Technicolor Dreams and Black & White Nightmares Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.5
Audio		2.5
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.5

Technicolor Dreams and Black & White Nightmares Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman September 27, 2014

Thunderbean Animation, the little home grown restoration outfit helmed by Steve Stanchfield, is back with their second Blu-ray release after their largely laudable Fleischer Classics Featuring Gulliver's Travels. There’s no real unifying theme in this collection of early shorts, and that, along with widely varying video quality (mostly due to the source elements), may make this a bit of a harder sale even among diehard early animation aficionados. But with a very early Disney on display, along with a few early color outings (including a Wizard of Oz that predates the famous film’s gimmick of a black and white Kansas followed by a miraculously colorful Oz), Technicolor Dreams and Black and White Nightmares is a valuable historical document of just how varied and creative early animation really was.

Cartoons included in this set are:

• Dolly Doings (1917)
• The Wrong Track (1920)
• Alice Rattled by Rats (1925)
• Playing With Fire (1926)
• Goldilocks and the Three Bears (1928)
• Mendelssohn's Spring Song (1931)
• The Bandmaster (1931)
• The Snowman (1932)
• A Swiss Trick (1931)
• The Wizard of Oz (1932/33)
• The Magic Mummy (1933)
• Indian Whoopee (1933)
• To Spring (1936)
• Teapot Town (1936)
• The Enchanted Square (1948)

Technicolor Dreams and Black & White Nightmares Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Technicolor Dreams and Black and White Nightmares is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Thunderbean Animation with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in a variety of aspect ratios that hover in the 1.33:1 to 1.37:1 region. As mentioned above, the source elements utilized for these transfers are in widely disparate condition, so that some of the very oldest suffer from significant image decay and damage, with things like line detail coming and going from frame to frame. There are occasional issues with stability and frame misalignment (as well as missing frames). As should be expected, the "newer" (a decidedly relative term) shorts generally look the best, with the color on The Wizard of Oz and The Enchanted Square looking fairly robust and well saturated. Restoration efforts have no doubt cleaned these up significantly, but there are still manifest scratches, dirt and other blemishes. Grain fields, while again somewhat variable, are natural looking and do not appear to have been severely compromised by whatever noise removing regimen was employed.

Technicolor Dreams and Black & White Nightmares Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The disc's collection of Dolby Digital 2.0 mono soundtracks is often fairly problematic, with lots of pops, cracks, distortion and other signs of age making their presence known with regularity. The overall sound here is pretty boxy most of the time, with a narrow sounding midrange, and some tracks that have brittle high ends and no real low ends to speak of.

Technicolor Dreams and Black & White Nightmares Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Teapot Town Booklet (1080p) features pages from a giveaway pamphlet by the National Tea Growers.


• Bosco the Talk-Ink Kid (1080p; 4:43) is a pitch reel.


• Still Gallery (1080i)


• Coke Theatrical Ads (1080p; 5:04) is a collection of pieces animated by Walter Lantz.

Technicolor Dreams and Black & White Nightmares Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

This Thunderbean release might not have the immediate appeal of the Fleischer Gulliver, but there's a great collection of some rather odd but charming early efforts in the art of animation and live action-animation hybrids on display here. There's only so far restorative efforts can go with no original elements (not to mention a limited budget), but Steve Stanchfield and his staff deserve kudos for their heroic attempts at rescuing these pieces from the dustbin of history, not to mention the horrors of standard definition. Recommended.