Ub Iwerks

Volume 1 of a celebration of the pioneering solo cartoon work of Ub Iwerks, Walt Disney's foremost animator/collaborator in the formative early years. The first fully animated color cartoon version of "Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp" (1934)...the legendary Flip the Frog in the slapstick masterpiece "The New Car" (1931)...the original cartoon adaptation of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," "The Headless Horseman" (1934)...the little-known animation star Willie Whopper in the surrealistic sci-fi classic "Stratos Fear" (1933)...and a famous "lost" film, a full-color cartoonization of "Don Quixote" (1934). These are just a few of the 58 cartoons captured on these two DVDs (available separately) of rediscovered masterworks from the very beginnings of the Golden Age of American Animation.

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A celebration of the pioneering solo cartoon work of Ub Iwerks;Walt Disney's foremost animator/collaborator. Includes Down and Out With Flip The Frog;Nurse Maid;Room Runners;The Office Boy;The Milkman;The New Car;Ragtime Romeo;What A Life;The Bully;Funny Face;Movie Mad;Things That Go Bump In The Night;The Cuckoo Murder Case;Stratos Fear;Jack Frost;Chinaman's Chance;Masquerade Holiday (aka Hill's Fire);Techno-Cracked;Soda Squirt;The Headless Horseman;Spooks;Balloon Land;Cartoon Extra;Laughing Gas;Circus;Stormy Seas;Coo Coo The Magician;School Days;The Goal Rush

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Willoughby Wren gets a job at a circus and, with the help of this magic hat, saves the circus from an escaped gorilla.

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A Disney educational animated short instructing the use of the Boys MK.1 Anti-Tank rifle.

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An owl seeking to add some meat to his dinner adopts several disguises to get into a party being held by some musical bats. They are not fooled for long and the owl ends up in his own cauldron.

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Gran' Pop Monkey and The Three Monkeys decide to open a jungle beauty parlor, but a tough-guy gorilla comes in with his fat hippopotamus girlfriend and demands that they make her lose a lot of weight in a very short time span.

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Gran'pop Monkey opens a nursery, but the mischievous baby animals overwhelm him and his two assistants.

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Mice get into trouble with toys and record players in a closed toy store.

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An English fellow lectures about his trip to the Gobi desert to find a dinosaur egg.

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In this episode of A Color Rhapsody, the blackboard drawings come alive, as the characters on screen gather together for class. This Columbia classroom tale features a jungle sequence, musical segment and a story-within-a-story structure, differentiated by the style of the cartoon world and the 'blackboard' world within.

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Gran'pop monkey runs a printing press while evading the advances of his amorous secretary and suffering the mischievousness of the two young family members who assist him.

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A farmer 'hires' two scarecrows to guard his crops against voracious attacks by a flock of crows. During one attack a baby crow falls into the farmer's water well, and the scarecrows save its life. The grateful crows pledge to leave the farmer's cornfield alone in the future, and set about to repair some of the damage they have just done.

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A spoof of those "No, No, A Thousand Times No!" melodramas.

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A boxing kangaroo tricks his son into fighting when he really wants to be a violinist.

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A mouse and a cuckoo bird, skeptical about the existence of ghosts, are startled by a midnight visit from a sextet of spirits, all men who once wooed a Florador show-girl. The specters do a song-and-dance routine from the gay-90's era of show-business. They all fade away at dawn, leaving the mouse and the cuckoo bird less-convinced skeptics than they were before the witching hour.

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In Ub Iwerks' The Frog Pond, many frogs are singing and having a good time until a big bully frog takes some food and basically orders a house built on his lily pond.

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Professor Owl is lecturing to his class of bird and animal students, when they students interrupt him with weather questions regarding what makes the north wind blow and what makes snow. As the good professor starts to explain this phenomenon, the scene shifts to the North Pole where little dwarfs are shown in the process of making snow, thunder and wind.

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Weary of his running-in-circles existence as a merry-go-round horse, the little hobby-horse gets a case of wanderlust. That night he gets out after the fair has closed and takes in the world of the Crazy House, the Wax Museum, the Ferris Wheel and a roller coaster. Battered and beaten from his adventures, he concludes he is better off on his stand at the merry-go-round.

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Scrappy and Oppie dream that they take a rocket trip to Mars. There they meet some nice Martian girls. When they want to go home, the Martians will not let them leave the planet.

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Porky owns a full-service gas station; he deals with a wide variety of problems, like a bump that migrates to different parts of the car. But his real nemesis is a supposedly sleeping baby in a car whose tire needs changing; in fact, the baby is wide awake and a real brat. Both Porky and the brat end up covered in grease; the irate mother drives off, but the child has tied a pump to a tire, which ends up pulling the whole station into the ground.

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The technicalities are topnotch, with some excellent Technicolor work, but this vaguely anti-foxhunting story has some basset pups winding up chasing a fox by accident, and one of them gets into all sorts of trouble when the fox captures him and takes him home to his kits in a sack.

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Porky Pig and ill-tempered Gabby Goat go on a camping outing. Chaos ensues.

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Told in a musical-comedy format, this cartoon is the story of two department store mannequins who fall in love, become engaged and plan to marry. When the other dummies/manikins/mannequins in the store learn this, they arrange surprises for the couple with nearly every piece of merchandise in the store coming to life.

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Ub Iwerks dusts off the skeletons from his early-Disney days and puts them to work at Columbia… in a graveyard replete with eerie owls and surrealistic bats, skeletons begin to rise from their graves and form a loosely-jointed band.

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Two crows do not want to work and prepare for winter.

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Pinhead is ridiculed by the other boys on the way to the fishing hole.

