Good mornin’! We jump in the wayback machine for a trip to the early 1930s to start this week, taking in the delightfully animated adventures of The Little King, a series based on Otto Soglow’s New Yorker strips and one that stands up much better than the Van Beuren studio association would lead you to believe. With only ever having known the character in name and from a couple of images, I found this terrific release – the latest in Steve Stanchfield’s wonderful Thunderbean Animation anthologies – to pack in more wit and brilliant invention than a great deal of the recent CGI wannabes that continue to flood the market. There’s a place for all sorts of animation, of course, but it’s creations like The Little King that continue to inspire. And at just $14.95 through Amazon.com you really can’t go wrong. Highly recommended!

Of course, we love a bit of Filmation around these parts too, and will be bringing you our coverage of the recent Warner Bros. releases of both The New Adventures Of Superman and The New Adventures Of Batman soon. In the meantime, our own Randall Cyrenne has hijacked the wayback machine to go back to the 1980s for his comments on The Best Of Bravestarr, the “toyetic” series that was intended to do for the Wild West what He-Man did for Greyskull. Coming just as I was too old to really dig the show, I can’t say that Bravestarr ever made any connection with me, but Rand’s review makes it clear that the show was anything but a flop, placing it in context of the Filmation story and highlighting BCI’s as-ever grand treatment, which includes the Bravestarr: The Legend pilot feature.

Talking of those kinds of zippy but empty CGI eye candy fests, and just days after Disney revealed the artwork for the upcoming Blu-Ray Disc edition of their Pixar-created Cars [left] comes news that the standard DVD – Pixar’s slimmest in content, remember – picked up three awards at the Entertainment Merchants Association’s Home Entertainment Awards as part of the Home Media Expo. The disc was the night’s only multiple winner, for children’s title, family title from a major studio, and sell-through title from a major studio. Although this adds more kudos to the groaning Pixar shelf, the original disc was nothing to shout home about, especially when known quantities of bonus material were known to exist and it was obvious that a double dip, or in this case excluding the majority that buy these titles and saving the features everyone has a right to see just for the Blu-Ray crowd, was in the works.

While I myself am preparing for the Blu-Ray jump, and can see that some content and higher-end spec features are not possible to include on regular DVDs, I still don’t think it’s right that non-Blu-Rayers (and let’s remember that the majority of people buying these titles aside collectors are kids with limited spending opportunities) shouldn’t get the full content experience right out of the gate. Disney are doing it again with their own Meet The Robinsons by including a few more deleted scenes on the Blu-Ray over its standard DVD counterpart. What this leads to is a situation that does no-one any good: the consumers feel ripped off, and the studios start complaining when someone works out a way to pull the added content from the hi-def disc and spread it around the web. Granted, better spec features and quality is what HD-DVD and Blu-Ray Disc – and higher pricing – is all about. But the video based content should still be made accessible to all, and I wonder how long it will be before we start double dipping on these new formats too…

– Ben.