Screen shots from Walt Disney’s Mickey, Donald, and Goofy: The Three Musketeers and a review of some of its DVD features can be found here:
DVD Features
The Three Musketeers is the first Disney DVD to come with their new FastPlay feature. Immediately after the FBI warning, you have the option of choosing the FastPlay feature or skipping directly to the main menu. If you don’t choose either option then the FastPlay option is chosen for you after a couple seconds (which plays some of the disc’s previews of other Disney movies, the movie itself, then some of the bonus features). This may seem like a dumbing-down of DVDs but the advantage to FastPlay is that by choosing the Main Menu option you can avoid having to watch or laboriously skip through all of the previews every time you put the DVD in, and instead watch them when and if you so choose. It seems that when DVDs first came out that the studios weren’t aware that they could put previews and commercials on them. But once they did realize it they went overboard in adding them and Disney was perhaps the worst offender. I don’t mind watching previews but I do mind having to sit through them every time I put a DVD in, so this feature is a welcome addition for me.
A couple of the menus have a brief animated introduction featuring some nice hand-drawn, yet three-dimensional, scenery in the castle. Disney must’ve listened to complaints about DVD menus of prior releases where viewers had to sit through a lengthy, animated opening every time they went to a particular menu screen and kept the length down this time.
The Movie
Ultimate Disney has posted an extensive review of The Three Musketeers, but I couldn’t refrain from making a few comments of my own. Being an old, jaded adult who keeps up on all the news in the animation industry, sometimes I have to get a fresh perspective on things. So, once again, I used my 6-yr. old nephew, Scottie, as a litmus test. Scottie loved the movie and watched it several times, keeping very involved with the plot and the characters. He watched and enjoyed all the bonus features as well. He was not turned off by the fact that the characters are some seven decades old and, most importantly (listen up, Michael Eisner), he was not turned off by the fact that it is not a computer animated feature.
The Three Musketeers is not on the level of one of Disney’s big summer blockbusters, but it still could easily have qualified for a theatrical release. Since it didn’t get one, but went directly to video, it is likely to up the overall perceived quality of Disney’s direct-to-video releases by throwing continuity to the wind, providing fresh fun with familiar characters in a familiar literary setting, and steering clear of Disney’s old habit of centering direct-to-video titles on the offspring of previous characters, who then merely rehash their parents’ experiences. While no movie is without its faults, The Three Musketeers shows that good product can still come out of Disney.
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| Choose FastPlay or Main Menu | Reports of the deaths of Mickey, Donald, and Goofy have been greatly exaggerated. |
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| Hard times for the future musketeers | Goofy’s goofy plan |
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| Goofy volunteers first for Disney’s new cloning experiments | Ahhhh . . . true love |
