Walt Disney Treasures: Silly Symphonies DVD Review - Page 1 of 2
Disc 1: 19 Cartoons - (Click title to view that portion of the review)
1931: Mother Goose Melodies; 1932: Babes in the Woods;
1933: Lullaby Land, Three Little Pigs
1934: The Wise Little Hen, The Big Bad Wolf, The Flying Mouse, Three Little Wolves, The Grasshopper and the Ants;
1935: The Golden Touch, The Robber Kitten, The Tortoise and the Hare, Water Babies, Who Killed Cock Robin?;
1936: Elmer Elephant, The Country Cousin, Toby Tortoise Returns;
1938: Wynken, Blynken and Nod; 1939: The Practical Pig
Disc 2: 18 Cartoons - (Click title to view that portion of the review)
1929: The Skeleton Dance; 1931: The China Plate, Egyptian Melodies, Birds of a Feather, The Busy Beavers, The Ugly Duckling
1932: Flowers and Trees, Just Dogs; 1933: Father Noah's Ark;
1934: Funny Little Bunnies, Peculiar Penguins;
1935: The Cookie Carnival, Music Land; 1936: Mother Pluto;
1937: The Old Mill, Woodland Café; 1938: Farmyard Symphony; 1939: Ugly Duckling
Video and Audio; Bonus Material: "The Song of the Silly Symphonies", "Silly Symphonies Souvenirs", Galleries, "Leonard's Picks"; Easter Eggs; Closing Thoughts
Running Time: 342 Minutes (5 hours, 42 minutes) / Rating: Not Rated
Disc One: 165 minutes (153 - shorts, 12 - introductions)
1.33:1 Fullscreen (Academy Ratio) / Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono (English)
Originally Released between 1929 and 1939
Subtitles: English; Closed Captioned / DVD Release Date: December 4, 2001
Two single-sided, dual-layered discs (DVD-9); Suggested Retail Price: $32.99
By Lindsay Mayer
I'd still like to know how he pulled it off, personally. Back at the turn of the millennium, film critic/historian and longtime Disney associate (not to mention fan) Leonard Maltin presented a concept to the Disney elite of releasing the studio's lesser-known archive material in a special DVD line. What resulted was one of the best collector's DVD lines Disney, not to mention any other studio, has produced: the Walt Disney Treasures. This unique line of 2-disc DVD sets, which are released in waves of 3 or 4 on every first Tuesday of December to celebrate Walt Disney's birthday, has been providing avid Disney fans with historic archival content - anywhere from early animated shorts to TV series to other rare and little-known material - for over 5 years. This particular set, Silly Symphonies: The Historic Musical Animated Classics, was one of the first four Treasures released back on December 4th, 2001. Highly collectible, the Treasures contain rare content, are housed in fancy packaging, and are produced in limited numbers of a few hundred thousand copies. Specifically, each title in this first wave came in at 150,000 copies each, but for all of their rarity, the retail price was set at a very reasonable $32.99.
The Silly Symphonies were a series of musically-themed animated shorts that launched in 1929 and ended exactly ten years later in 1939. Disney's chief composer Carl Stalling (who would later reach even greater fame as the main Looney Tunes composer for Warner Bros.) began to grow weary of writing music to match the pre-determined action and gags of the animation in his early shorts. Stalling prompted the concept of animation dictated by the flow of music instead. With this, Walt eventually produced a line of unique, unrelated animated shorts known as the Silly Symphonies. Shown before the feature film along with newsreels and serials, the Symphonies did not feature known cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse and the concept was a slow start with Walt's distributor at the time. Eventually, though, the shorts found success with the public; even egregious popularity, as was the case with Three Little Pigs.
The Symphonies were also developed with another purpose in mind - as a "training ground" for early Disney animators to experiment with new concepts and techniques such as the Technicolor process, speed lines to indicate acceleration, the multiplane camera, and much more. These shorts proved to be a valuable resource and learning experience for the studio staff,
especially before the production of their first feature-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Ironically, Snow White's success caused the eventual retirement of the Symphony shorts; as animated feature films became the future of the studio, the shorts that had served their technical purpose were ended two years after the arrival of the ebony-haired princess.The Silly Symphonies DVD, being part of the first wave of Walt Disney Treasures, set the unique standard for the Treasures packaging that continues through to this day. The discs are housed in a book-like, dark gray double keep case, which also contains a collectible lithograph card featuring a reproduction of the original poster art for Flowers and Trees as well as a silver booklet giving a short overview of the Symphonies and an outline of DVD content. The keep case itself is housed inside a brushed aluminum "tin," which originally came with a blue cardboard band around the bottom. This removable band gave a bit more description to the product (such as the span of years in which the content was produced), and featured a facsimile signature of Walt's nephew Roy E. Disney, giving the set a further air of authority as it was supposedly approved by the Disney family themselves. As the collectible Treasures line is produced in limited numbers, the outer case also featured the individual production number of your personal copy; for example, mine is 059,090 of 150,000.
The aesthetics of the Treasures packaging has gradually deteriorated with each passing year; stamped production numbers are gone, as well as the cardboard bands. The back covers of the aluminum cases are no longer printed directly on the metal - rather a flimsy card has been loosely glued to the back and falls off almost immediately after the DVD is opened. Even the Walt Disney Treasures title is not properly and fully embossed in the metal, and pieces of letters go missing. Through all of its packaging woes, however, the historic content of this line has remained a valuable source of the Disney studio's past for fans to enjoy; even though the physical video quality of the content is beginning to change for the worse, as well.
DISC 1
Of the 75 total shorts produced in the 10-year era of the Silly Symphonies, 37 are contained on this set. Luckily, a recent insider tip has hinted at the likelihood of a second volume of Symphonies set for release in this year's Walt Disney Treasures wave, which would theoretically mean the remaining 38 shorts would see a properly compiled release 5 years after the original set came out. Although several Symphonies have made scattered appearances as extra features on subsequent Disney DVD releases, the slated second volume would, hopefully, gather the remaining cartoons together and present them in their full, restored, uncensored form. The 37 available shorts are nothing to sniff at, themselves. An elaborate form of a "best of" compilation, the set features several landmark and critically-acclaimed Symphonies, such as The Skeleton Dance, The Old Mill, Three Little Pigs, and the 1939 Ugly Duckling, the last Symphony produced.
Though it features a "play all" function, this set lacks an alphabetical or chronological listing like several of the later Walt Disney Treasures. Instead, it offers its random assortment of shorts in a thematic grouping. On disc 1, the shorts are sorted under "Fables and Fairy Tales" and "Favorite Characters" - the latter of which contains many a sequel or two to some of the more popular Symphonies like Three Little Pigs.
