Rachel and I bought them this afternoon after taking a meander down to the Stop 'N Shop supermarket in Hoover Point. In a cardboard display of about a dozen DVD titles I'd never heard of, like "Huey Junior," "Aladdin" and "Thief of Baghdad,"were three titles that grabbed my interest: the Rankin and Bass animated "The Hobbit," a collection of Daffy Duck shorts, and "Asterix and Cleopatra." All for a buck each.
I half-expected the DVDs to be trash, and to freeze 10 minutes into the movie. To my surprise, no such thing happened. The girls watched Daffy Duck while I got dinner ready, and the disc played the whole time, with a clear picture and clear sound. It was vintage Daffy Duck in his heckler days, making life difficult for Porky Pig and others.
The disks, of course, are as no-frills as you can get. They come in clamshells; and have no foreign language tracks, subtitles, special features or Easter eggs. If you put the disk into your DVD player, it starts playing the feature immediately, with barely a minute for the copyright notice.
A menu does appear if you press the menu button, but your choices are "Play Movie," "Select Scene," "Also on DVD" and "Web site." The Also on DVD link takes you to a list of other titles available from East-West Entertainment LLC, apparently all Warner Brothers properties, and as far as selecting a scene, well, there are three of them.
That's right. "The Hobbit" is broken into three chapters, each untitled, and even the Daffy Duck scene selector doesn't let you choose a specific cartoon to start at. It's section one, two or three, and try your luck figuring out where the girls were when you turned it off.
Still, they were a buck, and there are no commercials to skip through. I can deal with it.
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