Just caught some TTI on Antenna TV.  The episode had a Sparky cartoon where Yippy the pup grows into a giant dog.  This episode had some of the more egregious sequences of re-recorded dialog and ill-fitting music and sfx.  This included a rather long and tedious re-recording of dialog by Sparky's mother.  The new material was so awful and poorly done, not that there's a good way to do it.  I couldn't  discern what could have possibly been offensive about the original dialog, unless there was some dialect humor going on (oh the horror).  What is the story behind these edits?  They always seem so nonsensical, replacing loooong sequences of dialog and music with poor and cheap modern substitutes .  Surely the original audio wasn't actually lost or damaged, the Columbia cartoons are otherwise so pristine.  There's almost never any detectable reason for them, and they really are awful.  Oddly the Magoo cartoons and other UPA entries seem to go unaffected, unless I just haven't  noticed.  Its mostly the older Color Rhapsody cartoons that suffer.   

I know -- they're both so good. 

Perhaps it's just from having previously had easier access to Ward cartoons, but aside from the unassailable talents of June Foray, the voice cast of Ward's productions, while quite good, seems a bit repetitive after a while.  It may also be from having to provide so many incidental and character voices for non-recurring-character series like Fractured Fairy Tales and Aesop's Fables, which TTV didn't really provide an analogy to.  But in Fractured Flickers and later Ward series you continue to hear pretty much the same voices with little differentiation.  My favorite of the Ward bunch is probably Hans Conried.

Meanwhile, the new Underdog DVD set has me remembering how much I enjoy some of the voice talent from the TTV cartoons, especially Kenny Delmar and Allen Swift.  Simon Bar Sinister is probably my favorite, followed by Commander McBragg, but there are so many other fun voices in these series.  Which do you prefer, or what are some of your favorites (voices or actors)?  Do you think any contemporary cartoons come close to the level of voice talent on display in these old classics?

Anybody else get this set today?  I forgot it was even coming out, or maybe confused it with next year's UPA release.  This is the next in a series of Classic Media licensed releases by Shout. Anyway, unsurprisingly, edited/dubbed audio is apparently still an issue with this release.  It's expensive too, but there's a lot of material.  Still, for that price....