This should have been the very first Karel Zeman's film released on DVD in his homeland. However, as of yesterday - 28/02/2007 - 2 days since its official release, the DVD has been withdrawn from the market due to an unspecified copyright issue. Had it had better transfer, and - most importantly - English subtitles, I'm sure it'd become a ridiculously priced collector's item for Karel Zeman fans all over the world. Now, alas, it's there (or rather isn't) just to show how much the responsible care about the heritage of one of the Czech cinema's most important director...

Update: A friend of my friend ;-) who owns a 16 mm print of "Ukradená vzducholoď" confirmed that the colour scheme of the Japanese disc is way off! The yellowish-patina look is how the film is supposed to look like. Some people on the zóna forum also pointed out that the Japanese disc seemed to have been artificially sharpened, thus making all the lines & edges jitter. I personally don't agree with this - I compared both discs closely, and the Japanese one, while sharper, is also excessively grainy, and as the grain structure is different in each frame, it might make the transfer look unstable & jittery. However, I do like film grain, so I don't think of this as a disadvantage. The colouring though - that's a different matter, and thus the Czech disc is to be preferred.

Another version - another colour scheme. This one preserves some of the yellowish-patina look as seen on the Czech disc, on the other hand, there seems to be a shift towards red (see e.g. frame 17638). However, even if this was the proper colouring, I couldn't recommend this DVD, as it does not feature the original Czech audio.

Ah, I don't know anything anymore... When the original Czech DVD came out (well, sort of), the consensus reached on the ZÓNA discussion board was that its "yellowish-patina" look is how the film's supposed to, um, look.
     Now, take this new Museum DVD - going by their previous releases, it's presumably based on a new scan (of the OCN? I dunno...), colour-corrected but otherwise untouched; so where did the patina go? At times, the colours are actually pretty close to the (supposedly) way off Japanese DVD... Well, that's all I can say about it - I don't know how the film should really look...
     Anyway, considering the overall package, I can't but reproach KZM for not being able to come up with any new extras for "The Stolen Airship" (they "only" had 1 year since their previous DVD release :-P). However, the major selling point for Karel Zeman fans abroad, regardless of extras, will be the fact that for the first time they can see the film with English subtitles. (c:

Even though anamorphic, the encode here looks just like Track Media's, only somewhat blurrier - I suspect it's actually been re-formatted to 16:9 & re-encoded from the same 4:3 source; if that was indeed true, any MPEG compression artefacts found in the original would be present, further exacerbated due to re-compression, in the new encode too... Well, the below is not really what I'd call scientific proof, but it does look as if the one was derived from the other, doesn't it?

This is already the fourth version of "The Stolen Airship," but it's the first that's non-anamorphic. In comparison with the Czech one, it seems to be a bit sharper, shows more picture on the left side, but misses a little at the bottom / in some scenes at the top. Colours are closer to the Czech disc as well. The French one shows less picture on all sides, and the sharpness is a bit over the top. Overall, the framing is most similar to the Japanese disc, perhaps showing a little more picture at the top. Considering that Bonton's DVD is to all intents and purposes out of print, E.M. does not feature the original soundtrack, and Pioneer's colours are way off, I'd say this is currently the most acceptable version on the market (supposing you understand spoken Czech / written Spanish)...