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The Big Bad Wolf stalks Little Bo Peep and steals one of her sheep. She enlists Little Boy Blue and a dancing scarecrow to assist her and her mischievous black sheep in rescuing it. Singing, dancing, hilarity and impalement ensue.

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A cowardly cat has several adventures involving pugnacious mice.

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The animated story of Tom Thumb

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Ali Baba senior and his son Ali Baba live in poverty. One day they happen to see the Forty Thieves enter their cave. After the thieves leave, Ali Baba and his son enter the cave and start to fill their pockets with the treasure they find inside. Alas for them, the Forty Thieves return and they are forced to hide in large jars. But of course they are discovered...

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Animated take on the classic nursery rhyme.

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As in the nursery rhyme, Simple Simon meets a pieman on his way to the fair and samples his wares. However, when he makes no purchase, the pieman becomes angry, follows Simon to the fair, and makes his stay there miserable.

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Professor Owl is lecturing to his class of bird and animal students, when they students interrupt him with weather questions regarding what makes the north wind blow and what makes snow. As the good professor starts to explain this phenomenon, the scene shifts to the North Pole where little dwarfs are shown in the process of making snow, thunder and wind.

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Pinhead is ridiculed by the other boys on the way to the fishing hole.

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The inhabitants, including the trees and rocks, of Balloon Land are made entirely of balloons. They come under attack from the evil Pincushion Man. With the help of a quickly inflated army, they manage to fend off the attacker.

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Old Mother Hubbard is the laundress for the king, but when she finds her cupboard bare, her dog travels to the palace where he winds up performing for the king.

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Mammy gives Little Black Sambo a quick scrub on the washboard, then pats him down with baby powder, black baby powder, before sending him off to play. She warns him about the tiger...

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A young grizzly bear, undaunted by his mother's warnings of the coming winter, runs away from home only to be confronted by Old Man Winter himself.

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Early color animated short of an adaptation of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"

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Aladdin is a child laborer who works for a guy that exchanges "new lamps for old". This guy swaps a "new" lamp for 2-3 replacement old lamps, then brings back the old lamps for Aladdin to polish and make look like new. One day Aladdin sees a princess riding by as he looks out the window, and he falls for her. But then he must return to his lamp polishing...

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Willie Whooper, doused in reducing creme, shrinks to the size of a mouse and is chased by a cat throughout a house. Finally Willie returns to normal size and angrily covers the cat in reducing creme. The cat now shrinks to mouse size, and gets a black eye from the mouse he habitually torments.

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Jack sells the family cow for magic beans which grow a vine into the sky.

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Flip The Frog goes head-to-head with a swami-type magician, both trying to top each other (with some funny results). This all happens after the latter pulls a disappearing act with Flip's girlfriend.

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"Bully" is a Bluto-type - you know: big, gruff guy with a cigar, small bowler hat, needs a shave....Here, he picks a fight with poor Flip. Before you know it, a neutral party comes along, shows the two guys a sign advertising "boxing to-night" and advises them to take it to the arena, where at least they could pick up some bucks if they're going to fight.

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Flip is back in his school days, on his way to the old one-room school house. You know the story: his pet dog wants to follow his master. The poor dog even has a turnstile in the middle of front year's picket fence, apparently to help prevent him from getting out. However, this is a very smart dog and he finds a way.

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A Flip The Frog cartoon....

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First, a bum comes along and steals their hat and replaces it with his flea-bitten one. Later, they are tormented at a diner when a hamburger comes to life! Later, after selling their instruments so they can get something to eat, they see a blind man begging on the street.

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Flip and his pals, working at a fire station, are called out to stop a fire.

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Flip, the owner of a dairy farm, wakes up one morning and goes to milk his cow. He has problems with a pesky fly who is eventually swatted by the cow's tail. Flip then takes the milk into town to deliver it. While in town, he encounters a bratty little kid who just won't leave him alone. Eventually Flip and the kid make up and become friends.

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Flip the Frog finds himself in a house haunted by crazy skeletons.

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Flip the Frog is a game hunter in Africa. He has an encounter with some cannibals who take him to their king for dinner ...

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Flip is a jail warden who has to deal with an escaped convict. Working with his horse, who seems almost as intelligent as he is, it has some amazing moments. Look in the background for two goats playing horseshoes, using their wooden legs as the pegs- not quite politically correct today. It even includes a scene where the convict is hiding as a store dummy, a routine lifted from Buster Keaton, and later used by the Three Stooges, although not quite as "rubbery" as Flip does it.

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This cartoon about how Flip, the village handyman gets called in to deal with a piece of plumbing that won't stop leaking is well constructed, paced and drawn -- the Rube Goldberg pipes in the cellar are quite a sight.

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FLIP THE FROG, who is basically a walking, talking, white glove, bow- tie & short-pants wearing little black frog. In this outing, Flip is introduced to us as he is reading up on how to become a movie director, which essentially comes down to dressing up like Charlie Chaplin!

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Seagoing Flip the Frog saves a girl, abandoned on a neighboring boat, from a mighty storm at sea.

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Flip The Frog goes out to buy a new car.

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Flip the Frog serenades his feline sweetheart to the delight of everyone in her building-- Everyone, that is, except a homely cow, who is trying to get some sleep.

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Flip is a dentist. A walrus in the waiting room is apprehensive when he hears the screams of earlier patients...

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When a cat's horse throws a shoe while pulling her carriage, she enlists in the help of a blacksmith in re-shoeing her horse.

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Flip the Frog is a café employee who performs with the band, makes soup and delivers food to patrons.

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A mouse mother refuses to accept another baby mouse as her kid. The stork decides it's best to place it on Flip's doorstep. Is he man enough to handle the little brat?

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