Silent Era : Home Video Reviews

Silent Era Home Page > Home Video > Cartoon Rarities of the 1920s

Reviews of silent film releases on home video.
Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett
and the Silent Era Company.
All Rights Reserved.

Cartoon Rarities
of the 1920s
(1917-1929)

Contents: Tanks (1917), The Four Musicians of Bremen (1922), Alice Rattled by Rats (1925), Ko-Ko in Toyland (1925), My Old Kentucky Home (1926), Red Hot Rails (1926), Sweet Adeline (1926), The Hunt (1927), Knighthood (1927), The Mechanical Cow (1927), One Man Dog (1927), Romeeow (1927) and A Lad and His Lamp (1929).

Alpha Video
2008 DVD edition

Cartoon Rarities of the 1920s (1917-1929), black & white, 79 minutes total, not rated, including Tanks (1917), black & white, 4 minutes, not rated, The Four Musicians of Bremen (1922), black & white, 7 minutes, not rated, Alice Rattled by Rats (1925), black & white, 7 minutes, not rated, Ko-Ko in Toyland (1925), black & white, 7 minutes, not rated, My Old Kentucky Home (1926), black & white, 7 minutes, not rated, Red Hot Rails (1926), black & white, 6 minutes, not rated, Sweet Adeline (1926), black & white, 3 minutes, not rated, The Hunt (1927), black & white, 7 minutes, not rated, Knighthood (1927), black & white, 7 minutes, not rated, The Mechanical Cow (1927), black & white, 6 minutes, not rated, One Man Dog (1927), black & white, 6 minutes, not rated, Romeeow (1927), black & white, 7 minutes, not rated, and A Lad and His Lamp (1929), black & white, 6 minutes, not rated.

Alpha Home Entertainment, distributed by Oldies.com,
ALP 5681D, UPC 0-89218-56819-9
One single-sided, single-layered, Region 0 NTSC DVD-R disc, 1.33:1 aspect ratio image in windowboxed 4:3 (720 x 480 pixels) interlaced scan MPEG-2 format, SDR (standard dynamic range), ? Mbps average video bit rate, ? Kbps audio bit rate, Dolby Digital 48 kHz 2.0 mono sound, English language intertitles, no subtitles; 13 chapter stops; standard DVD keepcase; $7.98 (raised to $8.98).
Release date: 28 October 2008.
Country of origin: USA

This budget DVD collection has been mastered from a series of good to very-good 16mm reduction prints, which are soft of image details but also hold some light greytones in most of the brightest picture areas. Most of the framing is too tight so that some picture information is lost on all sides, with more lost to the left and bottom of the picture. The roughest print of the silent era cartoons is that for A Close Call (1929).