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It seems most of these titles have been released in near identical form over in the UK at a very reasonable price.

knives wrote:It seems most of these titles have been released in near identical form over in the UK at a very reasonable price.

Five of them had equivalent UK releases: Mickey in Living Color volumes one and two; Silly Symphonies; The Chronological Donald volume one; and The Complete Goofy.

Others, including the two Mickey Mouse in Black & White sets, are available at amazon France for 15 euros each.

I'm still holding out hope that these will be coming out in the U.S. on Blu-ray at some point.

Japan is still getting them, being released on occasion, but in digipak rather than tins. I'm also hoping for HD upgrades, possibly with better extras like Warner has on their Looney Tunes releases.

What's frustrating is that they had almost everything out. Only a few cartoons left unreleased. Now of course it's way too late. Though I've been tricked thinking that something was happening with these new messages!

I completed my collection with the UK Goofy and the French Donald Duck Vol.3 ("Donald de A à Z" it's called). They stand out on the shelf though, no fat spine, chrome instead of silver packaging (and the french one is darker), even the metal case is different. But cartoons are what matter and they're great.

They should re-release the entire line in a more efficient packaging. Almost every tin case I've got has rust and they dent so easily that it is ridiculous. Disney is celebrating Mickey's 85th birthday next year, so I wouldn't be surprised to see at least the Mickey sets back in print in some way and hopefully on Blu-ray.

Saturnome wrote:What's frustrating is that they had almost everything out. Only a few cartoons left unreleased. Now of course it's way too late. Though I've been tricked thinking that something was happening with these new messages.

Agreed. All they needed to do was release one more miscellaneous shorts collection and we would've had just about everything animation-wise. Very frustrating. :-k

I just recently bought "The War Years" from an Amazon vendor for 35 bucks. No scratches on the discs and the packaging looks almost new, thankfully.

I would like to get more, despite the hefty price tags for some of the sets. Any updates for them being re-released on Blu ray?

Taketori Washizu wrote:I just recently bought "The War Years" from an Amazon vendor for 35 bucks. No scratches on the discs and the packaging looks almost new, thankfully.

I would like to get more, despite the hefty price tags for some of the sets. Any updates for them being re-released on Blu ray?

So far, it seems that none of these sets are going to be re-released in the near future. The line is dead according to Leonard Maltin and after all, this was Roy Disney's project and he is no longer with us. Maybe we will see Disney's collector's club, D23, have these sets available again, but for some reason Disney has been lagging in releasing their classic TV shows and cartoon shorts on DVD and Blu-ray. I wish they stopped with the limited release and vault crap since I would like to have once again the Dr. Syn set which I sold on Amazon at the ridiculous $350 price.

Yeah, the prices vendors want to charge for Dr. Syn is ludicrous. Likewise the Zorro sets. Too bad this series is dead. Just like Song of the South will probably never come out.

In addition to "The War Years" I also got "Behind the Disney Studios" for a fair price from a seller.

The Oswald set, Mickey Mouse in Black & White Vol 2, Tomorrowland are still in stock at their original price, just to give anyone else the heads up. I snagged all of them.

I really want the Silly Symphonies sets, but they are way too steep.

So very glad I bought into these early enough to grab them as they were released, and when the OOP titles were still fairly easy to get. (I only paid exorbitantly for the Goofy set.) That said, I never picked up any of the non-animation entries and now I'm wondering if that was a mistake. The Tomorrowland set sounds intriguing, at least...

I do wish this stuff could just stay in print.

By the way, is there a list somewhere of what odds-and-ends cartoons never appeared on a WDT collection?

The Tomorrowland set is the only one I ever bought. I paid almost $30 for the thing half a dozen years ago because it seemed like it had gone OOP but I guess it was just between printings or something. It was worth the money, though. Links to other threads: my comments on the set and some good discussion starting here. The EPCOT stuff is fascinating, I thought, "Our Friend the Atom" was far drier than I'd hoped, but the most enjoyable part of the set is some of the animation on Disc 1.

My local library stocks a large number of these, and I, for one, could really do without Leonard Maltin imposing himself on me. Also, I came to realize that while the Disney features are peerless, the shorts, with certain notable exceptions, do nothing for me. All that said, it really is unreasonable for these to be remain unavailable.

The only one I ever bought was the Goofy set since they've held up the best for me (at least that's what I felt at the time, whenever that set was released.) I really debated on some others but ultimately never picked them up. Now that I'm a father I'm regretting the fact I never did pick up other ones, at least the Mickey, Donald, and Pluto ones, so they could at least see some of the early stuff. I'm still hoping for some sort of Blu-ray release or possibly a re-issue of the DVDs.

