Rolie Polie Olie, The Book of Pooh and Out of the Box are programs that are aired on the Disney Channel. For those of you who have never seen these shows, Rolie Polie Olie is a computer animated show that follows the adventures of a family of robots with Rolie Polie Olie as the son. The House of Pooh uses puppets of Pooh and all of his friends superimposed on a computer animated background. Out of the Box is a live action activity based show for preschoolers. This DVD is a collection of their Halloween episodes. The…e programs are mainly aimed at a pre-school level, so when it came to reviewing this disc I consulted an expert – I watched it with my 2 1/2 year old daughter.

There are three Rolie Polie Olie episodes that revolve around “Spookie Ookie,” a robot that lost his master remote which allowed him to go home to his pumpkin house. As a result of losing it, Spookie Ookie now haunts neighborhoods looking to take a young robot’s remote control so that he can go home. The first episode describes the origin of “Spookie Ookie” and how the parents use “pappy (grandfather)” to try and scare the kids dressing up as Spookie Ookie, until they discover that they see the real Spookie Ookie while pappy was sleeping. In the second episode Rolie builds a haunted maze to try and scare his sister but ends up getting scared himself when his sister turns the tables on him. The last episode features a dream sequence that Zoe (Rolie’s sister) has that involves her becoming “Queen of the pumpkins” and accompanies Spookie Ookie in his quest to find a super remote.

The next part of the disc features 3 House of Pooh episodes. The first episode follows the telling of scary Halloween stories and the preparation for the Halloween party in the Hundred Acre Wood. Eyore, in his usual depressed party-pooper style, leaves the gang to go a find a quiet place to sleep - in the “Scary Woods.” When Pooh and friends learn that Eyore has ventures to unsafe territory they form a search party and go look for him. The second featurette is about Piglet finding a “Bravehat” which grants him the ability to do brave things. I’m not quite sure what this has to do with Halloween, but OK. The third episode entitled “Scardey Cat” has Tigger house-sitting for Owl and becoming scared of sounds that he cannot identify. With the help of Rabbit and Piglet he is able to discover the origin of the sounds and masters his fears.

The Out of the Box episode teaches kids how to make safe Halloween costumes and how to make a Jack O’ Lantern with paper and crayons. They sing catchy jingles which preschoolers can pick up easily and sing.

Video

I watched Rolie Polie Olie on both my projection TV and on my 17” LCD Apple Cinema Display and noted really severe artifacting whenever there were swift camera movements or there was a lot going on in the scene. There was comparatively less artifacting in the static computer generated images in the Book of Pooh episodes. The colors were bright and vivid as was the sharpness of the image for the Pooh shows. Out of the Box similarly had a high quality image and displayed no bleeding of the very bright colors used to decorate the set. As can be expected, each show was presented in a 1.33:1 fullscreen format.

Audio

All three shows were encoded using Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround. The sound was adequate for TV broadcasts, although at times there was some sound drop-out for the Rolie Polie Olie shows. I’m not sure if something is lost in translating the source computer data to tape for TV broadcast and then translating back to data for DVD production, but this is something that I have noticed in other TV computer animated shows when transferred to DVD (ex. the first Alliance Releasing Beast Wars DVD’s released over the last 2 years – I haven’t seen the new boxed set yet to see if Rhino corrected it). One would think with the increasing popularity of the DVD medium and the increased production of computer animated shows that they would do direct transfers to DVD. Oh well, one can only hope.

Special Features

This Extras on this DVD are accessed when pointing to various Halloween related objects on the main menu. The extras include trailers for the DVD releases for the Lion King Special Edition (a lot of people have been waiting for this one!), Winnie the Pooh: Springtime with Roo, Winnie the Pooh: Halloween Collection, Stitch The Movie, Rolie Polie Olie: The Baby Bot Chase, and Disney’s Sing along Songs.Additional features include a workshop in which kids can custom design animated Jack O’ Lanterns by mixing various eye, nose and mouth combinations. The other workshop teaches kids how to make different Halloween crafts (like bats, spiders and witches) using paper and glue.

The menus are great! Completely interactive menus will have the kids entertained for quite a long time even before they start watching the shows. There is a voice over explaining how to use the menus which is very reminiscent of the voice heard in “Haunted Mansion” in Disney World/Land as you are in the elevator heading to the ride. Great stuff! Also the cursor quickly turns into a ghost that floats over the various options that you can choose. Once you’ve chosen an option, a witch flies across the screen cackling and taking you to the feature you have selected. These menus are quite clever and a lot better than most of the menus I’ve seen for major Hollywood releases.

Final thoughts

As an adult I can pick on the patchy video and sound drop outs for the Rolie Polie Olie shows and average sound but I’m not the one who’s going to be watching this repeatedly (well okay I like watching Rolie Polie Olie because I’m such a computer animation fan). What did my daughter think of it? Well, if you can get a 2 1/2 year old to sit quietly and do anything for more than 30 minutes, you’ve got yourself a winner! My daughter stood transfixed in awe watching the menus and smiled every time she saw the ghost appear. She then smiled even larger and said “ohhh…scary. ” When we selected the icon to watch Rolie Polie Olie she ran around the room and cackled with the witch. It was great! She watched all of the shows intently with the exception of the Pooh shows which were kind of tedious.

As a parent, if you’re looking for a little safe Halloween fun for your preschooler this is definitely up your alley.

Special Features List

• •Make Your Very Own Jack-0-Lantern
• •How To Make A Halloween Decoration
• •Fun, animated, kid-friendly menus
• More…