Snagged the Bullwinkle DVD set today (Monday)

I just got back from grocery shopping at Super Wal-Mart - I happened to stroll by the DVD area to see if mebbe my Wally World jumped the gun on the Bullwinkle set - hot damn, there it was! Even better, while it was priced pretty well at $27.88, they keep competitor's flyers handy at the register, so I got it at the Target price of $24.99. I'm getting offa here now and I'm gonna go see Stokey the Bear!!!

 

Bastard! Hope you enjoy it as much as I will tomorrow.

 

Funny stuff, yesindeedy! The long unseen Stokey the Bear is pretty funny (Stokey gets hypnotized by Snidely Whiplash into starting fires) - best moment is when the credits for Dudley appear "Dudley Do-Right as played by Abraham Wilkes Booth"....

Color is much improved over the super worn tv prints we've seen for years; purists shouldn't howl too much as the clean up work got rid of the zillions of scratches and audio dropouts, but little glitches here and there show it wasn't overdone. Some prints were in better shape than others and it shows - they don't all look exactly alike (just like the originals - Ward had a lot of trouble getting consistency at first with his Mexican studio).

Remember how some of the VHS tapes of Bullwinkle were redubbed with synthesizer music in places? Thankfully, that stuff isn't used on these transfers. The show opening isn't from the first yesr (the circus style opening) - the opening credits are apparently 2nd year: a man looks up into the sky, music and voiceover starts and the show starts. There's some changes in the opening as the credits read Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends - looks like that was digitally imposed over the original Rocky and Friends credits, and a Keith Scott voice impersonating William Conrad says "Rocky, Bullwinkle and Friends".

I say grab it and have fun!!!!

 

Yeah, the logo is annoying. There's apparently a few companies who put out unauthorized VHS tapes of Rocky/Bullwinkle, and that might be a step in preventing that from happening again (or the unauthorized users might just crop out that logo til it dissolves)...

 

What i don't get is how the R & B watermark logo will deter anything. So the watermark shows up on a bootleg - how will that stop anyone?

 

Well - over at Termite Terrace they mentioned the names of the companies who had made tapes some years back - I recognized one of them and figure they'd probably not try and use the just issued series for source upgrades (this company issues tapes made from public domain material like the Fleischer Superman toons) - Sony would probably be all over them and wipe them out inna flash. I don't think any of the Bullwinkle stuff ever hit the public domain - it seems like the last renewal I remember was 1987, which would have been 28 years from the initial release year of 1959. Maybe at the time the knockoffs were made Jay Ward couldn't afford to go after them, but these days there's money behind the restored toons...

 

My wife just picked this set up for me at Costco for $22.99. At prices like this (for 4 CDs I think it is) why would anyone buy a bootleg of this stuff?

My earlier question about the watermark wasn't clear. Can the watermark actually be used (like a digital tag) to trace the booted copy back to its specific source or is it just there to let everyone know where the copies came from - i.e., this latest DVD release? In other words, how would this R & B symbol deter a bootlegger? (My guess is that it won't).

 

The logo is like when Cartoon Network sticks their logo on something - you know what you're watching. The VHS tapes (not the Buena Vista ones) were from public domain manufacturers - perhaps some of the Bullwinkle episodes fell through copyright cracks??? It's hard telling - calling them bootlegs might not be correct - they're more like a pirated product (if I understand my legalese, bootlegged would be material that hasn't been officially released; pirated would be officially released material, but put out by someone not licensed to do so). I'm betting that the pirated tape folks won't help themselves to the latest reissues - there's copyright info on the discs...