Fractured Flickers - The Complete Collection

I love Jay Ward's humor (cartoons) and Hans Conreid in general but this set of DVDs may strain your funny bone... It is drole & shall we say dated... Some sections are quite good albeit warped (as expected)... Others seem to struggle... I will say that Rocky & Bullwinkle DVD set is funnier than these DVDs...

By now everyone should be familiar with Fractured Flickers' gimmick of taking chunks of silent films and early talkies, mixing them up and adding their own dialog. Paul Frees and June Foray apply their amazing vocal talents to an array of loony characters like Lon Chaney Sr.'s Quasimodo, repurposed here as "Dinky Dunstan, Male Cheerleader". It has to be said, though, that the results can be a bit uneven at times, especially since they re-use quite a bit of footage. (Buster Keaton's "Steamboat Bill" seems to have been a particular favorite.) Jay Ward Productions was clearly trying for an edgier, more contemporary and adult-oriented brand of humor with this series, so it hasn't aged quite as well as, say, Rocky and Bullwinkle. For instance, the not-too-subtle digs at Walt Disney and the occasional political reference, as well as slang like "Ulcer Gulch" for Madison Avenue, will likely go over a lot of post-Baby Boomer viewers' heads. If you're a classic film geek, though, you can also have fun identifying the source material, everything from the von Stroheim vehicle "The Great Gabbo" to a Stan Laurel solo parody of John Barrymore's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" to 1918's "Tarzan of the Apes", starring the rather well-fed Elmo Lincoln in the title role. Another signature of the series is its self-deprecating humor, much of it provided by its host, Hans "Snidely Whiplash" Conried, who also does a short guest interview each show from a roster of celebrities as diverse as Bob Denver and Gypsy Rose Lee. (Plus the absolutely stunning Barbara Eden.) Even if I can't quite give it 5 stars, overall this collection is well worth having.

After many years, it was great to rediscover Fractured Flickers. If you've forgotten, it's as if the gang from Rocky and Bullwinkle gave life to silent pictures. That is, their own version of life. Your host, Hans Conreid, constantly pokes fun at FF, it's ratings, it's quality and it's revealing. In exposing their production process (and complaining about it), he explains why they seemingly use the same clips over and over again. Explains why it became redundant. I kinda think that if the R&B guys had more material to work with, it would have lasted more than a year. Everything else they touched was gold. This only lasted a year.

This show was an original idea, to take old movies and ham up the language to make them funny and wacky. This whole show was played to the max to be hokey. It aired in the 1960s (those of you under 45 may not want to apply) and seeing it now on DVD includes a bit of nostalgia to watch these shows again. These shows were played for laughs, with Hans Conreid, the host, doing the most along this line to play along. To explain the theme of this show, they took old movies and with a lot of effort created wacky dialogue to "update" the silents and make a plot (?) out of them on a completely different thesis than the silent movie once showed. I have no idea how they found so many old movies to "improve", but it was amusing then (in the 60's, when this show aired) to watch this and it is now too. If you like Rocky and Bullwinkle, you'll like this show from essentially the same group of, uh, artisans(?). It's not Seinfeld-style humor, nor stand-up comic humor, instead this is a sort of very hokey, consciously self-pretentious, over-done sort of humor that makes you laugh as much at their silliness as at their puns and at their frankly funny adaptations of old movies into absurdities with the dubbed dialogue. It's an interesting combination of old silent movies and the added-on dialogue. Not for everyone, great for some of us.

As Hans Conreid would say, "If you really want to watch great television, why are you looking at this show?"An absolute blast from my childhood past and something that over 50 years later ( or maybe more) wanted to see again in my dottage.Even though it's a pleasure watching again at last, must admit that as the episodes go on, the amusement is getting low as a lot of footage is used over and over again. Of course screening it weekly would make a difference but daily?Anyway, Hans is a pleasure to watch and I'd had completely forgotten about his guest star interviews. There are only 26 episodes are about 25mins long and feature the voices of the late great June Foray and Paul Frees.Glorious black and white and filmed, maybe on 35mm (or at least 16mm) and the quality is quite good.

I'm afraid this didn't age well for me, thus the 4 stars. My favorite flicker was "Do Me a Flavor" which was based on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It was just soooo stupid to hear Dudley Dooright's voice coming out of John Barrymore. The best part of this set is the inclusion of the brief celebrity interviews which were undoubtedly cut out of the syndicated versions I saw in the mid 1970s. Because each episode is labeled by celebrity, it makes it tough to find specific flickers, but various websites help on that.

This series from the early 60's is another winner from Jay Ward of Rocky and Bullwinkle fame. which should give you an idea of the fun you'll be in store for. The whole family will enjoy the silly dialogue mated to the silent era movie clips. Watch for Stan Laurel as Sherman Oaks in the Minute Mysteries.

If you loved silent movies and always wondered what more you could get out of them buy this little beauty and let the fertile imagination and schtick of the great Jay Ward work you over! The show only ran one season on TV but I feel that I speak for all the weirdos who fell in love with it first sight. It is not only the off-beat dubbings of the movies that Ward inflicts on you but it teams so nicely with the hosting style of the great Hans Conreid (whose voice-overs are featured in many Ward shows). The combination is wonderful and the guests on the shows are the very who's who of the early Sixties.

I remember seeing Fractured Flickers on TV when I was a kid in the 60's, and loving it. They take old silent movies and add funny dialogue to create a new plot line. Some of them are hilarious, others kind of struggle. In between those spots, Hans Conreid conducts funny interviews with some of the stars of the day. Probably those bits won't mean much to anyone born in the 60's or later, except as a time capsule of sorts. I got this for my 14 year old son, and he likes it, so the concept holds up. And film buffs will really enjoy it.

excellent brought back some good memories