Children’s Cartoon
Classics set (Passport)
Picture: C-
Sound: C- Extras: D Animated shorts: C+
The search for hard to find animation is an endless quest,
whether you have actual film collectors finding film prints or fans trying to
get the hard to get on DVD. Passport’s
new five-DVD Children’s Cartoon Classics set is broken down into
different characters, but that is sometimes misleading and the sound and
picture quality is awful.
Everything is Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono, down a few
generations like the image quality on these shorts. DVD 1 offers Popeye, but it is of all awful shorts Paramount
produced after the studio pushed Max & Dave Fleischer out of their
own studio. Not only is the 75th
Anniversary set VCI put out much better and inclusive of the Fleischer
shorts that made the character great, but Koch (Passport’s distributor)
themselves did an exemplary release of the TV Popeye shorts form 1960 –
1961. Both are much better bets for
your money and are reviewed elsewhere on this site.
Betty Boop and Friends (DVD 2) has more friends
than Betty, with some awful prints that are barely watchable. Scottie Finds A Home is not even a
Fleischer or Paramount short, but is one of the best in this dismal set. Tom Thumb and Friends (DVD 3) has only a
single Thumb short, and is then padded with some miscellaneous Fleischer and
even Warner shorts. The odd color
Fleischer shorts are best featured on VCI’s Somewhere In Dreamland set,
also reviewed on this site, and is again a better place to put your bucks. Three Stooges and Friends (DVD 4)
features some of the 5-minutes-long TV toons from The New Three Stooges
series produced in 1965, but they look better on Passport’s own Three
Stooges Collection (also reviewed elsewhere on this site) and that set offers
twice as many shorts!
The Stooges toons also have live action opening and
closing bits in all cases. Finally, the
fifth DVD has seven shorts built around a Zoo theme and dubbed At The Farm
& Sing-A-Long Fun. It is the
poorest and least memorable of all the discs in the set and the age of the
shorts range from 1935 – 1949. Except
for animation-obsessed maniacs who have to have everything, no matter what the
quality, this is a box that does not cut it.
Try the other four boxes noted instead.
- Nicholas Sheffo
