Description
Thunderbean presents Technicolor Dreams and Black and White Nightmares’ a Blu-ray set featuring a great collection of rare cartoons from the Golden Era of animated shorts.
These films have been digitally restored from rare 35mm and 16mm prints. Highlights of this collection include the rare Ted Eshbaugh shorts ‘The Snowman’ ‘Tea Pot Town’ and Wizard of Oz’, all transferred and restored from beautiful 35mm materials in glorious 2-strip Cinecolor and 3-strip Technicolor. This Blu-ray also includes still galleries and other special features.
Shorts included:
Dolly Doings-A Motoy cartoons 1917
The Wrong Track- Jerry on the Job
Alice Rattled by Rats!- Disney
Playing with Fire- Mutt and Jeff
Goldilocks and the Three Bears- produced for Kodak’s Cinegraph series
Mendelssohn’s Spring Song- Cy Young
The Bandmaster- Oswald
The Snowman- Ted Eshabaugh
A Swiss Trick- Tom and Jerry
The Wizard of Oz- Ted Eshbaugh
Tea Pot Town- Ted Eshbaugh
The Magic Mummy- Tom and Jerry
To Spring- MGM Harman/Ising
The Enchanted Square- Famous Studios
BD-R disc
Henry Van Nguyen –
The Snowman is in Cinecolor instead of black and white.
jobhater276 –
I’m not completely familiar with the line-upof Thunderbean’s Blu-ray sets, so can’t say whether or not this is their first official blu-ray set. Might be SNAFU. But to the review.
This blu-ray set contains 14 shorts, restored from the best surviving materials that were found at the time. The Enchanted Square has since been updated for the Noveltoons Blu-Ray from an additional print to fix issues with the initial version. Outside of that, the shorts on this Blu look beautiful. As can be seen on the disc itself and in a review here, The Snowman has been presented in Cinecolor instead of black ‘n’ white, and looks gorgeous, although it’s a bit fuzzy and there does seem to be a clean-up error on a close-up shot of the eskimo winding up the clock, but it’s nothing bad, especially when other companies/studios have done much worse.
The best addition(s) on this set are Playing with Fire, The Wizard of Oz, and A Swiss Trick, all from 35mm materials. Oz and Swiss sound and look gorgeous, especially Oz, depsite it feeling a little too colorful. Playing with Fire is nice & sharp, and is entertaining for what it’s worth.
Another notable addition is The Bandmaster, an Oswald short from Lantz. Although from 16mm, it’s still gorgeous looking. One of these days, I hope to see Thunderbean be offered the opportunity to restore the Lantz library of Oswald shorts, maybe the Winkler shorts too. But considering how they’re treating that black cat character with Thunderbean, fat chance for the time being.
Bonus features include Coke Theatrical Ads from Lantz, Bosko the Talk-ink Kid pitch pilot, A still gallery featuring two original cels from The Snowman, and A Teapot Town booklet. I hope in the future, Teapot Town will be in full instead of the version currently on this set.
I can’t say much else on this set, outside of it being a great set for what it’s worth. Similarly can be said about their other sets, past or recent. Despite one of the faults on one of the shorts, getting it is a must. Many of these shorts on the set will never look better, and chances are no other studio/company will ever tackle these shorts ever.