Movie:
Disc:
I
know one shouldn't speak ill of the dead unless they're Hitler or Stalin of
course,
but the phrase Hanna-Barbera Presents splashed across a television screen
still makes us groan aloud and reach for the remote control to quickly find
another channel.
No matter how lyrical nostalgic twenty-somethingers may wax about Scooby-Doo,
the fact remains that the ?creative? team of William Hanna and Joseph
Barbera with their poor quality TV animated kids shows represents a nadir in
the art of animation. Shoddy and cheap, their shows such as The
Flintstones, The Jetsons and Top Cat may be ingrained into
popular culture today, but their endurance rests on the fact that small
children have no critical facilities and will practically watch anything.
Adults who still recall these shows with fondness are in denial that they
have been short-changed as children with the whole ?entertainment? thing.
Simplistic storylines coupled with cheap, often static animation (you'd
often just see characters? mouths move and nothing else) are a hallmark of
these shows and Space Ghost & Dino Boy is no exception.
The title might lead you to believe that Dino Boy is Space Ghost's sidekick
or something, but they are in fact two separate and unrelated storylines.
Space Ghost is an intergalactic super powered policeman of sorts whose two
teenaged sidekicks and their pet monkey always get in trouble and then Space
Ghost has to go rescue them. One often wonders why he bothers keeping them
on, but let's not go into that . . .
The same goes for Dino Boy. Dino Boy is a small boy who is stranded
in a ?lost valley? populated by dinosaurs and other fantastical creatures.
He is befriend by a caveman named Ugh and the plots always involve Dino Boy
being captured by some tribe who wants to sacrifice him to their gods and
then Ugh has to rescue his scrawny little ass.
Each episode consists of three segments of about 5-7 minutes each, two
Space Ghost segments sandwiched in-between a Dino Boy piece. As
you can guess, the brief running time of each segment makes for the most
basic of plots.
THE DISCS: All 20 episodes of the series are fit onto two
double-sided discs. Sound and image quality are okay enough for a show
that's 41 years old and thus old enough for its own mid-life crisis.
WORTH IT? If anything can be said in Space Ghost & Dino Boy's defence
it is that they don't face the same villains episode after episode like the
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles would with
Shredder and He-Man would with Skeletor later
on. Also, the animation is decent
