YMMV / Color Classics

• Audience-Alienating Era: These shorts have their fans, but along with the decline of Betty Boop, they are generally considered to be the start of a downward spiral for Fleischer Studios, and they are considered blatantly inferior to the pre Hays Office Fleischer cartoons, and as a blatant attempt to ape Disney's shorts, with all the habits that ensue.
• Even Better Sequel: "Small Fry" to "Educated Fish". Or at least more well-known.
• Fan Nickname: The blue streamline locomotive had no name, but many fans liked to call him "Montana".
• Growing the Beard:
  • Upgrading from two-strip Technicolor to three-strip brought out the three-dimensional sets, as highlighted in "Somewhere in Dreamland" and "Play Safe" (both from 1936).
  • Their animation remarkably improved by the end of the series run. Comparing the first Hunky and Spunky short to "A Kick in Time" highlights this upgrade.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Cobweb Hotel is often considered the scariest of the Fleischer Color Classics.
  • "BETTER PLAY SAFE!!"
  • The Disney Acid Sequence from Small Fry can be just as scary as the one from Dumbo, as a matter of fact it came out 2 years before Dumbo!
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The theme of "Cobweb Hotel" is a peculiar arrangement of the Popeye the Sailor theme with custom lyrics, and it's fittingly sung by Popeye's own voice actor, Jack Mercer.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Somewhere In Dreamland is this mixed with Heartwarming Moments.
  • "Christmas Comes But Once a Year" starts off with an orphanage on Christmas, where the children receive gifts that immediately fall apart irreperably upon their initial use, reducing each doe-eyed, ragged orphan to a sobbing wreck as they file back to their beds.
  • The poor flies crying for help as they struggle to free themselves from the web beds in "Cobweb Hotel".
  • "Hawaiian Birds" has the husband bird desperately searching for his wife after she runs off to be with The Singing Orioles in the freezing winter city. However she quickly gets left to freeze to death in the snow by the snobbish performer. Suffering from the guilt, she actually ties herself up and is Driven to Suicide attempting to jump off a building. She is only saved because she fell on her husband who she reconciles with.
• Values Dissonance: Though Color Classics holds up significantly better than many cartoons for the time there’s some standouts that have aged poorly.
  • "The Barnyard Brat" in particular has Hunky ultimately discipline Spunky's bratty behavior by spanking him and trying to beat him after she just defended him from an Angry Mob doing the same. Needless to say corporal punishment was frowned upon, even back in 1939.
  • "Dancing on the Moon" has two instances of animal brides being way too physically aggressive with their husbands.
    • The seal bride slapping the seal groom.
    • Right at the end, after the other wedded couples return to Earth, the cat groom gets walloped by his wife for not taking her with him to the moon, even if it wasn't his fault that she was left on Earth.
  • "Little Dutch Mill" briefly shows a Black Face shoeshiner.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Many of the three-strip shorts feature some fantastic set design, such as the food-themed dreamscape in "Somewhere in Dreamland".

---