BEST BUY BARGAINS

Tipped by a reader, I made a trip to a local Best Buy in search of a intriguing DVD set of BLONDIE movies. I luckily found one copy and purchased it.
This is an officially licensed (by Hearst Entertainment) set of the first ten Blondie features, produced by Columbia Pictures, starring Penny Singleton (“Jane Jetson”) and Arthur Lake (“Seaman Hook”). The video company, Platinum Disc Corp. of La Crosse, Wisconsin, obviously thinks these are TV episodes, but you are getting ten full length features compressed onto two discs – for $9.99!These are the King Features TV versions, with 3 minutes of the middle of the movie preceeding the corny theme song and TV title sequence before the full feature (no original Columbia titles), and the prints are in good condition. It’s a helluva deal for ten bucks… almost as good as the sets of eight Abbott & Costello features Universal is selling for $24.99.While I was there I found another set of two DVDs sold together for $5.99 – SCI-FI: The Greatest Sci-Fi Cartoons of All Time has a large image of DO-DO THE KID FROM OUTER SPACE on the cover. Heck, I had to have that! Despite the cover claims of “Digital Restorations”, the DVD contains crappy 16mm transfers of P.D. cartoons such as DUCK & COVER, Colonel Bleep in The LUNAR LUGER, Harryhausen’s KING MIDAS, Pal’s Puppetoon JASPER IN A JAM, Hubley’s THE HOLE, Pintoff’s THE HUFFLESS PUFFLESS DRAGON, a couple of Fleischer SUPERMAN cartoons and a horrifying print of the “Stone-Age” cartoon GRANITE HOTEL. This was bundled with EXTREME FAIRY TALES (featuring Jiri Trinka’s EMPEROR’S NIGHTINGALE, Harryhausen’s RAPUNZEL, and Iwerk’s ComiColor shorts TOM THUMB, BREMENTOWN MUSICIANS and MARY’S LITTLE LAMB).For six bucks, that’s a heck of a lot of animation. I don’t reccommend these latter DVDs – but the price is right.