I'm pleased today to report one of the best things I've heard in a while: Classic Media has announced that they'll be releasing The Complete Harveytoons Collection on 11/7. That's right, I said THE COMPLETE. This 4 disc set (double-sided DVD-18s), will include ALL 312 classic Harveytoons shorts with digitally remastered picture and sound. Anyone else, like me, old enough to know and love these shorts? Yeah, we're talking Casper the Friendly Ghost. We're talking Richie Rich. We're talking Wendy and Herman and Katnip, Hot Stuff, Baby Huey, Little Audrey and The Modern Madcaps. The set will SRP for just $39.98, and it comes in collectible packaging with an original Casper comic printed inside. Very cool news indeed. Here's a look at the cover art...

First of all, we've gotten our hands on Classic Media's Harveytoons: The Complete Collection DVD and we have a couple comments about it. The bad news is that these are NOT the original Harveytoon shorts per se, but rather this 4-disc set contains episodes of the more recent The Harveytoon Show (each episode of which contained 3 or 4 Harveytoon shorts) as seen on Fox Family Channel and more recently on Boomerang as Casper and Friends. The OTHER bad news is that there's no list of the episodes and shorts included anywhere on the packaging, and even when you pop the DVDs in, they're only identified by a number. A booklet would have helped this set immensely. What fans will consider even WORSE news, however, is that the set only includes 52 episodes, while there were 78 episodes of the show in all. On top of that, while the episodes are listed by number, they don't always even correspond to the original series' episode numbers. Disc One seems to correspond to the Wikipedia episode list fairly well, but then the set starts to skip episodes and jump around like crazy. And while the original series occasionally duplicated some of the same shorts over different episodes, new episodes seem to have been edited together such that there's little to no duplication... and yet a LOT of the original shorts even from this series are missing. Obviously, there are many more original Harveytoon shorts that were never included in this series as well. The one bit of good news that we can report about Harveytoons: The Complete Collection is that the video and audio quality here is very good. But calling this set "complete" is terribly misleading to say the least. Despite its problems, however, this is still a decent collection of great and classic shorts on DVD. If your kids haven't had the chance to see these before, this is a good way to expose them to a lot of wonderful animation. But with a little more attention to detail, this could have been a truly great DVD release, ranking right up there with Warner's Looney Tunes Golden Collections and Disney's Walt Disney Treasures sets. What a shame. Animation historian Jerry Beck has more information on this Harveytoons DVD over at his Cartoon Brew website (check the 10/26 post).