As I've said before, the 80s series went through a few different incarnations itself during its eight-year run: the first five seasons were produced by Ruby-Spears and were some of the better episodes, IMO... granted, the animation improved over that time, but it's clear more effort was put into the overall animation during these seasons, more detail was added into the backgrounds and layouts, the music score was enjoyable, and the stories were stronger. The character designs took a while to get worked out though.
I liked how the Ruby Spears episodes contained voice actors that were on other RS shows at the time... Peter Cullen, for example. Plus, I just really like the background music the RS series had. Every series after had some very 90's synth music to it, but the RS ones sounded orchestrated. And I like their background music in general... check out this opening to their Plastic Man cartoon.
I swear, I just got the DVD of that series... can't put it down.
The first half of Season Six was produced by Fred Wolf Films, and were pretty decent (I know Drtooth hates that "Cadet's Regrets" episode though), the overall animation was pretty good, but the layouts and design were more simplistic, and the voice cast was reduced to Ross and Janice and their associate producer who did terrible voices, and the music score was rather annoying. The rest of the episodes were produced by DiC and were not very good: lots of off-model, inconsistent animation, further cheapening of the series, lot more simplistic designs and layouts, more annoying music score, etc. And the stories were pretty weak by that point too.
I can't remember if I did indeed hate Cadets Regrets (I probably mentuioned that a while back) but I HATED the fact the episode skipped on my DVD player and I had to return it. Now that I recall, I don't think it was even worth bothering, and I wish they just had 2 more RS episodes.
I did also buy SOME of the compilation DVD (namely The ALVINNN!!! Edition, The Best of The Chipettes, and the holiday specials), but I REALLY wish Bagdasarian Productions would release season sets on DVD already, even if they have to replace songs (which is tolerable), because they literally have been re-releasing the exact same compilations over and over and over again for years.
I kinda would more want the 50's series. I'm sure someone has good enough quality masters if they look hard enough. If nothing else, I wanna see those great Clyde Crashcup cartoons again. He's such an underrated character that only got respect in the modern era via Back to Alvin's Future. They even CUT his entire scene when they broadcast the Christmas special.
But the maddening thing is this.. they're not
just re-releasing the same compilations that were already out for years. They're re-releasing the same compilations that were already out for years
with one maddening unreleased episode per disk! Meaning if you bought them all, you'd have to double dip for
one episode! Thankfully all I have is the Christmas one and the ALLLVVVIIIINNN thing, but I still have no real desire to spend 10 bucks on 3 half hours at most.