After releasing two volumes each of the Saturday Morning Cartoons series for the 1960s and 1970s, Warner has announced the 1980s version.
There’s no volume number in the title shown in the image, so this may be the only one planned. The two-disc set will have 11 cartoons and one extra feature for a total of over four hours running time. The extra “Lords of Light! Thundarr the Barbarian” will “explore the animated origins of this timeless hero”. The set will be available for sale on May 4.
From the image, in addition to an episode of Thundarr, it looks like we’ll get to sample The Monchhichis, the Mister T cartoon, The Flintstone Kids (part of a trend of making cuter, baby versions of existing brands), and others I don’t recognize.
Warner Home Video has released the following clip in which Lex Luthor (voiced by Chris Noth) explains the premise of Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths, due out on February 23.
Review by Johanna and KC Carlson
The newest Peanuts DVD release, You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, is a bit of an oddity.
It’s a 1985 adaptation of the 1967 stage musical of the same name. The animated characters perform comedy sketches and songs from the show, only without the framing of a stage. There isn’t a continuing story, just a string of skits, and the two-hour-plus show has been cut down to 48 minutes, so some songs have been omitted. Musical numbers on this DVD are:
The voices don’t sound quite right to our ears, but we’re guessing that that’s because they needed to cast more professional kids (not the more natural voices used in the earlier specials) in order to handle the singing. Even so, occasionally hearing them reach for some of the notes made us say “ow”. (The stage show was cast with adults.) Particularly weird is hearing Snoopy have voice-overs. With words, I mean, not just sounds, and an adult voice (Robert Towers, who played the character on stage in 1967).
During the numbers, we see various fantasy sequences, which is unusual for the Peanuts characters (with the exception of Snoopy’s daydreams). Also unusual to long-time Peanuts viewers is the way the characters have to be reintroduced to the viewer and summed up in terms of their best-known traits.
Fun bit of trivia: Charlie Brown’s closet contains shirts in all different colors, but they all have that zig-zag bar pattern. Also, if you keep your finger on the pause button, you’ll get to see the round-headed Charlie Brown drawn in three-quarters view, during the Valentine sequence, which makes him look like his features were scribbled on a balloon. Not good. The character, like the rest of the cast, works much better in either full-face or profile views, the way Schulz designed all of them for the newspaper strip.
Quibbles aside, this is a neat way to capture the musical, especially for kids who like the characters but don’t have the attention span to sit through a real-life staging. It’s an interesting, unique approach to the characters compared to the other animated specials. The 15-minute bonus feature, “Animating a Charlie Brown Musical”, gives a history of the stage show, including its beginnings as a concept album by Clark Gesner. This DVD is a great artifact to have, especially since there’s no easily available filmed version of the show, and there’s nowhere else you can see the cartoon characters singing their songs, since you didn’t even get that on stage.
(The studio provided a review copy.)
Iron Man, Reed Richards, Dr. Strange, and an unidentified fourth member of their secret group (which by process of elimination and comparison to the comic story is likely Black Bolt, but he would be too complicated to explain to movie viewers) banished the Hulk from Earth because they couldn’t overcome his destructive force. His spaceship lands on another planet looking for a gladiator savior to free them from slavery.
When the comic story started, I thought it was a good idea to get Hulk into a different environment, one where they could use the character’s strengths and weaknesses to their fullest without worrying about how he fit into the Marvel universe (not well). That’s even more true here, where we’re watching a different world full of alien species, a distinction played up well in the animation. (Note that we only see the Hulk; Bruce Banner doesn’t make an appearance. I don’t know why he doesn’t revert; his psyche knowing that the human would die on this new planet, maybe?)
After struggling to adjust to his new situation, Hulk eventually joins with a motley band of outcasts and prisoners to overthrow the tyrant. This allows him to smash a lot, which is the core of the character and presumably what Hulk fans want to see. Unlike DC’s direct-to-DVD animated films, this Marvel movie uses unknown voices cast for their suitability instead of star power. I liked that, since I didn’t get distracted from the story wondering whom I was hearing.
While the plot is promising, the script is horrible. The dialogue seems to have been written by the Cliche-O-Mat, assisted by Hulk Mad Libs. The story is lots of fighting, which is of little interest to me, and random deaths, which I’m tired of. In an early scene, we’re supposed to get emotionally involved in the death of one of the characters, whom we’ve only seen for five minutes and I’m not sure he even has a name. Never mind that several bug-like characters’ deaths were just minutes before being played for comedy.
