Tuesday 4 October 2011

Loose Cannon Reconstruction: The Wheel in Space

From the Loose Cannon mailing list:


Hi There

This is the first Loose Cannon mailing update for quite a while, it is around 2 years since we released Faceless Ones but we haven’t been sat idle in that time, we have been working away on new recons despite a lack of an update to our website

There have been several things gone on in that period which have delayed us from releasing stories, at present we have several stories which have episodes complete but not the usual extras we release along with them, we had been endeavoring to get these releases ready to go but there has been a recent development which has caused us to have a little bit of a rethink

As you will probably know Loose Cannon has always insisted on releasing our stories in VHS quality, the reason for this is we fully respect the BBC’s copyrights in the situation and have no wish to tread on their toes, we have been led to believe that the BBC are unlikely to take any action whilst the releases are in a degradable format, despite our best attempts to stop it our stories have been made available again and again over the years on eBay converted from our VHS versions onto DVD, this has become an increased problem as VHS as a format has now all but died, I suspect most of you keep your VHS players simply to play the recons on, indeed it’s the only reason we keep ours! As people get rid of their VHS machines an unfortunate side effect has been that eBay is an even more popular place to try to sell recons, in addition to this in more recent years YouTube has become a more and more popular place for people to view and share video content, once again we prefer to avoid YouTube for fear of offending the BBC, however as YouTube has increased in popularity it has become more and more difficult to avoid this, we have asked people again and again to remove our recons, most people are happy to comply and often do not realize we have an issue with it being on there but no sooner has one recon being removed someone puts it back up again, usually in all innocence, indeed in recent years we have simply given up trying to prevent it, we cannot force people to remove our stuff and YouTube is crammed full of Doctor Who related items other than recons varying from full episodes to peoples own edits of stories to animations, indeed not only are our recons up there, often in horrendous quality, people see fit to reedit them on occasion and add in a narrated audio, thus totally opposing our wishes not to distribute something the BBC could sell, in short whatever we do we cannot seem to stop the YouTube floodgates.

Now the recent development that has happened is one of our unreleased stories has appeared on YouTube, as episodes are completed we do give copies to people who have contributed to the recon, people often contribute photos, information, CGI etc, and we do ask them to keep the copy to themselves until the story gets a wider release, however the world being as it is people inevitably do a copy “just for my mate” then that person does one “just for their mate” and before you know it the episodes are beginning to circulate, in this case someone has uploaded The Wheel in Space to YouTube, once again without necessarily realizing the implications, this has left us in a bit of a quandary as we don’t yet have the extras ready we would like for a full release, however we would like the people who enjoy recons to be able to see this story, with that in mind we have decided to send this update to people explaining the situation and to see how things go, it seems churlish to ask for it to be taken down as it will inevitably be back up there again within days!, obviously at this stage we have no idea what will happen from this point but one way or the other we simply want as many people as possible to enjoy our work so whilst it is up there please follow this link to enjoy The Wheel in Space http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZZNyYwJOXo all of this story is now up there and we understand Web of Fear will be following, feel free to check in on our forum http://ianlevine.forumco.com/forum.asp?FORUM_ID=24 and keep an eye on our website www.recons.com and maybe even submit a review for this or any other story.

Thanks

Derek, Dean & Russ

Loose Cannon


Well, there you have it - enjoy! :-)

3 comments:

  1. is the wheel in space likely to relased through loose cannon

    ReplyDelete
  2. i sent an email about a question to loose cannon 3 days ago and still haven't got a reply yet,

    could you sort this out please.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Is this the end? No not Doctor Who Logopolis ending but for loose Cannon as their website recons . com is now gone and taken over by what looks like medical profession.

    ReplyDelete