The Mr. Magoo Show - The Complete DVD Collection
Picture:
C+ Sound: C Extras: C- Episodes: C+
Made in
color before color TV arrived in full force and one of the first big hit
cartoon characters for the groundbreaking UPA Studios, Mr. Magoo has become a
victim of political correctness, which unfortunately extends to the recent Mr. Magoo Show - The Complete DVD
Collection where voiceovers were changed in some episodes to no avail. But first, the show.
Jim
Backus later became part of the immortal original cast of the live action hit Gilligan’s Island, but his voicing of
Magoo started in theatrical film shorts, continued in a remarkable telling of
Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol
and then the TV version in this set.
Already a major voice actor on radio, Backus was also a big supporting
actor in hit features and his talent for playing Magoo with such smooth ease
made Magoo a legend.
If you
are not aware, Magoo is a well-off older man who has some vision problems. He is a bit nearsighted and farsighted,
giving him difficulty reading anything properly or seeing where he is going,
only he has no idea how he gets everything he sees wrong. Besides constantly putting him in mortal
danger, he is living it up and going wherever he wants whenever he wants. That is where the comedy comes from, but
because he has a heart of gold and is a good guy deep down, he survives the
potential disasters because of his moral center and good will.
However,
there are shallow idiots who have watered down the character and his adventures
into some gibberish about making fun of the vision impaired, which is moronic
beyond belief. As a result, the show
disappeared in the early 1980s from TV and when it came back in 1988, the stereotypically
drawn Charlie. He would have impaired
speech calling his employer “Mr. Magloo” ands “bloss” but was never mean or
made out to be mean-spirited.
Though we
were OK on the first few DVDs, we suddenly have on DVD 3 voice overdubs on
Charlie which sound too new to be from the early 1960s and give him an American
accent. Suddenly, he sounds like a radio
show host and pronounces everything clearly.
It is a hack job of the worst kind and ruins this set enough to make
diehard fans and others think twice about how “complete” it is. Otherwise, these are all the episodes from
the period, despite alterations.
The 1.33
X 1 image has some detail and aliasing troubles, but despite some
inconsistency, the colors here are far superior to any TV prints I have seen,
especially the muddy copies I grew up on.
It makes me wonder how these would look in HD. The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono shows its age, but
the 1980s dubbing is a disaster and sounds compressed to boot. The set has no extras, but the foldout case
has a pocket with a foldout about the character and episodes, plus a
min-reproduction of one of the Dell Comics on Magoo.
- Nicholas Sheffo
