Alfred Harvey started Harvey Comics in 1941, and by the 1950s, the small publishing company was producing a successful line of licensed comics featuring popular characters (Casper the Friendly Ghost, Little Audrey, Baby Huey, and others) from theatrical cartoons produced by Paramount, and Harvey’s own creations like Richie Rich.

In the late 50s, Harvey bought the rights to many of the Paramount cartoon characters and began packaging the theatrical shorts for television, where they became minor icons running alongside other weekday afternoon/Saturday morning fixtures like Looney Tunes, Tom & Jerry, Woody Woodpecker, Scooby Doo, and Popeye for decades.

Which brings us to the mistitled Harveytoons: The Complete Collection, a compact and problematic DVD set sure to embitter animation enthusiasts everywhere because of its lack of an index or table of contents, and its blatantly false adverstising. Harveytoons: The Complete Collection in fact does not contain every Harvetoon every made. What it does is compile on four double-sided discs every episode of “The Harveytoons Show,” a half-hour television program that repackaged the Harveytoons theatrical shorts and ran on the Fox Family Channel and Boomerang. In short, there are a lot of Harveytoons on the set (almost 20 hours worth), but not all of them.

So with all that mess out of the way, what about the cartoons themselves?

The good news is the shorts themselves look and sound wonderful. Somebody out there made a serious effort to carefully remaster everything and their hard work shows.

Content-wise, Harveytoons seem to hold kind of a strange position in classic American animation. Ostensibly made solely for small children, they’re completely inoffensive and just aren’t very funny. It’s not that they’ve aged poorly — they haven’t. It’s just one isn’t sure if big laffs are the kind of aesthetic the original creators were going for.

Sweet-natured, gentle, and light-hearted, Harveytoons make up for their dire lack of funnybone and edge with an exceptional attention to craft and an aptitude for being inventive and often mind-blowingly weird. I mean, Casper and Baby Huey are already bizarre just in concept alone, right? Although it appears one of Harvey Comics’ goals was to take monsters (ghosts, witches, devils) and render them utterly harmless. But that still doesn’t explain Baby Huey.

Anyway, what really stands out on this collection — and a decent reason for animation buffs to purchase the set — are the “Modern Madcaps,” slightly more experimental, one-off shorts with non-recurring characters that really show just how much clearly remarkable talent was floating around in American animation during the 1940s and 50s.

So, finally, what are we to make of this unevenly produced set? Incomplete…no index…no extras…no Richie Rich. Animation fans might want to hold out for a more exhaustive and historically minded collection. But if you’re a casual viewer looking for some interesting toonage, something good for the kids, or just simple nostalgia, you’ll enjoy yourself.

KFR Rating: B-

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