Ghosts of Saturday Mornings Past

So, I'm spending another evening torturing myself by browsing through the Warner Archive Collection.  I think I've blogged about this in the past...it's a really neat concept.  Warner Brothers went through their archives and found a bunch of their classic films.  While they know there's a market to release these films on DVD, they know it's an incredibly small market, and really not worth it to produce the DVDs in mass quantities.  So, what they did was they converted these movies to digital files, and they make the DVDs to order.  That's right, they burn them on demand!

Granted, these DVDs have no bonus features, and they've done little to nothing in the way of digital restoration...just burned them to DVD straight from the highest quality source they could find.  But that's OK.  These are for cinephiles who wants these just because they never thought they'd see the light of DVD.

I have only one problem with the Warner Archive Collection:  THEY DON'T SHIP TO CANADA.  There's a few titles in there I'd love to get, but when it asks me for my address, it says, "Cannot ship to your location."  There's warnings all over that they only ship in the USA.  It's a very frustrating case of "look, but don't touch."  

And now, they're starting to dig through their animation archives, and starting to dig up some classic Hanna Barbera Saturday morning cartoons.

Man o man, this one was announced a few months ago, and I'd sure love to get it.  The definition of cheesy cartoon crossovers, The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones.  Thanks to Elroy Jetson's time machine gone awry, the Jetsons find themselves thrown back to prehistoric times, where they meet the Flintstones.  The Flintstones help the Jetsons adjust to the days of the caveman, and then the Flintstones are flung into the far future, where they quickly become the new mascots for Spacely's Sprockets.





It was made in the late-80s as part of this huge series of TV movies that Hanna-Barbera made, starring a bunch of their classic cartoon characters.  CBC showed them on Saturday mornings when I was a kid.  I'd watch them occasionally, as they nicely filled the void between CFRN's early morning of Masters of the Universe and The Smurfs, and ITV's afternoon of The Transformers, G.I. Joe, MASK, Visionaries, Jem, and everything else that made the 80s FREAKING AWESOME.  But yeah.  Among those movies, The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones is truly the best and most famous.

And then I start browsing some more, and I see they released The Dukes: The Complete Series.  Holy crap, they released The Dukes on DVD, better known as The Dukes of Hazzard cartoon.

At the height of The Dukes of Hazzard popularity in the early-80s, it actually spawned a Saturday morning animated spin-off known simply as The Dukes.  In grand Saturday morning cartoon style, Boss Hogg decides to end his long-standing feud with the Dukes once and for all by challenging the Dukes to a race around the world.  So Bo, Luke, and Daisy (and Coy and Vance in the early episodes, as this was made during the Coy and Vance era) hop in the General Lee and head off for Paris, London, Tokyo, and other exotic locales, with Boss Hogg and Roscoe in hot pursuit, cheating along the way to win the race.





I didn't get this cartoon on TV when I was a kid, but my grandparents did.  I have very fuzzy memories of watching it one Saturday morning when visiting my grandparents.  And I remember thinking it was incredibly cool.  I would get this purely on that fuzzy memory.

So, yeah.  Some of the things I'd be disposing my disposable income on if the Warner Archives shipped to Canada.  Those two...and Steel.  Come on!  Everyone should see the classic Shaq superhero epic!  Just to see what a train wreck it is.