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Tonight I'm watching volume 3 of Olive Films' Betty Boop collection. While the discs contain nothing in the form of contextual material, which is a crying shame considering the historic value of old American pre-code animation, and the collections don't actually contain all the shorts from Fleischer Studio's best period, the transfers are at least very nice. And considering that no one has released Betty Boop outside of cheap public domain collections, since the marvellous LD box set, the Olive discs are a real treasure chest.
A frustrating thing about these releases is that the cartoons aren't ordered chronologically, but instead mixed and spread out over all four discs, which means you actually have to switch discs four times if you want to go through all of the pre-code films for instance. Olive have probably done it this way, so that the pre-code enthusiasts have to buy all four releases if they want all the shorts. I think that was a bit of a problem for the company releasing the great Popeye DVD collections some years back. A better approach imo would have been releasing everything in a four disc set. The Disney Treasures sets, probably the gold standard for this kind of thing, were kind of like that, even though for example the Silly Symphonies were split into two big releases, without chronology carrying over from one set to the next. But Disney is Disney, and they probably didn't have to worry about losing sales anyway. On the subject of the Disney Treasures, a big advantage Olive's Betty Boop BD's have over them, is not having to endure Leonard Maltin's Very Serious (unskippable) warnings before watching a cartoon involving alcohol, smoking, violence, sexuality or racial stereotyping. After the twentieth time listening to his words of caution, even most idiots and kids have probably understood that the cartoons are almost 100 years old, and were created in very different times with other attitudes towards what we now consider politically incorrect.
A frustrating thing about these releases is that the cartoons aren't ordered chronologically, but instead mixed and spread out over all four discs, which means you actually have to switch discs four times if you want to go through all of the pre-code films for instance. Olive have probably done it this way, so that the pre-code enthusiasts have to buy all four releases if they want all the shorts. I think that was a bit of a problem for the company releasing the great Popeye DVD collections some years back. A better approach imo would have been releasing everything in a four disc set. The Disney Treasures sets, probably the gold standard for this kind of thing, were kind of like that, even though for example the Silly Symphonies were split into two big releases, without chronology carrying over from one set to the next. But Disney is Disney, and they probably didn't have to worry about losing sales anyway. On the subject of the Disney Treasures, a big advantage Olive's Betty Boop BD's have over them, is not having to endure Leonard Maltin's Very Serious (unskippable) warnings before watching a cartoon involving alcohol, smoking, violence, sexuality or racial stereotyping. After the twentieth time listening to his words of caution, even most idiots and kids have probably understood that the cartoons are almost 100 years old, and were created in very different times with other attitudes towards what we now consider politically incorrect.
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