The Lost Years Of Merlin

Watching Merlin Before He Met Arthur

I ran into this trying to track down a specific VHS tape from the late 90s and ended up spending way more time than I should have on the whole Merlinese media landscape. What I found was a two-part BBC miniseries from 1998, starring Anthony Andrews as a young Merlin and featuring a fairly notable cast including Sienna Guillory and James Cosmo. It ran for about four hours total when combined, which was ambitious for a BBC drama of that era trying to stretch a single source material across two nights. The series isn't available on major streaming platforms in most regions. I checked Netflix, Amazon Prime, and BBC iPlayer over a weekend and it wasn't on any of them. That has been consistent for several years now. The closest legal route seems to be renting it through Amazon Video or Apple TV in certain territories, but even that availability fluctuates regionally and sometimes disappears entirely for a few months at a time. Physical media is probably your most reliable option. The DVD was released in the UK by BBC Worldwide and in North America by various distributors depending on the region. I picked up a Region 2 UK DVD a while back off eBay for about twelve pounds. The picture quality on these is acceptable but not great — it's early digital video, not HD remastered. The audio is mono or Dolby Digital depending on the pressing. If you're sensitive to compression artifacts, the DVD transfers from the original broadcast masters show their age, especially in the darker outdoor scenes during the Later Cambrian sequences.

There is no 4K remaster. There has never been an official Blu-ray release. I asked around in a couple of forums about fan uploads of a proper transfer and nobody had anything better than a camera recording of a TV screen, which is the usual state of things for out-of-print BBC content from this period.

What the series actually covers

The show picks up with Merlin as a teenager in sub-Roman Britain, somewhere around the fifth century if you follow the timeline the producers set. His father is a Roman centurion who has disappeared, and Merlin discovers he has genuine magical abilities that make him a target. The central conflict involves him navigating between the warring British kingdoms while being hunted by a sorcerer named Gorlois, who wants to control or eliminate him. It eventually leads into his fateful meeting with Uther Pendragon and sets up the circumstances for Arthur's eventual birth. The production value was decent for a 1998 BBC drama. They shot on location in Wales, which gives the landscape shots something that green screen work from a decade later still can't quite match. The costume design leans pretty heavily into what we now recognize as the standard fantasy medieval template — cloaks, chainmail, whatever looked impressive on a modest television budget. Anthony Andrews plays Merlin as someone who is genuinely powerful but also deeply uncertain about it. That's the right choice for this period of the legend. The series isn't trying to make him a wise old mentor yet. He's a kid who can do things he doesn't understand, surrounded by people who want to use him or kill him. It's a reasonable approach to the source material, though some viewers found the romantic subplot with Guinevere a bit rushed given the episode count.

Why this matters in the broader Merlin media landscape

There are a lot of Merlin adaptations. The BBC's Merlin series from 2008 ran for seven seasons and became fairly popular. There's the 2006 film with Sam Neill. There's the 2018 film with Ashton Sanders. Each one treats the character differently. The Lost Years Of Merlin occupies a somewhat awkward middle position — it's too ambitious to be a simple standalone story but too constrained by its two-part format to go as deep as a full series would allow. I've noticed that people who discover this version first tend to either love it or find it frustrating because it ends on so many open threads. The second episode cuts off right as things are about to get interesting, which was a deliberate choice by the producers to potentially launch a series that never materialized. In practice, this means you watch four hours of setup without much payoff beyond the emotional beats between Merlin and his mother. There's also the issue of canon contradiction. If you're following the Arthurian timeline across multiple adaptations, this version of events doesn't align well with the BBC Merlin series, the films, or the traditional Malory source. It exists in its own continuity, which is fine if that's what you're looking for but confusing if you're trying to build a coherent timeline.

Technical details I wish I had known before buying

The DVD runtime is approximately 237 minutes split across two discs. Disc one covers Part One and disc two covers Part Two plus some extras. The extras are minimal — I was hoping for a director's commentary or behind-the-scenes featurette but there's basically just a trailer and a photo gallery. If you're collecting Merlin media, don't expect bonus content to justify the purchase on its own. The aspect ratio is 4:3 standard definition. This is important because some viewers try to upscale these DVDs to 1080p through their TV settings and it looks worse than the original. The source material simply doesn't have enough resolution for clean upscaling. A cheap DVD player through an HDMI upscaler will produce a sharper image than running it through any software upscaler like Topaz or AVIWARE, which is counterintuitive but true in my experience. I also discovered that the UK DVD has different chapter markers than the North American release, which matters if you're trying to reference specific scenes. The timestamps don't line up. I learned this the hard way when trying to show someone a particular scene and the disc I had was out of sync with the timestamps I'd noted from a friend's copy.

When this version just won't work for you

If you're looking for a high-fidelity presentation of Merlin with modern visual effects standards, this isn't it. The magic effects are practical and early CGI, which looks dated even by 1998 standards. Dragon sequences in particular are rough. If you watch this expecting anything close to the visual quality of later fantasy television, you'll be disappointed within the first twenty minutes. Similarly, if you want a complete self-contained story, this won't satisfy you. The narrative is deliberately open-ended and skips over large swaths of the traditional Merlin mythology. Characters we expect to see — Mordred, Nimue in any meaningful capacity, the full establishment of the Court of Camelot — are either absent or barely present. The series is more of a character study than an epic. For viewers who prefer the T.H. White literary source material, this adaptation takes considerable liberties. Merlin's age, the political landscape, the nature of his magic — none of it aligns closely with The Once and Future King. This is a television drama first and an Arthurian adaptation second, and it knows what kind of show it is.

If the two-part format feels too short for the amount of story being told, you might be better off starting with the 2008 BBC Merlin series and working backward, or skipping ahead to the more recent cinematic attempts. This version has its place but it's not the definitive treatment of the character for most people I talk to about it.