Customer Reviews

Cartoons That Time Forgot: Van Beuren

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Van Beuren studio made some very interesting cartoons during 1929-1936.
This collection includes several black-and-white Aesop's Fables cartoons, which, although unsuccessful at the time, they are real gems. The B/W cartoons are a combination of bizarre, surreal gags with basic animation. Some good cartoons in this category includes "In a Cartoon Studio", a spoof on the making of a cartoon, and "Candy Town", where two cats eats all the candy contained inside the moon, only to be chased by a bottle of castor oil and a spoon! Strange, but brilliant!
Also, the DVD includes the original Tom & Jerry (no, not the cat & mouse, but a tall, thin man and a short, fat guy). Although the characters themselves are bland, the cartoon themselves still shows off the odd sense of humour that is typical of the studio. One example is in the cartoon "Piano Tooners", where Tom plays a bad note on the piano, only for Jerry to "catch" the note, and then flushes it down an off-screen toilet! Another Tom & Jerry cartoon is "Wot a Night" (their first cartoon), which is a spooky but very weird cartoon.
However, the B/W cartoons were not successful, and so Van Beuren assigned Burt Gillett (who directed Walt Disney's "Three Little Pigs") to create a new colour cartoon series called "Rainbow Parade". Gillett tried to make these cartoons as good as his previous boss, but that's why these cartoons are generally not as good as they should be (although they are not terrible), because he tried to imitate Disney rather than innovate. Characters like Molly Moo Cow and Toonerville Trolley were not good choices, and neither was the return of Felix the Cat, as he was turned into a goody two-shoes kind of a character. Oddly enough, the Felix cartoons were some of the best efforts of the series. Perhaps the best cartoon was "The Sunshine Makers", where the happy elves tries to bring happiness to a bunch of gloomy elves by bombarding them with sunshine milk. The series ended in 1936 when the Van Beuren studios closed down, due to its distributors RKO switching to Walt Disney for their cartoons!
There are 21 cartoons in total, and all are of good picture and sound quality considering they are public domain cartoons. Most of the Rainbow Parade cartoons have their original titles restored, with only a few B/W cartoons retaining their original titles.
Overall, this is good collection of rare cartoons, and is still an essential purchase for classic animation lovers. Personally, they should have included a few more B/W cartoons, but I'm more than happy with this DVD!

I've always been fascinated with hard-to-find items and this one was pleasing for that reason. Van Beuren Studios have been all but forgotten so it was with wonder that I discovered the familiar 'Little King' and 'Toonerville Trolley' as well as shock at witnessing the ENTIRE 'Molly Moo-Cow' series (can you believe it?). The print quality is excellent and most of these are in color. Be advised though, these are not great stories (most of them are numbingly plotless) and the price is rather steep. If you want to watch some obscure cartoons and you have the cash to spare...go for it. Safe for the kiddies too. No matter what the P.C. police say your children won't notice a thing.

Van Beuren is a sadly forgotten studio and is one of the funniest and goofiest of the 30s!

WOT A NIGHT Is Tom and Jerry's first screen appearance (not the cat and mouse Tom and Jerry, the two humans). It's funny, spooky and crazy but it's not just there to making a great cartoon. It starts out great but right after Tom and Jerry are locked in the haunted house things start to go a little downhill, this is a pretty good cartoon none-the-less. Oh yeah, and The black skeletons are NOT offensive.

OPENING NIGHT Is just plain weird. It's pretty weak and the bland "Cubby Bear" is just not top-notch like the other big Van Beuren characters "Tom and Jerry" and "The Little King".

TUBA TOOTERS Gives a bad name to the Tom and Jerry cartoons. It's boring compared to the others.You almost might as well skip over it but I wouldn't if I were you. I never trust these guys that make the reviews, anyway!

PALS (A.K.A CHRISTMAS NIGHT) The best Van Beuren cartoon and my 17th favorite cartoon of all time!!! And that's including "What's opera Doc?", "The Band Concert", "Popeye the Sailor meets Sinbad the Sailor" and other classics! The animation is better than most of the other Van Beurens and it's worth watching over and over again! The Little king his a hilarious character (adapted to screen from the Otto Solgow's comic strip).

PIANO TOONERS Here's Tom and Jerry at their best (exept for the goofy ending). The beginning is the best part!

