I don’t know about the rest of you, but I grew up watching the classic Disney short cartoons. I caught them as often as possible, on the Disney Channel, on VHS, but mainly on our RCA Selectavision discs.

Even though the format was dead and gone a year before I was born, we had a player and about 300 pounds worth of discs. Even among Jaws, Superman, Bad News Bears, and Indiana Jones, the Disney shorts were what I watched the most.

And, among those, it was Volume 3 of the Cartoon Classics series, namely Scary Tales, that was my favorite. What’s so cool about Disney shorts is that each generation remembers them in a different way. You’ve got the old folks that were around when they were played in theaters and the younger crowd that grew up with compilation tapes and clip shows on TV. So, like a mix tape, you not only remember the cartoons, but how they go together. Being Halloween, I thought I’d share some thoughts (and videos!) of this creepy edition to Disney Home Video.

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I’m sure all you gamers have heard of Warren Spector’s crazy-looking Disney Wii game Epic Mickey. Well, Game Informer has released a new batch of info and images about the game, and it sounds awesome.

If you haven’t heard about it, the title is pretty accurate. It’s an epic adventure where you play as Mickey Mouse in a disutopian/steampunk style environment in which Disney’s lower cast of characters have teamed up to defeat you. Its cool that Disney is backing a project like this, where Oswald the Lucky Rabbit is a villain.

For us animation buffs, it’s cool that they’re using the classic Disney shorts and comic strips as inspiration, even obscure characters like the Mad Doctor and the Phantom Blot. Spector is about as hardcore of a Mickey fan as you can get, so you can expect this game to be chocked full of references to Mickey’s history.

The gameplay involves the erasing and painting of objects, and has some 2D style side-scrolling levels in addition to the 3D levels.

Make sure to check out the article, and keep an eye on Game Informer’s Epic Mickey landing page.

I was going to post my review of this earlier, but I had to watch it twice before I felt I could really describe how nice of a set this is. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: Diamond Edition is of course the first time this film has been released in HD, and they did a surprisingly great job with the transfer. Considering that this film came out in 1937, I assumed the Blu-ray would look good but still show a lot of imperfections, just due to how old the masters are. I was wrong.

My wife and I fired this up one night and were blown away by how clear the movie is. By itself, the film is presented in the Fullscreen aspect ration that it was animated in, because Disney didn’t start animating in Widescreen until the 50s. However, they’ve added a cool feature called DisneyView where they fill the remaining sections of the frame with paintings by Toby Bluth. They fit in nicely with the style of the movie and aren’t distracting, so you won’t have to worry about burning in black bars on your expensive Plasma HDTV. This was first used on the Pinnochio Blu-ray that came out last spring.

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In anticipation of Robert Zemeckis’ latest motion capture extravaganza, Disney has been touring the country with a special Christmas Carol train to raise awareness of the film and to block city streets for days at a time.

I’m not particularly excited about the film, because I usually hate motion capture, but when something like this rolls into town, I can’t pass it up. The tour includes glimpses at models, concept art, busts, and of course, a healthy dose of motion capture propaganda. They also set up an impressive outdoor, inflatable Disney Digital 3D theater to show off clips from the film.

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Image from DisneyShorts.org

Mickey’s Trailer holds a very special place in my childhood, and is without a doubt my favorite Disney short. I watched a ton of Disney shorts growing up, mostly thanks to my family’s RCA Selectavision player (article to come), a few VHS compilation tapes, and the Disney Channel.

One compilation that I watched quite a bit was called On Vacation with Mickey and Friends, which was six shorts put together with some new animation of Jiminy Cricket trying to track down Mickey and his pals. These compilations were done pretty well, and were a great introduction to these classic shorts.

Watch the short after the jump.
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