Care Bears: Share Bear Shines Movie (Lionsgate)/A
Cinderella Story: Once Upon A Song (Warner Premiere)/Dora The Explorer: Dora’s Storybook Adventures (Box Set) + Dora’s Enchanted Forest
Adv./Nickelodeon)/SpongeBob
Squarepants: Runaway Roadtrip (Nickelodeon/all 2011/all DVDs)
Picture:
C+ (Upon: C) Sound: C+ Extras: C- Main Programs: C+ (Upon: C-)
For the
fall, the various home video majors keep the children’s titles coming as school
starts and the market never takes a holiday…
Care Bears: Share Bear Shines
Movie continues
the new computer animated era of the Care Bears, as if it needed it, but it is
not awful despite how purists and vintage fans (yes, they now exist) feel about
this turn of events. This runs 70
minutes, is more of the cutesy same as the previous DVD releases and you can
find many of them on this site by putting the franchise name into our search
engine. A simple interactive game is the
only extras.
Our one
live action entry is the unusual but explicitly straight-to-DVD release A Cinderella Story: Once Upon A Song
from Warner Premiere with Lucy Hale (from the TV show Pretty Little Liars) in a “can she become a pop star” story. After watching this, I can see why the
Chinese banned this kind of Pop Music nationwide (ha, ha). Not that this is the worst of it and this is
a work of fiction, but this is like a toned down version of what Disney has
been doing for a while (until it all recently imploded over there, which is why
Warner may be anxious to get this one out there), but it is everything we have
seen before and the music is forgotten as quickly as the paper thin
script. Very young ladies might enjoy
it, but might get bored quickly too.
Extras include a Music Video (surprise?) and four making of/behind the
scenes featurettes.
Those who
want a more able-bodied female figure can always turn to Dora The Explorer, but even she has been taking trips into the
fantasy zone and for gals, that includes romantic interludes. Dora’s Storybook Adventures has three
singles and we also get Dora’s Enchanted
Forest Adventures (a trilogy with 3 Music Videos as bonus) oddly not
included in the same set. Some may find
this a disturbing turn of events for the character, but it is not too bad and
this set also includes these singles: Crystal Kingdom
(includes a game), Fairytale Adventures
(includes a game, Sing-Along and Photo Gallery) and one we covered before – Snow Princess and you can read about it
here:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/7573/Dora+The+Explorer+%E2%80%93+Do
That
leaves SpongeBob Squarepants: SpongeBob’s
Runaway Roadtrip which debuts here on DVD months before it hits the
network. Gotta love his unique still
camera on the DVD cover! This runs 66
minutes with its main five episodes and the show rightly continues to be one of
their best series. Extras include two
bonus SpongeBob episodes.
The 1.33 X
1 image on the Nickelodeon releases is the equal of the anamorphically enhanced
1.78 X 1 presentations on the other DVDs, all being soft with either aliasing
errors, limited detail, color limits in most cases and fine for what they
are. The Dolby Digital 5.1 on Upon and Bears are really stretching the regular stereo that is like the
Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo on the rest of these releases. These are all clearly recorded, but not
beyond professionally competent.
- Nicholas Sheffo
