October 4th, 2009 
rberry 
Come on…how come they have sets like Gimme A Break Season 3 but not this wonderful perfectly awesome show? What’s the hold up, WB? The theme song is awesome, the cartoons were fantastic, and the music numbers were out of this world great! When I hear that they’re jerking around considering releasing garbage that nobody wants like “Big John Little John” and shelving true quality like this, it just blows my mind. They released a set in the UK…why don’t us Americans get to see our own damn shows???
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The Banana Splits are on daily (or eveningly) on Boomerang at 5:30 pm EST. (I live in NJ and get Cablevision – it’s channel 125.)
I’d even take a DVD of the full “Danger Island” from beginning to end, with hte Skeleton Men, Jan Michael Vincent, and that wild professors daughter. UH OH CHANGO!
This show would have seen a US release a couple of years ago but was cancelled when it was decided the master materials for the shows were in too poor shape and there wasn’t enough money in WB’s budget to restore them. Unfortunately, the UK DVD set is just the half-hour edited syndicated shows. The cartoons and “Danger Island” are all there, but a couple of Banana Splits segments are missing from each show. The good news is that at least some version of the first episode is going to be included on the upcoming “Saturday Morning Cartoons: The 70s Vol. 2″ set (even though this show is actually from the 1960s), due out in the US from Warner Bros. on October 27. (It remains to be seen whether or not it will be the complete show as originally aired.) If you really want the UK release, it’s not too hard to find a multi-region DVD player (or one that can be modified as such). It’s a fairly good deal and all the half-hour versions as aired on Boomerang are there — but again, these are not the complete shows.
The “Cliffs Notes” version of the issue is that the original one-hour shows were cut into half-hours for syndication many years ago. Warner Bros. has one-inch video versions of the 18 one-hour shows from Season 1 (but they apparently do not have the 13 Season 2 shows in complete form). The one-inch video masters were copied from 2-inch Quad (which no longer exists) in the late 1980s. When those transfers were done, the four video heads were not fully in alignment so there are some “color banding” issues with the transfers and they were not considered good enough for DVD release. They do have most of the segments from the show in 35mm film (the remastered shows on Boomerang were made from those) including at least some of Season 2 — the second season shows might as well be considered “lost” since they have not been available since the show originally went off the air in 1970. But anyway — presumably Warner’s UK division just grabbed the Boomerang half-hours off the shelf, since they look and sound good and were pretty much ready to go. What I’d like to see them do is to release the one-hour originals through Warner Archive. That way, maybe it won’t matter as much that they aren’t in pristine condition. We shall see.
בלו ביי – קונים מוכרים – מכירות פומביות, מכירות רגילות, לוחות ובארטרים…
Before we add in our input video files, you might notice that there are actually two“ Add” buttons here. Well, the top“ Add” button, with the movie reel icon, is for adding what EasyDVD refers to as“ Movies”. The bottom“ Add” button with the film strip…