Fulvue Drive-In.com
Current Reviews
In Stores Soon
 
In Stores Now
 
DVD Reviews, SACD Reviews Essays Interviews Contact Us Meet the Staff
An Explanation of Our Rating System Search  
Category:    Home > Reviews > Animation > Children > Compilation > Children's Cartoon Classics (Koch)

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


Marketplace


 
 Copyright © MMIII through MMX fulvuedrive-in.com