett must infiltrate a group of fanatical assassins and discovers that Tremayne is to be their next target. Will he be able to stop them in time?

Episode 13: Twelve Hours
The Nemesis agents are sent on a boring bodyguard mission to see off a visiting president aboard a waiting submarine. However an assassination attempt means they will require all their powers to save the president.

Episode 14: The Search
A new Nazi regime holds London hostage after stealing an atomic submarine loaded with nuclear weapons. The champions race against time to put an end to this dastardly scheme.

Exploiting Commander W. Lawrence Tremayne’s background, the Navy features heavily throughout these episodes with two being set on a submarine and the others having extensive use of Navy bases and ships.
‘The Dark Island’ episode is especially good as I think just about every power the Champions have is showcased and exploited as their situation pushes their powers to the extreme. There’s lots of action, some great fighting scenes and enough desperate madness in William Gaunts eyes to satisfy the most harden fan.
‘Twelve hours’ sees Sharon desperately trying to save the presidents life on board a damaged submarine, along with Richard Barrett who seems to lose it while having a tussle with the guys on board. Don’t they think it’s a little strange how strong he is? And surely if the submarine surfaced at that steep angle everyone on board would slide down to the end. Anyway some great model in the tank shots along with the usual mind transference fare.
‘The Search’ also features a submarine plot but here we have one of the Champions favourite sources of criminals, yes you got it, the old Nazi in my cupboard. Yeah I love the old Nazi plots and this one while not as good as the previous Nazi in the secret underground bunker episode, sees the capture of a nuclear sub and the attempted destruction of London.
The submarine footage and the studio shots just don’t match at all and are rather weak, but you do get to see some old footage of the German U-boat base that was used in the film ‘Das Boot’ (if you haven’t seen it shame on you) and briefly in ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’. Same sub in the tank models as the episode before by the way and same steep angle of ascent. They must get through a lot of crash pillows at the end of the sub.
The weakest episode is probably ‘The Fanatics’, but it does feature a nice suicide assassin that would probably go down well in some parts of the world today and the odd attempt to kill Tremayne is needed now and again just to get him out of the office. Thinking of Tremayne, how does he not know that the Champions have special powers? I think he’s getting suspicious though.

Video

This is a suprisingly decent print that remains fairly clean with defects showing mainly when stock footage or location shooting is used. Here the level of dirt and grain rises which immediately draws attention to itself and can be a little distracting at times. Apart from these rare distractions the picture is remarkably clean considering its age with only the occasional bit of dirt or dust.
Detail levels remain average due to some of the shots being a little soft and the colours, although sometimes seeming a little subdued are rendered well reflecting the style of when it was first made
A surprisingly good all-round picture which reveals only a small number of flaws inherent to the source material. Altogether it’s a very pleasing picture and I’m sure fans wont be disappointed.

Audio

The audio is presented in standard mono and does its job well. Dialogue remains clear and undistorted with no real problems.

Features

Extras include 2 rare promotional trailers that give a unique insight into how the series was first marketed.
The first is a trailer for The Dark island which is in fairly bad condition and the second a short trailer for the overall series where the Champions plane crashes in Tibet and gain their powers.
A small original memorabilia section is also on offer featuring a few pages of the Champions gum cards together with a behind the scenes photo gallery of the episodes.
The menus are themed with music and suitable background pictures as well as a small animated scene selection section. A small fold out booklet which includes information on where the episodes were filmed, information on the director, cast appearances in other ITC series and chapter details is also included.
There are 8 chapters per episode and each episode has subtitles.

Conclusion

Some really good episodes here and a decent print ensure that this DVD should not be missed. The disk retains the high standard as the other disks available, although extras still remain a little weak.
It seems the source material is getting better though with less dirt apparent throughout the main portion of the episodes but we will have to wait and see what the next disc will be like. In the meantime I’m off to try and perfect that scary William Gaunt stare.