Customer Reviews

CRUSADER RABBIT AND FRIENDS[ANIMATED]

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The Crusader Rabbit DVD is a cheap presentation of what it a very good and undeservedly obscure cartoon series. It has nearly all his first adventure. That's what I don't like about it. The cartoon was a serialized cartoon like Rocky & Bullwinkle and they left off the last chapter (I have an earlier copy of the show on a videotape from Rino, so I know what happens, but child and grownup alike will resent that cartoon missing the end).
Too bad, because despite the very primative animation, Crusader Rabbit vs the State of Texas (the adventure's full name) was funny, clever, and original. J.Ward (who later did the Bullwinkle cartoons)
worked on it, and it shows. If you like a mixture of cliffhangers, slapstick and satire, I reccomend the
Crusader Rabbit cartoons, and I hope more of them come out. Only next time, please don't forget to include the last chapter!-Charles Garofalo

Crusader Rabbit was the first cartoon produced specifically for TV. Its stories were serialized in short segments. This DVD has 14 segments of a story, but the story has at least 15 segments. In other words this disc has an incomplete story. I bought it for the sake of nostalgia but I expected, or at least hoped for, a complete Crusader Rabbit story.

From my earliest memories of TV, carved in the recesses of my young mind.
A clever saturday morning series that paved the way for many to follow (Rocky and Bullwinkle for example).
Disc contains a few episodes, but not the entire series. It's just enough to revive those memories.

This is historically important as CRUSADER RABBIT VS. THE STATE OF TEXAS (c. 1949-50) consists of the first episodes of the first cartoon produced specifically for television and the first of Jay Ward's (creater of BULLWINKLE a decade later) moosical menagerie.

I have heard baby boomers wax nostalgically about this. Unlike Ward's HOPPTY HOOPER and other cartoons that may hook the viewer who did not see them as children, you really had to be a kid at the time to enjoy this. The tale itself is quite clever, with Crusader and Ragland (Rags) The Tiger (even their voices somewhat presage Rocky and Bullwinkle), going to Texas to keep the locals there from genocide against Crusader's jackrabbit cousins. Storywise, it's a kind of precursor to the flights of slap-happy whimsy that would be found on BULLWINKLE, HOPPITY HOOPER, GEORGE OF THE JUNGLE, etc.

While well-written, the animation itself is so poor that it is difficult to watch for long periods of time. Basically, it consists largely of cuouts with only occasional bursts of real, fluid movement (sort of a crude precursor to SOUTH PARK in that sense). While I usually have no problems with limited animation of the Hanna Barbera variety, this was so static that I personally found this downright irritating to watch-almost on the level of the infamous abomination of animation CLUTCH CARGRO.

But if you are a nostalgic cartoon fan who saw this as a kid, an animation historian, or a hardcore CGA (Cartoon Geek of America), then this one's for you.