Fractured Flickers - The Complete Collection

Rating:
Summary: The Bullwinkle Show meets the Silent Movies!
Review: From the creator of Rocky & Bullwinkle comes this great slap at the old silent movies! The talented voices from The Jay Ward studios put their own twist to clips from silent movies. Words (or Wards) can not describe this looney series hosted by Hans Conreid.
In the first episode, a giddy voiced Tarzan (called Tarfoot here) with a hacking caugh overtaking his yell, meets a "Fractured Fairytale" voiced Jane and rescues her from...oh if I give away too much it will ruin it for you. Rose Marie (of the Dick Van Dyke Show) is Hans' guest star interview in the first show.

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Summary: A BARGAIN for film enthusiasts everywhere!!!
Review: I am a Jay Ward fan, and I've collected some episodes of "Fractured Flickers" on 16mm film at a cost of several hundred dollars. Films from this series are a serious collector's item, and they've never sold for cheap on eBay. As such, $35 for this DVD collection is an incredible bargain

And the show is an absolute scream! Hans Conried shines as the stoic, but not unflappable host. In one show, Conried sardonically compares his hosting duties on a silent film show to "doing a show live from Forest Lawn cemetary." The best skits include "Dinky Dunston, Boy Cheerleader" (Lon Chaney's Hunchback of Notre Dame is endowed with Dudley Do-Right's voice) and a terrific re-editing of Fritz Lang's "M" (Peter Lorre tries to give up smoking. It's topical treatment of the Big Tobacco industry was decades ahead of its time.)

If you're tired of sitcom mediocrity full of brainless idiocy, phony families, hackneyed plots and stupid pratfalls, you DESERVE this series on DVD!!! There has been no series like "Fractured Flickers" before or since!

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Summary: New Twist on Silent Films
Review: I have only watched the first four, but I am hooked. They are so funny. I am a big fan of silent films and this is definitely a new twist on watching them. I loved the one with Rudolph Valentino as a traveling insurance agent. I was in tears with that one. I can't wait to watch all the rest. It is definitely worth the money.

Rating:
Summary: Cute concept, but mostly a waste
Review: Like so many other projects I can think of, the concept here is funnier than most of the actual execution. The idea of cutting up old silent movies and dubbing in dialog to create entirely new comic scenarios is great at first (especially when Dudley Do-Right's voice is used), but for me it can only go so far before it becomes downright tiresome.

Yes, there are moments which are genuinely hilarious, but they are few and far between. After two straight hours of viewing, the only scene I can remember that really cracked me up was in the Tarzan spoof: playing the Charleston over an aboriginal military drill. Other than that, it wasn't all that memorable, and I couldn't bring myself to watch the rest of the disc.

Woody Allen tried much the same thing in "What's Up, Tiger Lily?" and while it was funny at first, again I could only stand so much after a while.

Still, if you're as much a Jay Ward fan as I am, at least give it a rent and check it out for yourself.



Rating:
Summary: It's about time!
Review: This show, more than anything else, is responsible for warping my sense of humor as a child. Hans Conried was the perfect host, the bits were not all the greatest- but when they were on target- it was hysterical. "The Barber of Stanwyk" "Stan Laurel's "Minute Mysteries" "Believe it or Don't" It was a guide for satire and it affected me greatly as a child. I would not be the person I am today without having watched this show- whatever that means

Rating:
Summary: A Mixed Bag but Well Worth Opening
Review: What a treat it was to finally be able to see this favorite TV series from my childhood once again. It wasn't hard to see why a 10-year-old kid would have loved it so much, although I would have to admit that seeing it again as a 50-year-old was a somewhat different experience. Several of the segments were so good, they're still among my all-time favorite moments in TV comedy (mostly from the series' first few episodes, I noticed). But I'd have to say that a surprising number of the program's segments misfired. I think that part of the problem with the series was that it pretty quickly veered away from the premise it set for itself in its earliest episodes (i.e. wacky truncated versions of actual silent movies like Valentino's Blood and Sand, Elmo Lincoln's Tarzan, Fairbanks' The Mark of Zorro, etc.) and simply began cobbling together disparate footage, mostly from silent comedies, that would have been funnier WITHOUT the Jay Ward treatment. For this reason, I thought that those first few humorous versions of silent dramas and serious action films (see the above) worked best, while the Fractured Flickers versions of actual comedies were much less effective. I mean, why on earth "fracture" a classic comedy like Buster Keaton's "Cops" when the original version was totally unimprovable for generating laughs? On the other hand, the Fractured versions of deadly serious films like Lon Chaney's "Hunchback of Notre Dame" (see the hilarious "Dinky Dunston, Boy Cheerleader"), Conrad Veidt's "The Hands of Orlac" and John Barrymore's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" worked so well because they weren't comedies to begin with. Consequently, all of those great Ward studio voices, music cues and silly sound effects resulted in some pretty big laughs at the expense of these straight dramas and action films. Why this obvious fact escaped the notice of the program's makers really mystifies me. An even bigger surprise to me than the uneven quality of the "fractured" film segments, though, was how many of host Hans Conreid's on camera remarks and scripted celebrity interviews fell totally flat. He and his guests often appeared visibly uncomfortable having to mouth such weak material and that made me uncomfortable for them, the very last response they were probably aiming for. Yes, this long awaited release is definitely a mixed bag, but I would still recommend it to anyone with enough patience to hunt for the series' better moments. There are more than enough to warrant a rental or purchase, especially if you've always wanted to show your friends, kids or grandkids how you happened to come by your own warped sense of humor. These three crazy DVD's will explain A LOT. I know they did for me!

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Summary: Exactly As Remembered By Original Fan
Review: When the premiere of this series was advertised on a TV station in my area, I immediately recognized the voices and sound effects as those of the "Rocky and Bullwinkle" cartoons, immediately strongly catching my attention! Every week for the year the show was on, I tuned in on Thursdays and laughed my head off at the non-stop spoofs of 1920s silent movies! Over the decades I never forgot this series, even buying bootlegged video cassettes from other fans. Now for the price of this three DVD set, original fans and curious younger Bullwinkle fans can see the entire series from start to finish.

I think the series has an almost subversive, slightly sinister, Gothic quality to it. The self-deprecating jokes about the series, the scratched-up, ancient silent movies, the tiny low-budget set design, and the now-almost-forgotten interview guests make the series seem downright strange nowadays. There was nothing like it on TV at the time. Producer Jay Ward and Bill Scott were utterly unique television producers.

The producers of this DVD set have done a fine job, minus the absence of closed captioning or on-screen captions. The release of the first year of "Rocky and Bullwinkle" cartoons on DVD made me hope that Jay Ward's other fine TV shows might make it to DVD. This DVD set is a wonderful first step. Now we need to see "The Nut House", "George of the Jungle", "Hoppity Hooper", and "Crusader Rabbit" all on DVD!!!!