Blog Talkback: Revisiting Childhood: "Scamper the Penguin"

I used to watch this a lot as a kid and never knew it was originally in Russian. I remember my brother suspecting it was entirely a Japanese production, but I was never convinced as there was hardly anything "anime-like" about it.

The father penguin's disappearance mystified me a little back then, but now knowing that he dies in the uncut version clears things up.
A re-release on DVD would be nice, if it's the uncut version. I don't think I could ever revisit the US cut again with all those cheesy songs and narration.
 
I had this on VHS as a kid back when my mom subscribed to Feature Films For Families but I think I only managed to watch it once, or maybe twice, but I do remember liking it. Now I feel the urge to see if it's in my mountain of VHS tapes and rewatch it.
 
It's cool that other people are aware of and have seen this film. It certainly brought me back watching it; even though I never watched it as much as, say, "Aladdin", I do remember many scenes from "Scamper" years later.

If this blog post proves popular, I may consider writing more "Revisiting Childhood" entries: "Scruffy", "Samson & Sally", "McGee and Me", "Willy the Sparrow", and "The Butter Battle Book" are just a few I have in mind.
 
That's a very interesting blog, Speedy Boris! Maybe you should do some more childhood movies as well, like Hungary's The Seventh Brother and Vuk, which the latter was titled The Little Fox for a good reason. You can search both of these movies on youtube.
 
Scamper was one of my favorite movies when I was a kid. I first saw it in school, then constantly begged my parents to rent it every time we went to Blockbuster.:p

Haven't seen it in at least ten years, now, but this review sure brought back memories. I'll have to try and track down the DVD for my little brother and sister one of these days.

Also, I'd definitely read a Samson and Sally review. I must've watched that fifty or sixty times as a kid, but my VHS copy finally gave out two or three years back.

Another reccomendation would be Serendipity, the PInk Dragon. My mom actually resorted to hiding my copy of this one when I was about five years old, to keep from having to watch it again. I dug it back out for my sister about a year ago, and it actually still holds up pretty well.
 
I appreciate the recommendations on what else to review, but I never watched The Seventh Brother, The Little Fox, and Serendipity back then, so it wouldn't work to review them in a "revisiting" context, in the sense of revisiting something I watched as a kid and seeing how it holds up.

It's always possible to review them if watching them for the first time, though. I recently watched the 1982 film "Heidi's Song" (mainly to spot WB veteran Manny Perez's animation and see if it shared any similarities to Robert Taylor's earlier directorial effort, "Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat"), which I never watched as a kid, so never say never.
 
Ha! No, that was unintentional. I haven't watched An American Tail in years. Though because of that, that could be another title "eligible" for review. Same goes for another Bluth movie, The Land Before Time.
 
^ Never saw An American Tail, but the original Land Before Time was another one that I watched religiously when I was about five or six. Haven't seen it in quite a while, though.
 
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