CineSavant Column
Hello!
Advisor Gary Teetzel reminded me of this attractive disc, said to be coming down the pike from the company ClassicFlix. I remember Olive Films releasing several volumes of Betty Boop cartoons on Blu about a decade ago. This compendium of Max Fleischer hits throws a wider net — looking at the titles, even I recognize some great, one-of-a-kind animation masterpieces.
It all depends on the quality, but ClassicFlix is promising that the disc will measure up.
One of the better experiences in Film School was Bob Epstein’s animation class, which showed original prints of everything from Lotte Reiniger to Ladislas Starevich to Tex Avery to Ray Harryhausen. Bob demonstrated that the art was a lot more than Cartoonarooney Fun. He had a particular yen for early Max Fleischer, especially some of the silent Koko the Clown classics. They showed us 1970s faux-hipster know-it-alls that our generation invented very little — everything surreal, subversive or sexually provocative had arrived way before. Before a big screen presentation of some classics in Royce Hall, he screened Koko’s Earth Control, an apocalyptic preview of Crack in the World, only completely insane.
The link below takes one to ClassicFlix’s sales page, for the curious — this first Greatest Hits volume combines remastered Fleischer marvels of Koko the Clown, Bimbo, Popeye the Sailor Man, Superman, and of course, Miss Betty Boop. The expected arrival date is May 26.
And correspondent Scott Stirneman surprised me today, with something I’d forgotten about entirely.
Back in the days of DVD Talk I spent a lot of time organizing and trying to keep current a ‘DVD Savant Wish List’, to which readers could contribute desired titles. It was plenty popular, as it reflected the frustration in the first years of DVD that ALL of our FAVORITE discs weren’t coming out fast enough. I knew the pain of various disc boutiques. After making an all-out effort to release some highly-desired feature, when it arrived the fan base only demanded more discs, the ones that those stingy studios and disc companies were hoarding. That of course wasn’t the case (most of the time), but I remember the attitude very clearly.
What I forgot was where these Wish Lists were — they weren’t linked like the thousands of other DVD Talk / DVD Savant reviews. It’s rather nice that that old content hasn’t been taken down from the web, 25 years later. Someday it will surely disappear, which is why we’ve retained backups here. When that happens, Assuming I’m not six feet under (I’m not holding my breath) I should be able to recover any review, complete with misspellings, mixed metaphors, head-scratchingly odd syntax and pathetic attempts to be clever. It’s what the world needed in the Clinton and Bush years, that’s fer shure.
I think this Wish List is the last one from 2012, after which I begged off — it required an extra hour a week in text management. Long-time Savant readers may find their own names listed. It starts off with that of Brad Arrington, a steady correspondent who suggested many titles, who is now gone. I told the kindly Mr. Stirneman that I was grateful for his help locating the lists. My plan is to print this last one out — the ‘collectors’ game’ could be to cross off all the AWOL titles that have since appeared — and in Blu-ray or 4K, to boot.
And hey, it’s good nostalgia for my websites, reminding me how well I’ve succeeded in keeping them stupendously unprofitable!
For fun, this extra link may be my first stab at a wish list … from (cough) 2002. The text will show me where my greedy disc-collecting brain was at back then, you know, when we were so, so, young.
Practically everything on this 2002 list is now on the shelf here at CineSavant Central, in one format or another:
Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson