I’m a huge geek for animated shorts, and my fanboyism is pretty evenly split between classic Disney and Warner Bros. cartoons. For some reason though I always held off on buying Looney Tunes on DVD. I guess I had unconciously decided that I couldn’t afford to buy Disney Treasures sets and all the Looney Tunes DVDs at the same time.

Now I’m really glad I never did because WB has been releasing Looney Tunes on Blu-ray and they look awesome and come packed with bonus features for animation nerds like me. I picked up the Looney Tunes Platinum Collection: Volume 1 a while back when it came out, and WB was kind enough to send a review copy of Volume 2, and it’s just as awesome.

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Being a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fan often means embracing the good (the comics, the first movie, the ’87 cartoon) and the bad (Coming out of Our Shells Tour). The Turtles’ inherent wackiness keeps me from ever taking it too seriously, but one piece of TMNT history always gives me that weird embarrassed feeling, and that is Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation.

In case you didn’t turn on your TV for the five minutes that NT:TNM aired in the late nineties or you’ve just done a better job than me of repressing the memories of this show, I’ll fill you in. The Next Mutation was the first (and only) live-action TMNT show, and it was made by Saban, of Power Rangers fame. The costumes were pretty horrible, April and Casey are nowhere to be found, and the Shredder barely shows up at all. Sounds like a formula for a great TMNT show!
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There were a few VHS tapes that I had as a kid that got watched all the time. Rock-a-Doodle, We’re Back!, and Fievel Goes West come to mind, as well as a direct-to-video movie tied to one of my favorite cartoons of the early 90s, Tiny Toons.

Tiny Toon Adventures: How I Spent My Vacation came out in 1992 and for some reason is just now coming out on DVD, years after all my other favorite VHS tapes have made the jump. I was excited to watch this again and add it to my media center, but I wasn’t sure how it was going to hold up. Is it still watchable?
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Brave is a rather brave venture for Pixar. It’s the company’s first female lead, but more importantly, Pixar is coming off the lackluster Cars 2, a movie so bad I couldn’t finish watching it and my four-year old has never requested it again. So far the gamble seems to be paying off as audiences are embracing the firey-haired Merida and the story of her struggle for independence. If you’re one of the millions who have already seen the movie, you can relive the adventure at home as a Disney ebook, and also as a motion comic, both available for iOS.

If you’ve read my reviews of Disney ebooks before, you’ll know that Disney does a pretty decent job of getting and keeping kids’ interest through the use of quality artwork, good music and sound effects, and interesting animations. Brave is no exception. In fact, in a lot of ways, Brave exceeds any previous efforts I’ve seen from Disney’s ebooks.

First, the artwork is absolutely stunning throughout. I said before with The Jungle Book that many of the “pages” were screen-capture worthy. With Brave, nearly every page would make a great background for your iPad. Read More

I may not be a hardcore toy collector, but I like to think I have a vague awareness of the current toy lines on store shelves, especially with big characters like super heroes and Star Wars. Usually I duck into toy aisles when my wife and I are out getting groceries (“I just need to look at something real quick..it’s for my blog!”), but until I read a post on Battle Grip I was not aware of the new Batman Power Attack line of action figures.

The Power Attack series features the cutesy, bulky style of cartoon-themed toy lines and more kid-centric lines like Imaginext but stretched out to 6″ scale, and the results are surprisingly awesome. After Philip’s first post got me interested, he went on to review some of the more colorful versions of Batman and I knew I needed to pick up a few of these figures.

I picked up the two normal looking figures in the line, Battle Gauntlet Batman and Strike Shield Robin. Since I was a kid I was always confused by the multi-colored versions of Batman and this line features plenty of those. Some of them actually look pretty cool, but I tend to stick with blue, grey, and black versions of the Caped Crusader.
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