Channel Frederator Blog

Disney has announced their 2009 release slate of films. These include Pinocchio: 70th Anniversary Platinum Edition (March 10) and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Platinum Edition in October. Pixar will be releasing Monsters Inc. and A Bug’s Life.

Hopefully these Blu-Ray releases will be a better release than that of Sleeping Beauty last year, which received mixed reviews, mostly due to picture quality issues such as DVNR, oversaturated colors, and color timing. There was a post about these issues and the release back in November on Cartoon Brew.

I don’t know if Walt Disney Home Entertainment has learned anything (or changed anything) since their last classic on BluRay release, but I hope they did. The issues listed here are what kept me from buying the Blu Ray release of Sleeping Beauty.

-Floyd Bishop

My post yesterday paid tribute to the classic (but not classy) holiday icon Mr. Hankey. Since he is over ten years old, I thought I’d point out a more recent example of cute celebratory caca. Dookie-Poo is a side project of creative director Manny Galan (who used to direct animation for Nickelodeon). Dookie-Poo and his friends have appeared as vinyl toys, plush toys, animation, apparel, prints, and trading cards.

The Dookie-Poo website is full of fun stuff including lots of downloadables: activity pages, 3-D paper models, finger puppets, and more. (I spent yesterday evening finally assembling a printed version of Pookie-Do’s Sleepy-Poo bedroom set that I bought last winter at Comicon.)

Go here to check out the festive seasonal front page, complete with happy-go-lucky theme music that might remind you of a certain holiday cartoon special staring a round-faced boy with a squiggly mouth.

After the jump, a Dookie-Poo music video for “I Will” by [Read more…]

This morning’s New York Times has an article about the Disney “lifestyle brand” which highlights couture clothing, chandeliers, and $1200 fountains pens–with many of the products totally devoid of Disney cartoon characters or even abstract Mickey ears. Dresses are inspired by the colors in Fantasia; pens are modeled after the “window architecture” in Alice in Wonderland.

As a fan of Mid-Century modern design, I do covet some pieces in the Walt Disney Signature Furniture Collection by Drexel, with names like “Storytellers Sofa” and “Scriptwriter Ottoman”. There’s a “Studio Martini Table” perhaps inspired by our hard-drinking animation heroes of the past. I’m not naming names.

After the jump, some Disney-inspired products not officially sanctioned. (Found among the endless listing on a certain crafty online marketplace site.) [Read more…]