Maltin is terribly annoying on these, and I actually like him well enough in general. But it seemed at the time as if the inclusion of Maltin's constant warnings about "guns" and "gunplay" were the only way Disney would ever deem it appropriate to release a lot of these shorts uncut.

I think I may pick up that Tomorrowland tin now, Gregory. Thanks for the tip!

On the Goofy set Maltin was there to address some of the more racist elements in some of the shorts, making it A-OK!

cdnchris wrote:On the Goofy set Maltin was there to address some of the more racist elements in some of the shorts, making it A-OK!

The primary audience, Adult collectors, are already well aware of the context of these shorts, and kids (and myself) just don't want to see his stupid face when we're trying to watch some comic mischief. From what I remember he actually pops up for individual shorts to remind you how insensitive you are for watching them. While I loathe the "scold screen" on the Tom and Jerry set, at least it is silent and once over, the shorts are easily accessible. Why does laserdisc have to continue being the only "grown-up" video format.

Zot! wrote:

cdnchris wrote:On the Goofy set Maltin was there to address some of the more racist elements in some of the shorts, making it A-OK!

The primary audience, Adult collectors, are already well aware of the context of these shorts, and kids (and myself) just don't want to see his stupid face when we're trying to watch some comic mischief. From what I remember he actually pops up for individual shorts to remind you how insensitive you are for watching them. While I loathe the "scold screen" on the Tom and Jerry set, at least it is silent and once over, the shorts are easily accessible. Why does laserdisc have to continue being the only "grown-up" video format.

I agree that Maltin's presence gets annoying and isn't a great solution to the issue, but I don't agree either that adults will inherently know the context in which these works were made nor that kids will be able to understand that the racist assumptions behind a lot of them are unreconstructed views into a more racism-friendly past and ought to be understood as problematic and not simply swallowed whole. I mean, as far as I can understand, Disney just likes to cover their asses in making it clear that the views of the older stuff isn't necessarily being endorsed when they put it out again, but it's a serious question of how best to deal with racism in stuff aimed at kids, who may just pick it up as received wisdom without some kind of effort to explain why they shouldn't.

So much stuff in modern entertainment is just as, if not more, offensive than entertainment from the past. And no doubt, different people will tell you that they are offended by different things, and you might even be offended by what others take offense to. The difference is that we don't yet have 50+ years of distance to allow many of our individual perceptions of what material is offensive to have congealed in some sense. I'm sure that at the time a lot of these cartoons were made, some people considered them deeply offensive while others considered them harmless fun. Same as it is today.

One thing I can say for sure is that I'm commonly more offended by the disclaimers at the beginning of these kinds of DVDs than I am by any of the actual offensive material.

I find annoying that Disney has abandoned their entire line of catalog titles (except classic animated films) and TV series. Why don't they revamp their Movie Club by offering its members these out of print sets? Or why don't they license it to another company, like they did with Anchor Bay during the early years of the DVD format? What annoys me the most is that the Zorro sets they offer on their movie club are the colorized version. By the way, Disney missed a hell of an opportunity to promote the Mickey Mouse shorts to the new generation of children when they released the Epic Mickey video games. That was the perfect moment to have tie-ins celebrating Disney early history.

The new generation of kids are watching Mickey Mouse shorts on Youtube instead. But I think everyone wants to know Disney's plans are for their old stuff.

But I don't think they've abandoned all. "The Absent Minded Professor" movies and "Pollyanna" have been announced for release this year.

Interesting to hear some people's tins have developed rust. Mine haven't. I picked up the B/W Mickeys, Oswald (gold tin), More Silly Symphonies, Front Line, and Rarities at release, and also have the five Region 2 releases (no tins). I wish the remaining animations had been released, although I have filled a few gaps on other releases (Susie the Blue Coupe for example showed up on Sweetheart Stories, as did the second Casey film).

dustybooks wrote:
By the way, is there a list somewhere of what odds-and-ends cartoons never appeared on a WDT collection?

The wiki entry for Disney shorts appears thorough enough:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Di ... ted_shorts

The only cartoons that didn't appear on a WDT set were a couple of Goofy driving shorts from the sixties. Other DVD sets contain odds-and-ends cartoons not found on the WDT line. Overall, the WDT series included the essential ones...more or less.

I don't find Maltin quite as annoying as everyone else here. Sure, his disclaimer comments were unnecessary. I thought his interviews were solid, though.

Question for anyone that has More Silly Symphonies. Does the replacement discs for that set include the unedited version of The Night Before Christmas? I seem to get different answers on that. Clarification would be great.

Taketori Washizu wrote:Question for anyone that has More Silly Symphonies. Does the replacement discs for that set include the unedited version of The Night Before Christmas? I seem to get different answers on that. Clarification would be great.

Replacement discs? (groan...) Any others?