Customer Reviews

Happy Summer Days [VHS]

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'Happy Summer Days' is a proud part of my collection of old Disney cartoon classic shorts, along with the "Here's..[insert character's name(s)]" tapes. It contains four delightful little stories highlighting the exciting and sometimes less than enjoyable moments of summer vacation for Mickey Mouse, Pluto, Donald Duck and Goofy. In the first cartoon, a very early one, Goofy takes his son out hunting and they run into some trouble with a lion--except that Goofy is for the most part unaware of the danger, making what happens quite amusing. Donald next attempts to have a picnic but is of course disrupted by...no, not Chip and Dale this time, but an army of ants. Mickey and Pluto go to the beach for a relaxing day of fishing that turns into a bit of a calamity involving greedy gulls and squirting clams.

My personal favorite cartoon in this edition is Two Weeks Vacation, starring Goofy. He sets out on the road for what is supposed to be a peaceful break from the office, but his travels are doomed from the outset. He encounters one problem after another and, while funny, there is a sort of lonely and creepy feel to the cartoon, perhaps because of the narrator's voice (rather sarcastically trying to make everything seem more pleasant than it is) and the fact that Goofy is travelling solo. Watching it when I was younger, certain parts were a bit 'freaky,' such as when Goofy finally finds a vacancy only to realize that the cozy-looking cottage is really a terrible place to sleep, with trains driving straight past and shaking it during the night. And that part with the trailer on the road! This shouldn't suggest that it's scary; not by any means. Just a mite, er, unsettling? I'm not sure if that's even an appropriate word. However, these old cartoons, whether Disney or Looney Toons or otherwise, very often have that kind of feeling about them. And it's part of why I love them so much. I highly recommend this particular video.