Ahh, Saturday mornings. Time to grab some breakfast and plant yourself in front of the TV so that a variety of commercial sponsors can tell you what to want in between snippets of ridiculous animated stories frenetic enough to hold your minuscule attention span! Ok, I haven't always been this cynical, and it is that innocent youngster that lurks somewhere inside us all that these collections are made for. Most of these series are from before my time, but anyone who watched cartoon reruns as a kid will find something recognizable in these collections.
The Saturday Morning Cartoons collections each feature two discs of classic cartoons from their decades. Both sets claim to feature 12 shows, but many of those shows are actually broken up into shorter segments, meaning that you end up getting many more characters than you might expect. The 1960s set features one disc of humorous shows like Top Cat, Quick-Draw McGraw, The Flintstones and the Porky Pig Show, with another disc packed with more action series like Space Ghost and the Herculoids. The 1970s collection is a little more mixed up, with humor and action mixed together with shows like The Jetsons, Batman, Josie and the Pussy Cats and Scooby Doo.
The quality of animation in general varies in quality, although everything is old fashioned, as expected of cartoons from 30 to almost 50 years ago. Audio is also particularly old fashioned, with some shows featuring cheesy laugh tracks or voice acting. Video quality is generally excellent, although certain episodes feature segments of corrupted video that have otherwise been lost, while audio quality varies from series to series.
These episodes are packed with a couple of special features. Each disc features a quick video summarizing the episodes on the disc, and each set also includes a small collection of videos that examine the importance of or inspiration for some of the series included in the set. As someone not entirely familiar with a lot of the older series featured, these features provide some interesting context about what made these shows so great.
These collections present a good variety of classic cartoons from yesteryear… but the actual episodes selected seem like a random sampling of the catalog, so that the end result is something like watching reruns on Cartoon Network or Boomerang for hours in a row, only with the convenience of having a disk that you can watch anytime. Which, I guess, is kind of the point. But it would be nice if the episodes were more consistent in quality. Even if the cartoons aren't always great, there sure are a lot of them, and they each have a decent selection of special features, making this a good pick for people looking for a heavy dose of nostalgia.
ComicsOnline.com gives Saturday Morning Cartoons: 1960s Volume 1 and Saturday Morning Cartoons: 1970s Volume 1 3.5 stars out of five.
