Yes, that's right, The Hobbit; the classic 1977 Rankin Bass animated film. It's released through East West Entertainment LLC found at www.eastwestdvd.com. (Their website isn't particularly user friendly or well developed.) This isn't a re-release of the more professionally produced works but their own recording of it. A little search on Amazon also reveals that some of the films they release are live action, such as The Pied Piper of Hamlin, even though the cover art may make it appear as an animated film.

I haven't watched through the movie yet, only sampled it to assure what version of the film it was. What I did find is that it appears almost as a TV recording in full-screen. Yet the image appears clear as if it came from a good source. It's possible that it was transferred from tape, though it could also have been tranferred from film or Laserdisk. It does appear as if it's been taken from another source as the beggining just jumps into the movie. (No studio titles.)

In order to find it I had to dig through a bunch of children's DVDs, a trick I discovered when searching for misfiled anime. The company has other titles out, but this appears to be one of the best. The only other title I saw of note was a Captain Harlock movie which I suspect was taken from the TV series.

The DVD is almost absent of extras, and doesn't even include the trailer (at least I haven't found one), but then again the more professional Warner Brothers' release doesn't appear to have one either. Yet for a dollar one can't expect too much. It's well worth the expense and effort of going to the store just to find this gem, although anyone particular about quality might prefer to buy the WB's release. Still, given that this film only cost a dollar, just about any watchable quality is acceptable.  It's definately a five out of five.

I thought that since I didn't have much to write since I'm often writing most of my ideas as comments in other blogs, that I would start a series of reviews of dollar store items. For the most part, everything I'll review costs a dollar. Prices are Canadian, though prices elsewhere should be similar, depending upon the local stores.

Amongst some of the more useful things I've found at dollar stores are voice input headphones and scan radios, but I've also found an interesting selection of foods and I'm constantly buying cd/dvd cases from there since I can get two or three for the price of one elsewhere.

The Electra CD/DVD Repair Kit gave me the idea for doing this review, mainly because it isn't a repair kit but a cleaning kit. There's nothing in it for actually repairing disks. It comes with a small packet of cleaning solution and four small dust-free cloths. The cloths are of decent quality, better than just tissue paper. The cleaning solution is a white soapy fluid suggesting that it could be nothing more than hand soap.

I tried it with about ten disks, which is about how long the fluid lasted. One was a prerecorded CD while the rest were homemade recordings.

According to the instructions, one spreads it on a disk and waits a few minutes before wiping it off. After applying the fluid, I used the cloths to remove it and even with some effort it still didn't clear the material completely. In comparison, I've been able to get a cleaner job with rubbing alcohol and (facial) tissue paper.

Out of the ten damaged disks, I wasn't able to retrieve anything that I could not retrieved before. This may have been mostly due to the fact that the damage was from (tiny) potmarks and not proper scratches for most of the disks.

Overall, the kit isn't what it claims nor worth the money. It's much cheaper to use rubbing alcohol and tissues. It does clean the disks and might be useful after initially scratching a disk or work well or a dirty disk, but so does rubbing alcohol, a small bottle of which can be had at a dollar store along with tissue paper for a total of two dollars. And a bottle of rubbing alcohol would last a lot longer than ten disks.

Granted that the damage I'm dealing with isn't quite what it's designed for, the kit still falls far short of providing any disk repair other than cleaning. Rating it out of five, I would give it a one.