The emotions are broadly painted, obviously captured, and conveniently forgotten to move the plot and/or fights along. Some fans have been upset that the Silver Surfer has been replaced in this version of the story by Beta Ray Bill, due to licensing restrictions. (The Silver Surfer is used by Fox, not Lionsgate, who put this out.) I couldn’t tell how or when he was replaced, since I haven’t read the comic. Honestly, by 25 minutes into the 80-minute film, I was nodding off. It’s perfectly fine for what it is, but it’s not really my thing. I’m not a fantasy fan, especially when it’s all about the fighting. We skipped ahead to the end, where surprise surprise, the bad guy was defeated and a voiceover spouted more cliches. If you liked the story, or if you like epic struggle or the character, I’m sure you’ll like this as a relatively faithful moving adaptation.
Planet Hulk is also available on Blu-Ray or a single-disc edition that lacks some of the special features and the digital copy. Those special features here include two commentaries — one by supervising producer Joshua Fine and screenwriter Greg Johnson, the other by director Sam Liu, character designer Philip Bourassa, and key background painter Steve Nicodemus.
The featurette “A Whole World of Hurt: The Making of Planet Hulk” amusingly starts with Joshua Fine talking about he didn’t want to do this because he thought they’d already done the Hulk to death (I assume with last year’s Hulk Vs.). However, this story showed him new things about the character because of the emotional arc and complexity of the story. The animators also discuss how they couldn’t capture everything about the story (because it would have been a six-hour miniseries) so they opted to choose some of the big fight set pieces. Which sums up why I’m not the target audience. I would have rather had the emotional moments and fewer fights. But they’re playing to the appeal of the character, who isn’t exactly a deep thinker. The rest of the 22-minute featurette is the usual process review — sketches, computer animation demos, art used to inspire the animators, voice casting, etc.
The 12-minute “Let the Smashing Commence!: The Saga of Planet Hulk” explores the comic story through interviews with writer Greg Pak and artist Aaron Lopresti. This kept my attention best of any of the disc’s features, especially when Pak gave the list of items he got from Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada as springboard for the story (it included “alien planet” and “battleaxe”).
The special edition also includes a Wolverine and the X-Men episode where Wolverine battles Hulk and two motion comics. Plus, there’s a preview of the next direct-to-DVD animated movie, Thor: Tales of Asgard, the story of young Thor and his friends, coming 2011. More fighting, plus British accents. Even though I didn’t care for the movie subject, this special edition is a good package for the film, with plenty of supporting and related material. (The studio provided a review copy.)
Lionsgate will be releasing the original animated Marvel movie Planet Hulk on February 2nd.
But Comics Worth Reading has a chance for you to win a copy of the two-disc special edition DVD the day before! Simply post a comment here saying which comic character you’d most like to see the Hulk beat up and why. The winner will be selected and announced at 4 PM East Coast time on Monday, February 1.
(U.S. entries only, please. Winner will be selected by random number draw and emailed for their physical mailing address. If email is not answered or a valid email address is not provided, a replacement winner will be selected. DVD will be mailed on February 2.)
Find out more at the busy Marvel movie hub site, including a gallery of sketches from the movie. And watch for our review of the movie over this weekend!
Disney has just announced that The Princess and the Frog will be available on DVD and Blu-Ray on March 16. This seems really quick to me, since the movie only opened wide on December 11.
As of last weekend, the movie had only just made $100 million domestically, so maybe that’s why they want to go ahead and get the video money. As I am disappointed but not surprised to see, there will be no special DVD edition. The single-disc DVD includes an audio commentary by co-writers and directors John Musker and Ron Clements and producer Peter Del Vecho, a princess quiz game, and deleted scenes. The Blu-Ray includes an additional eight making-of featurettes that talk about the movie’s hand-drawn animation and its musical structure. The Blu-Ray Combo Pack (which includes a copy of the DVD and a digital version) lists at $45, with the single DVD priced at $30 US.
Disney is pushing hard the idea that this is their newest princess, with lines describing Tiana as “a timeless heroine in the tradition of Snow White, Ariel, Jasmine, and the rest of the beloved royal sisterhood” and bonus features called “The Disney Legacy” and “Disney’s Newest Princess”. The game also “tests viewers’ knowledge of all of Disney’s beautiful princesses”. Unfortunately, I don’t think she’s quite reached that status yet. Give her a few more years of merchandising.
