Sgt Halibut:
Now my Icelandic is rather rusty...
The Icelandic
I did was actually Old Norse - and I wasn’t good at it! There certainly wasn’t any vocabulary for “DVD Soundtrack†in
Njal’s Saga!
Sgt Halibut:
perhaps some of these are the Nelvana titles
I’d be prepared to bet that you will find that
all of these are the Nelvana series - twenty titles, and they seem to match the series: it’s far more likely
not to be the Belvision series, I’m afraid.
Sgt Halibut:
1) if the Icelandic DVD releases of all the Belvision films are still on sale in Iceland?
I think we have still to find anyone other than Muller who has seen the DVDs in question (and there have many similar enquiries to yours over the years), so it’s a bit hard to establish who produced them, catalogue numbers and associated details. If he could be persuaded to provide these, it might be possible to order them through a local retailer; however he has not been around these parts for some time, so it doesn’t seem likely to happen. Sadly that also leaves the possibility open that it was a mistake, a joke or a hoax. When on video, both the Belvision and Nelvana releases tended to use slightly adapted book-cover art, and this can make them difficult to distinguish - it may be that a DVD jacket might also be deceptive.
Sgt Halibut:
2) If so - do they still have the "English-language" option?
This would be good, I know, but the point above still stands - we’ve yet to get any concrete details of the release to show what was included.
Sgt Halibut:
3) And then if they do - do the end credits yield any clues as to whether these were originally produced in the US or by the BBC in the UK?
As said before, we’ve still to ascertain for sure that the BBC actually had anything to do with the dubbing; that aside, the episodes shown on BBC TV never had English credits (none of their dubbed series did, as I recall), just the Tele-Hachette/ Belvision card with a spoken overdub by the narrator.
So, while I too would welcome any information leading to the Belvision serials getting a new audience on DVD (they were the gateway to my enjoyment of Tintin), I wouldn’t get your hopes up
too soon…
Update: Actually, clicking through on the titles from the Icelandic on-line store to the information pages for each story, gives a link from there to IMDB, and that shows the Nelvana series, so that seems to be fairly conclusive.
Still, I’ve sent the shop an e-mail to see if there is any word on the earlier DVDs (I tried this before, but got no response); if anything develops, I’ll let you know!