MOLLY MOO COW AND RIP VAN WINKLE When you see cartoons like this you wonder how the same studio could have produced "Pals" and "A dizzy day" ("A dizzy day" is not on this collection). It's boring and stale and full of errors. And Molly Moo Cow has nothing in common!

THE SUNSHINE MAKERS Fantastic! One of the best cartoons produced by Van Beuren!

MAKING 'EM MOVE Starts promising but isn't as good as you would expect!

Van Beuren was great, there's no doubt about it!

A must for cartoon fans. Great stories, brilliant color, and a trip down memory lane for those of us over 40. Show them to the kids and let them see what real animation was like. PLEASE PUT OUT A VOLUME 2

Van Beuren was a B-grade animation studio in the Max Fleischer vein. Regardless of the tight budgets, Van Beuren produced some bizarre and truly memorable cartoons during the early 1930s - particularly those featuring the musical antics of Tom and Jerry. "Cartoons That Time Forgot" includes some of the duo's best shorts: "Piano Tooners," "Wot a Night" and "The Tuba Tooter." Another minor classic is "The Sunshine Makers" (1935) in which cheerful dwarfs conquer grim-faced gremlins with bottles of sunshine. Unfortunately, Van Beuren's misguided attempts to emulate Disney and resurrect Felix the Cat fall flat. Though an uneven collection, this DVD has several underrated gems worth seeking out.

Considering the age of these cartoons, the reproduction quality of the video and audio was excellent.

After watching the two volume collections of Ub Iwerks early cartoons, I wanted more, so I took a chance on this Van Beuren collection from the Cartoons That Time Forgot series. These shorts may not be of the same quality as early Disney, but they are certainly worth the time of any animation history buff. While this set isn't at a bargain price like the other two sets, it can be found less expensive if you look around. This set features 21 cartoons and for the most part they look very good to excellent, with most of the wear being at the beginning of each short during titles and the first 10 seconds or so of the shorts. Have they been remastered? .....probably not completely, but besides a little wear here and there, they are presented uncut and look pretty clear and not washed out.

This set was release before the two Iwerks sets and it has the basic menu. The menu could have used a little work to make it a little more user friendly. You can play all the cartoons or look at the scene selection for individual titles, but once you start the cartoon from any point, it will play all from that point. Meaning you have to stop after each cartoon and go to the menu if you want to skip around and see selected shorts. It's not a huge deal, but it could have been easily fixed with a few adjustments.

Is it worth buying, absolutely! it has 21 rare shorts that may never look any better or be released again. Even though the price is pretty steep(cheaper if you look around), you get a nice collection of cartoons from a studio who was one of the pioneer in animation. The shorts are not the best produced from the time period, but I enjoyed these cartoons very much.

I share these old cartoons to my Kindergarten classes. This is probably the only time in their lives that they will see these old cartoons. Everything they see now days is fancy computer animation, not that there is anything wrong with that! It is nice to be able to introduce them to something different!!!

First, let me quote animation historian Leonard Maltin: "The Van Beuren studio is the least-known cartoon company of the 1930s, yet its brief history is dotted with interesting films and major animation talents".
Although I think this DVD could be a little cheaper, I found some magnificent examples of colossal imagination and, overall, I think this is way more interesting than the two volumes devoted to Ub Iwerks in this same "Cartoons that Time Forgot" series.
This collections emphasizes on the colour cartoons, when director Burt Gillett (of "Three Little Pigs" fame) was hired. I wish there would be more of the black & white ones, which have gags and style similar to the Max Fleischer's 'Betty Boop' cartoons. There's only one episode of 'Cubby Bear' and one of 'The Little King'. In contrast, Molly Moo Cow (which I didn't find interesting as a character) appears in some five or six cartoons. There are also three 'Felix the Cat' colour cartoons, which may be the first attempt to add a voice to a character that was originally silent.
To deepen into the black & white era of the Van Beuren studio, one could buy the collections devoted to 'The Little King', 'Cubby Bear' and 'Tom and Jerry' (not the cat and mouse). But I insist, this DVD is good as a quick look to eight years of production from an unfairly underrated team of animators.

Great quality on these old cartoons! Maybe they have been restored. Contains many cartoons that I saw as a child many years ago.