One of the most popular fighting game franchises of all time, Mortal Kombat has spawned not only numerous versions of the video game, but live action films, web series, animated TV series, and a live action TV series. Warner Bros. recently released the short lived 1998 TV series Mortal Kombat: Conquest on DVD.
In a world scarred by destruction and violence, the series focuses on Kung Lao (Paolo Montalban), who has triumphed in the Mortal Kombat tournament, defeating Shang Tsung and saving Earth Realm. Now, it is his duty to train a new generation of warriors for the next tournament. Joining forces with Taja (Kristanna Loken), a beautiful thief, and Siro (Daniel Berhnardt), a reluctant warrior constantly trying to keep his arrogance in check, Lao fights to make sure that Shang Tsung is never able to regain a foothold. They must fend off Shang Tsung’s advances, as he pits his supernatural warriors such as Scorpion and Sup-Zero against the humans in an effort to impede their progress.
Though Mortal Kombat: Conquest bills itself as a prequel to the films. It really doesn’t have much of a Mortal Kombat feel—clearly watered down to the necessary cable standards of TNT—with the exception of appearances by Sup-Zero and Scorpion. Outside of that, the story is really something entirely different and frankly, occasionally cheesy.
While the show is poorly written, some of the martial arts work is pretty good. It’s also clear that the show hired some pretty talented stuntmen. There are some pretty cool fight sequences as you might expect and the choreography gets better as the series moves along. Apparently, Daniel Bernhardt and Jeffrey Meek did their own fighting, so that makes their work all the more interesting to watch.
While the collection doesn’t offer any extras, it does have all twenty-two episodes of the series, so any hardcore collector of all things Mortal Kombat should be pleased.
This standard DVD set replicates the broadcast experience surprisingly well. While the discs clearly haven’t gone through a full remaster, detail is satisfactory, black levels are relatively consistent and skin tones look natural. The episodes do show signs of some digital compression and colors can be a bit dim at times, but this transfer was certainly better than expected.
The Dolby Digital 2.0 audio track gets the job done. The main speakers are really the only ones concerned and LFE is nonexistent. With that said, dialogue, techno music and sound effects come through quite clearly from start to finish.
English SDH subtitles are included.
