DVDizzy Forum

I have a little question about last wave of WD Treasures from 2005. Will there be any replacement of my Chronological Donald 2 DVD? I feel bit cheated because the overall quality of Donald's shorts are not fully restored except the wartime cartoons. The colors are awful and background is too dark. It is very sad because the early 40's period is one of my the most favorite

It's not like something went wrong in the mastering process. Disney clearly just didn't do all the remastering work they had for Volume 1 and other previous Treasures. It was a conscious decision to release the content with less than grade A presentation. So, no, no replacement in sight.

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Don't get your hopes up. They're out now; there's nothing we can do about it. Worrying certainly won't help. All we can do is hope that Disney has learned its lesson and will bring the next set out more up to snuff.

I don't believe they've made any attempt whatsoever to remaster, restore or reimage any of the shorts in any of the tins. All the cartoons have looked as lousy as they ever have, compared to the obvious restoration work in older classics like Snow White. Look at the lousy and blurred version of "Grasshopper and the Ants" from the first Silly Symphonies release. But that's how I've always seen it, actually. I imagine that the restoration of all the hundreds of short cartoons would be very time-consuming and expensive, but Disney should have done it.

Yes, some of the shorts on previous volumes looked ugly such as Grasshopper and the Ants and Mickey's Trailer but there were just a few of them but the situation on Chronological Donald is far worse because 75 percent of them are above-average. This is unacceptable.

As mentioned, "Mickey's Trailer" looked pretty bad due to being taken from some old video master, and I think one or two of the "Three Little Pigs" shorts suffered a similar fate, but apart from those almost all of them were remastered/restored. Yes, even "The Grasshopper and the Ants". The reason I believe it looks blurry is because the Technicolor strips are misaligned most of the time. I'm not an expert so I don't know if they could have done it better.

Anyway I really hope they shape up for this year's wave. It saddens me that I won't get to have a complete collection of Donald restored, but if these sets are good then at least that will be the only severely tarnished line of shorts (at least of the big ones).