听 User Rating 
Adapted from the classic children's TV series, The Magic Roundabout "moves quickly but goes nowhere". Even a starry cast that includes Robbie Williams, Kylie Minogue and Jim Broadbent couldn't liven up this CG-animated kid flick that sees The Enchanted Village plunged into an artificial ice age. During its stint at the European box office, it scraped just over $5m of its $20m budget and there are no plans to release it in US cinemas.
Mounting The Roundabout
Tom Baker amps up the nostalgia value by providing voiceover for most of the featurettes on this Special Edition DVD. A Magical History is the best of the batch using inventive, animated skits to tell the story of The Magic Roundabout from its inception back in the early 60s. Sadly its French creator Serge Danot is no longer with us, but his family are on hand to reminisce about him ("He was quite a character!" etc) and the emergence of his counterculture cartoon. Peter Lord of Aardmaan Animation also pays tribute.
Magical Voices gives the cast members a chance to have their say; when asked about his recollections of the series, Robbie Williams makes the bizarre confession that, "I became really scared of animation when I was a kid." Conversely Ms Minogue talks about falling in love with the "madness" of the show, while Ray Winstone hints at the adult subtext of the story.
Elsewhere footage from the UK premiere is reduced to a montage of D-List celebrities while Our Heroes And Villains is simply a text-based feature that breaks down all of the characters' defining traits, likes and dislikes etc.
Movie Magic
Re-Imagining The Magic allows a closer look at the process of development ie a bunch of geeks glued to their computer screens. In addition there are demos of early CG test footage, a glimpse at storyboards and brief discussion of art direction. A gallery of concept art adds to this featurette, but overall the DVD skimps on the crucial matter of production design. Unfortunately The Sound Of Magic is similarly uninspiring. It reveals how the effects team were able to manufacture sounds by unastounding means eg the sound of cracking ice is recreated using, um, a block of ice and a chisel. Genius!
The Magic Of Music featurette is only slightly more informative at just under four minutes. That's barely enough time for composer Mark Thomas to convince us that his work on this movie was "a labour or love".
On the upside, diehard fans of the original series will surely appreciate 5 classic black-and-white episodes (we recommend Jumping Beans) and younger viewers may want to swat up for the trivia quiz on Disc One. Ultimately this batch of original episodes is the only reason to invest in the Special Edition of The Magic Roundabout. If it's just for the kids, go with the single disc - the array of featurettes on Disc Two will hardly make your head spin.
EXTRA FEATURES
DISC ONE
DISC TWO (ONLY AVAILABLE AS PART OF THE SPECIAL EDITION)
