Branching Out on Blu

In a rather strange move, Disney's home entertainment division announced that two titles that are hitting stores on November 5th... But they aren't full-length features!

That's right... A featurette and a cash grab holiday special assembled from a television episode and other footage.

According to DVDizzy, Mickey's Christmas Carol will come with two other cartoons that are currently unspecified. My guess is that The Small One will be one of the two, being a holiday-themed roughly half hour-long short subject. Coincidentally, both films were products from the then-young turks at the Disney studio. Don Bluth worked on The Small One - which was released in 1978 to accompany the holiday re-release of Pinocchio - one of the last projects he completed work on at the Disney studio before leaving in 1979. Mickey's Christmas Carol was another safe project for the animators, as the executives weren't willing to let them tackle the likes of a big budget Snow White-type epic - something like The Black Cauldron - just yet.

Though it may be criticized for being a watered down version of the classic story, I always thought it was a good short. I particularly liked the surprise appearances of characters from some of the classics, including the package features. I'll happily pick it up. If the Blu-ray contains The Small One, what else will it contain? Supposedly the main feature runs 95 minutes, and that's 52 minutes down so... I'm guessing a package of Christmas Mickey short subjects (Cartoon Classics-style) or maybe a special from the 90s or something... Can't really guess at the moment.

A Very Merry Pooh Year was a 2002 special cobbled together from "Winnie the Pooh and Christmas Too" (a special from the New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh television series that ran from 1988 to 1991) and newly-created animation... All I can say is this: Does this really warrant a Blu-ray release? Why can't Disney just do the right thing and release the entire first season of The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh on Blu-ray... Oh, and while they're at it, seasons for every Disney Afternoon cartoon. Consumers may not demand it, but many other folks do! Plus, if they forget the special and just release seasons of New Adventures, parents will snatch them up for their tykes. Heck, even Pooh's Grand Adventure is more deserving of a Blu-ray release than this!

Anyways, if Disney is willing to release short subjects and specials on Blu-ray as standalone titles, then what could they possibly churn out next year? Cartoon compilations, maybe? More shorts? What do you think?

P.S. - I saw Monsters University yesterday and I thought it was very, very good... Review should be up soon, but I'd prefer if I gave it another watch... Until then, stay tooned!

Ranking the Oscar Nominated Shorts: 1982-1991

Well, we have gotten through the third decade of reviewing Oscar nominated shorts. And you know what that means, don't you? It means G-men! To be shot down like a...okay, I guess we're getting ahead of ourselves. Actually, it's time for yet another super special awesome post where I rank the nominated films in the ten year period we just finished, just like what I did for 1992-2001 and 2002-2011. Anyways, I just think it's fun, even if you'll probably disagree with almost all of the list.

So the era we just finished established a record for fewest nominations in a ten year period, one that may never be broken. After all, the rules state that the minimum number of nominees in a year is three. Even if less than three meet the scoring minimum, they just take the three films with the best average score and name them the nominees. So I don't believe it's possible that there would be a year with only two nominees, like Best Makeup did in 2002 or Best Original Song did this past year. (Embarrassing.) Every single year in this ten year period had exactly three nominees, so there were exactly 30 nominees to rank. And I'm able to rank them all, because this was the first ten-year period where I was able to watch all of the nominees. And how do they rank? Let's get started and find out.

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Best Animated Short - 1983

In recent entries we have moved into the era where I've had infantile amnesia, and now we're all the way out to the years preceding my birth. That's why these introductions have been less my anecdotes and more an overview of what happened that year. Normally I can come up with a few items off the top of my head, but 1983 is such a non-descript year for me (other than the fact that a couple of my good friends were born this year) that I just can't think of anything. So it's off to Wikipedia I go. Hmm. Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie is arrested in South America. Bjorn Borg retires from tennis. The last episode of M*A*S*H airs to great ratings. The EPA evacuates Times Beach, MO for dioxin contamination. Nintendo's Famicom (short for Family Computer) launches in Japan. Those are interesting news items, I suppose.

Maybe I should stick with the things I know without having to look stuff up: baseball and the Oscars.

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