‘Little Orbit the Astrodog and the Screechers from Outer Space’ also known as ‘Pluk, naufragé de l’espace’ and ‘Arago X-001‘ is an animated feature from French director Jean Image.
The feature was originally created as a 22 episode television series titled ‘Arago X’, with each episode lasting around 5 minutes starting in 1972. It tells the story of ‘Terry’ a billionaire, and his girlfriend, talking-dog and an alien robot who bounce around the cosmos together on a series of adventures.
Screenshot from the feature DVD.
The series was originally shown on French television in October 1973, it was re-shown several times during the 1970s. The film was first aired in 1976. In 1979 it was dubbed into English and released on videotape. It was this version that I saw, as a child a fell in love with.
While the animation is a bit rough around the edges, and the characters are barely two dimensional, there is something a little different and anarchic about the story which appealed to me. Much later I fell in love with the work of French artist Mobius, in particular ‘The Incal’ and some of the designs in this feature remind me of his work.
Like another half-forgotten childhood memory (TIme Masters), I took the trouble to track it down based on fragments I remembered of the story. I found a VHS copy on ebay and made a personal preservation of it, after finding there was no DVD version. However digging around recently I discovered a French video company has released both the feature and the television series versions on DVD.
Little Orbit the Astrodog DVD Review
Orbit the dog inspects the spaceship. From the DVD.
The two DVDs are both coded region-2, and are PAL. So be warned – you need both a DVD player capable of playing back region-2 discs and a television capable of display the european PAL TV standard.
The television series version only has a French language track (224kbit Stereo), and if you are watching on a computer, you can scan through the main title and see that they haven’t trimmed the film countdown and reference frame at the start of each episode, which is either a fabulous piece of retro chic, or a pretty silly oversight. There are a few small extra sequences in the television version, but these tend to just be padding out gags a bit, and don’t add much to the story. Total run-time of the television version main title is 116:42, but this includes the main titles 22 times, as well as a lot of black filler.
The feature version includes both French and English tracks (at 192kbit Stereo). The total run-time of the main feature is 70:40.
From the DVD – An example of what looks like temporal noise reduction gone wrong, or perhaps a bad de-interlacing artifact ?
Image quality is fair to poor, with bit-rate on the feature version bouncing between 5 and 9 megabits per second over the course of the show. Colors seem accurate, though differ a little from my VHS preservation, they are still within the Gamut of acceptability. There are some odd interlacing artifacts, and evidence of temporal noise reduction which is disappointing. Given some of the odd video-domain artifacts, I suspect these may be an older video transfer that someone has tried to clean-up a bit.
Given the overall rough-and-ready nature of the animation, this doesn’t spoil things too much, but it’s a bit of a shame they couldn’t get it right. The DVD certainly looks better in motion than my personal preservation of a then 23-year-old VHS cassette.
Conclusions
A relative four out of five. I never expected to see a better version than my personal VHS preservation, and while it’s not exactly perfect, the French feature edition DVD is very serviceable.
It’s gone out of stock on amazon.fr, but you may be able to find it at other retailers.
Comparison Between DVD and Early 1980s VHS
Pluk, the feature DVD on the left and the VHS version of Little Orbit the Astrodog on the right.