Cartoons That Time Forgot - V. 2 - Down & Out With Flip the Frog (DVD, 1999)

Ub Iwerks was the master animator for Disney in his early years. Walt in appreciation actually paid Ub more than himself for a time. Ub left for awhile to set up his own studio, but later returned to be Walt's technical artist for many years. In this collection one sees that Ub was both artist and innovator ahead of others during this period. He didn't have Disney's ability to stay solvent, and Ub, the man behind Mickey Mouse, couldn't quite come up with a winning character for himself. His own dissatisfaction is shown by changes in Flip the Frog with almost every cartoon, until he emerges finally as a sort of weird ugly child. Willy Whopper's spherical body progressively becomes more normal. This is the period just before the Hayes office of censorship and like Max Fleischer's Betty Boop some of the material is a bit raunchy. Lots of deplorable stereotyping too. All in all a great DVD, as is the Volume 1.