Walt Disney Treasures Collection

This week, I explained the Criterion Collection to some people I know online. Fortunately, I didn’t have to overcome the initial hurdle of “why would I want physical media?” That’s a whole other argument. One I can have, but one that wasn’t what we were talking about at the time. I mentioned that the Collection crosses studio lines and that there’s a single Pixar entry into it, the only Disney-associated film in it. The frustrating part is that Disney had their own quasi-Criterion, and then they decided that it wasn’t worth sticking around.

In 2000, Leonard Maltin and Dick Cook became friends. Maltin convinced Cook that the best way to release the studio’s cartoons was in a controlled fashion in curated sets. These would be two-disc sets sold in fancy commemorative tins, sometimes with interesting inserts—stills from the set, for example, and the Zorro ones came with pins. The very first one was Mickey Mouse in Living Color, which featured the Mickey Mouse shorts from 1935-1938, plus bonus features such as pencil tests and shorts made for the Academy Awards and the 1939 World’s Fair.

While the collection included sets about the Big Three, of course, the first wave also included what was essentially a best of the Silly Symphonies collection, a set of episodes of the Disneyland TV series about the park, and the complete Davy Crockett series. These, too, included special features. You could look at posters of Disneyland attractions, watch an interview with Richard M. Sherman by Leonard Maltin, or listen to Fess Parker sing “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.” Not quite Criterion-level special features, but still very much aimed at collectors as well as ordinary viewers.

Eight more waves would follow. The Complete Goofy would come in the second wave, The Chronological Donald in the third, and The Complete Pluto in the fourth—with both of the latter in multiple volumes. The Adventures of Oswald, the Lucky Rabbit would come in the seventh wave, after Disney regained the rights, and many of the Alice shorts were in the fifth-wave Disney Rarities set. There would be sets about Annette Funicello, Spin and Marty, and of course the two-part release of the entire Zorro series.

While the “Three Little Pigs” release in the first wave would include the remade—and no longer antisemitic—animation and the redubbed audio, thereafter, Maltin would preface the sets with explanations of the stereotyped content. I haven’t seen it yet, but no doubt the On the Front Lines collection includes serious explanation. Maltin’s insistence on pointing out how some of the content was Not Great led the way for the kinds of warnings put in front of bigoted content to this day. He responded to for example racist caricatures with statements that they weren’t okay but were a thing people did anyway.

Again, not quite Criterion-level. You don’t get the essays. About the only film scholar involved was Maltin himself. No commentary tracks on much of any of the sets. I love my Zorro sets—of course I have both of them, presents from my also-beloved partner—but they barely have any special features at all beyond episodes that aired outside the normal series. But they are, let’s be clear, among the best releases Disney has ever done. There were a few movies released on DVD in the Vault Disney collection, and those are the only things truly comparable. Arguably those were even better; if you ever have the chance to listen to the Vault Disney Old Yeller commentary track, do yourself the favour.

That said, some of these sets are clearly aimed at a different audience than Disney tends to focus on. The very existence of the On the Front Lines collection, for example. And it’s not just “Commando Duck” or similar. This is shorts I will definitely have to get to at some point like “The Grain That Built a Hemisphere,” a short about the importance of corn. While I might have watched the pro-vaccination short “Defense Against Invasion” for kicks as a kid, even I can’t say for sure that I would have, and most people absolutely would not.

One of the things I’ve been saying for years is that there is some deeply fascinating stuff in the Vault that needs to be released. I know people who definitely want the Wave Eight Dr. Syn: The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh set, and frankly the reason I never even put the Swamp Fox/Elfego Baca set on my list was that I discovered it was only a few episodes of each and not the full series. I’d love more sets of the educational stuff and more of episodes of the assorted Disneyland and Wonderful World of Disney programming.

But I’m not getting that. Dick Cook left Disney. And there went the product line. Disney barely does physical media anymore, and certainly they don’t do high-end releases of this kind. So sure, you can get a 4K Steelbook edition of Hoppers with some decent special features. I grant you most people don’t want to shell out nearly fifty bucks for that. However, most results for an Amazon search of “Disney DVD” are movie-only. It’s trivially easy to include shorts or karaoke tracks or similar, and I can’t imagine you’d charge more than the ten or fifteen bucks they already charge.

It’s deeply frustrating. I know Disney’s a corporation, but I do wish they felt more of an obligation to their own history. I’ve said this many times as well. And this could be a business decision. While I do like the fancy tins and so forth, I suppose they aren’t technically necessary. You could do a print-on-demand system like the old Warners Archive. Or you could really hype it up the way the Criterion Collection is. Make it a product film buffs would simp for, and not just film buffs like me. Hype it. Put it into a collection on Disney+. People would run with it, and it would make the company money.