Hey everyone! How's it going? I'm doing pretty well. So today I'm going to be officially starting my long term History of Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment review/overview series where each week, in the order the tapes, DVDs, and Blu-rays were released in, I'll be taking a look at a Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment (previously known as Walt Disney Home Video and Walt Disney Home Entertainment) release that I have in my collection. I'm able to do this because thanks to online friends, I have digitized copies of some of these tapes, DVDs, and Blu-rays, while having the actual physical copies of the rest of them. My focus will be on the openings, bonus features occasionally, and the history of Disney releasing movies and shows on home media formats. I'm also going to give short opinions on each movie, which means I'll be repeating myself in several posts because I have multiple releases of the same movies. So let's get into it with the only pre-1984 Neon Mickey tape that I have, The Adventures of Chip 'n' Dale!
As I said in my Neon Mickey VHS overview Disney began releasing cartoon shorts and live action movies on home video in 1978 with the MCA-Discovision Laserdisc releases. However, beginning in 1980 with the Fotomat collaboration, they began releasing movies and cartoons on VHS and Betamax. Among the thirteen titles planned for the Fotomat collaborative release line, The Adventures of Chip 'n' Dale was released on VHS on March 4th, 1980, alongside Pete's Dragon, The Black Hole, The Love Bug, and Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Case wise, there's no difference between tapes released through Fotomat and tapes released elsewhere. It's simply that Fotomat was the first place where you could rent tapes from. That's it. The case for The Adventures of Chip 'n' Dale is exactly how I described the cases in my Neon Mickey VHS overview. A white clamshell, with the Sorcerer Mickey Walt Disney Home Video logo at the top with orange and red bars separating the logo from the release's title. What's odd about the piece of animation they used for the picture, Chip and Dale are in their original appearances from the 1943 cartoon short, Private Pluto where they look more like the animals in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Which is interesting because I didn't actually know that about them.
The tape's opening is interesting, because while the front cover says Walt Disney Home Video at the top, the Neon Mickey logo actually says Walt Disney Home Entertainment, as they were still using the original 1978 Neon Mickey logo, rather than the one used from 1981 until late 1986. And I say late 1986, because all four 1986 VHS releases for the Winnie the Pooh cartoon featurettes have the Neon Mickey logo in the openings for the tapes, but the first Disney Sing-Along Songs tape, Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah has the red Sorcerer Mickey Walt Disney Home Video logo at the beginning of it, which I'll talk about more when I get to those tapes in a few weeks.
So The Adventures of Chip 'n' Dale is actually an episode of the old Disneyland TV series that aired in 1959 and it's actually pretty good. The cartoons that are featured in this program are ones I've never seen before, as I didn't watch a whole lot of cartoons that had Chip and Dale in them as the main characters. I mostly saw them in Christmas specials and short cartoons with Donald Duck, much as they are in the three cartoons that Donald is in on this tape. They're funny though. And they aren't like Disney funny either. They're more Looney Tunes funny with the physical gags and the Wile E. Coyote/Road Runner type humour. I'm not usually a physical humour guy outside of the Looney Tunes and occasionally the Three Stooges, but I found these cartoons to be really funny. Maybe it's just from the shock of watching Chip and Dale take down Pete with his own weapons and cooking items in a Tex Avery/Looney Tunes style. I had a good time with this tape.
1980 was an interesting year for Disney. They hadn't released an animated movie since The Rescuers and The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh had been released in 1977, but the animators were in the middle of making The Fox and the Hound, and both theme parks and the live action movies were still doing relatively well. I say relatively well because the live action movies were mostly comedies they could just crank out one after another with smaller budgets than movies like The Black Hole required. Ron W. Miller, the son-in-law of Walt Disney, was the biggest advocate for the home video market at Disney. At least for the animated classics such as Dumbo, Alice in Wonderland, and Pinocchio. Though he doesn't seem to be the originator since he was still working on the movie side of things as a producer, and wouldn't be in a position of power at Disney until he became the president of the studio in 1980, two years after Disney made their deal with MCA Discovision to start releasing movies on Laserdisc effectively starting Walt Disney Home Video.
Overall this was a fun tape to watch and a great start to the series. Unlike with my other reviews, At the end of each review I'll be telling you what the next release I'm going to be talking about will be, because I am going in chronological order for each release. This way I'll be recording a more comprehensive history of Walt Disney Studios Home Entertainment through all of it's stages, as well as getting into my personal history with the tapes I have that I had or rented when I was a kid. I promise, it'll be fun. So next week I'll be talking about Volume 4 in the Walt Disney Cartoon Classics series from 1983, Sport Goofy.
That is going to be it for me for today, but I'll be back on Thursday for my review of the first episode of Loki, which drops tomorrow. My sister and I are watching it tomorrow night, so that should be fun. Until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.
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