Fractured Flickers - The Complete Collection

For years, this little Jay Ward series was at the edge of my consciousness and attention -- ever since I was a little kid in the early 60s. After purchasing and viewing the 3-DVD set from Amazon, it is apparent now what priceless humor this is. I Love it!The bottom line is its subversive purpose is to satirize authority. Paul Frees, June Foray and Bill Scott achieve an hilarious voiceover chemistry that I don't think will ever be equaled. And Hans Conried, whom I always liked very much, is the perfect host, self-deprecating of himself and the show at every turn, even begging for donations and joking about the show's legal problems and "poor ratings".Skit after skit takes the form of some kind of official announcement about health, or politics, or how to behave properly. The writers coupled with the colorful voiceovers -- exploring a whole plethora of amazing accents and voices -- is dead ON TARGET. If you're a Paul Frees fan, you'll be in heaven, as the show is almost wall-to-wall Paul Frees. Bill Scott is also very, very woonerful!The opening titles and the music theme are also amazing, playing games with classic Hollywood tropes. All-in-all, delicious entertainment that I can watch and repeat night after night.

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.

Loved going down memory lane watching them . Goofy offbeat cartoons .

This product is not for everybody. Many of the bits will not be perceived as humorous unless one possesses the necessary political or cultural history background that supports the punch-lines. Fractured Flickers will appeal to history buffs. The old films represent a wide variety of genres from dramatic to documentary. There is much detail to be gleaned from the films. The guest interviews are also most interesting and humorous. The guests are all familiar faces to anyone who lived in the 1960's or before. An interesting program could be created from these historical interviews alone. Finally there is Hans Conried and the Jay Ward production crew and their values surrounding the entire production. It seems to me that anyone who enjoys Rocky and Bullwinkle will also enjoy Fractured Flickers, but I know that some people today do have problems when viewing black-and-white. I'm loving it.

I got just what I wanted so far as I'm viewing the first DVD. I now have it ALL! Those silent film are amazing by themselves and the voice overs are hilarious to my somewhat 'easy to please,needs' with this great look back. Yeah, what I thought was funny back in the Rocky/Bullwinkle days is Still funny for me. Hans Conried and June Foray (age 97) have an amazing list of accomplishments as per their Wiki's. Three DVD's in one. 676 min. 26 episodes. This has been around for 2009, released in 1963 (says so on the back) The right price for my budget.MB

Jay Ward, the genius who released Boris and Natasha onto an unsuspecting world, took 1920s "silents", added early 1960s dialogue, had Danny Thomas's "Uncle Tonoose" deadpan his way through interviews and introductions, and created one of the most underestimated comedy shows in TV history. I enjoyed the flicker about Peter Lorre trying to quit smoking (and the response of the "Mad Men" of that error, that should be era!) and the "Believe It or Don't!" routines (sendups of Ripley's work). Buy this wacky DVD and share it with friends, whether they're Rocky or not!