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Category:    Home > Reviews > Children > Educational > Muppet > Comedy > Animals > TV > Animation > Music > Musical > Satire > Mystery > Elmo The Musical Volume Two: Learn & Imagine (Sesame Street)/Looney Tunes Musical Masterpieces (theatrical shorts)/Scooby Doo!: 13 Spooky Tales - Surf's Up Scooby Doo! (2015 Warner DVD Compilations)

Elmo The Musical Volume Two: Learn & Imagine (Sesame Street)/Looney Tunes Musical Masterpieces (theatrical shorts)/Scooby Doo!: 13 Spooky Tales - Surf's Up Scooby Doo! (2015 Warner DVD Compilations)


Picture: C+ Sound: C+ Extras: C+/B-/D Main Programs: C+/B/B-



Warner has issued three different, expansive titles for children you should know about...



Elmo The Musical Volume Two: Learn & Imagine runs over two hours with extras and is the latest Sesame Street-affiliated DVD release is a mixed bag with some good humor, good fun, but none of the songs particularly stuck with me. This is not to say that they are bad or weak, just that they are serviceable and at least have a sense of joy if nothing else. The Muppet cast is a plus and it is worth a look for a young audience, but it is not the best DVD single of Elmo of from Sesame Street we've seen. It is fine for what we get, but just don't expect anything stunning or extraordinary.


The classic program Play With Me Sesame: Imagine With Me is the only extra.



Looney Tunes Musical Masterpieces is a solid compilation of theatrical shorts from the Looney Tunes animated catalog that are all pretty much classics. Released on previous DVD and even Blu-ray sets, most are very familiar and some (pre-1949 shorts in particular) look great restored and rightly take their place along with the later works. These include...


Corny Concerto


Page Miss Glory


Rabbit of Seville


Katnip Kollege


One Froggy Evening


High Note


Rhapsody Rabbit


Pigs in a Polka


What's Opera, Doc?


Three Little Bops


Hillbilly Hare


Rhapsody in Rivets


Pizzicato Pussycat


Back Alley Oproar


Nelly's Folly


Holiday Shoestrings


I Love to Singa


Lights Fantastic


These 18 gems show how early on Warner understood (as much as Disney or the Fleischers) how to bring music and image together. These are all must-see works and make for a nice intro collection as well.


Isolated Music Scores, Audio Commentaries and four featurettes on the shorts are the extras.



Finally we have Scooby Doo!: 13 Spooky Tales - Surf's Up Scooby Doo! bringing together episodes of several incarnations of the show, plus a brand-new 22-minute cartoon in Scooby-Doo! and the Beach Beastie. We get too much Scrappy Doo, but the real surprise is seeing episodes of the underrated What's New Scooby Doo?; one of the only later shows to work. You can see for yourself with this double set, but I would rather have separate season sets.


There are no extras.



The 1.33 X 1 image on all three releases look good for the format, but all have their soft shots and limits. Elmo is all from analog and digital standard and high Definition video, so you can still get aliasing errors and halos here and there. Most of the animated shorts on the Looney set come from restored prints, but not always and the color shorts are all dye-transfer, three-strip Technicolor in appearance (often from such great prints), even when they look older and too comparatively soft. This is more so if you have seen any of them on Blu-ray. Scooby also originates on 35mm with good color at times (What's New Scooby Doo? Is anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1), but no match for the Looney art and quality.


Elmo has lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo, Looney lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono and Scooby a combination of both including some with Pro Logic surrounds, yet they all even out sonically as well since Elmo never gets carried away, Looney is often very well restored and Scooby has various quality depending on the age of the program.



- Nicholas Sheffo


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