Product description This video features two animated adventure stories one featuring the legendary mythical hero Hercules and another on the life of Native American woman Pocahontas. This program is not to be confused with either of the recent animated features from Disney featuring these characters or the live-action television series Young Hercules. .com These films epitomize the bargain-basement schlock that gives cartoons and children's entertainment a bad name. When Hercules is assigned a mere four labors as punishment for recklessly hurling thunderbolts, he's joined by Falina, a princess who's been turned into a sable. She tries to be comic but is merely obnoxious. Hercules defeats the Stymphalian birds, which are drawn as robots, and the Hydra, a clumsy three-headed dragon. He also tangles with a Gorgon (borrowed from the legend of Perseus) and goes after some golden apples. The result is a pointless bore, despite the ham- handed moralizing at the end. Pocahontas fares no better. A conventional Indian girl, she wants to befriend a very silly John Smith, but the nasty medicine man insists all outsiders are evil. The songs by Megan Cavallari and David Goldsmith barely qualify as doggerel: "Look out, strangers, for the Medicine Man / I'm on the warpath and I have a plan." In both films, the animation veers between painfully inept and unintentionally comic. This DVD offers parents an effective new tool for curbing their kids' media intake: given the choice between watching it or no TV at all, most kids will opt for the latter. --Charles Solomon
J**D
Charles Solomon underestimates the awfulness
As one of the titular writers of this DVD, I must take exception to the Editorial Review of Charles Solomon, who wrote "These films epitomize the bargain-basement schlock that gives cartoons and children's entertainment a bad name."I do not believe these cartoons give children's entertainment a bad name. Rather, they call into question the very definition of "entertainment" if the term can be so loosely applied. They are, I would say, something more akin to "child abuse" than "children's entertainment." How any child could watch these cartoons--and we know they watch them over and over--without his/her brain resolving into a viscous gray sludge is beyond me.These cartoons were quickly excreted to take advantage of Disney's far-superior offerings, Hercules and Pocahontas. Their perceived market was confused parents who, seeing what they thought was a bargain or perhaps a pricing error by a careless clerk, would pick this DVD up by mistake. Really. And what a mistake it would be!Of course, as one of the writers, I am prejudiced. What parent finds their own children anything but beautiful? Well, in this case, even I have to admit that what we have here are two babies of such hideous aspect that, if they were abandoned, orphanages would leave them on the doorsteps of other orphanages. Gypsies would recoil in horror. Wolves would refuse to devour them.They are, in fact, a vile abomination upon the face of the earth.If you buy them by accident, remember that Amazon has a generous return policy.
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