It’s time for more DVD adventures with Strawberry Shortcake and her friends, both old and new, in Strawberry Shortcake: Campberry Stories, another collection of three sequential episodes which could have just as easily been released as a single hour-long movie.
The DVD contains episodes five through seven of season four of the Strawberry Shortcake’s Berry Bitty Adventures animated TV series:
- “Tall Tale Trio” – Season 4, Episode 5
Strawberry and her friends (newcomers Sweet, Sour and Apple included) decide to go on a campout. However, when Orange, Plum and Cherry arrive late to the campout, they kick off the group’s annual tradition of telling tall-tales by the campfire, coming up with more and more outlandish accounts of what had caused them to be late and to have lost some of the food. - “Berry Big Tale-Teller” – Season 4, Episode 6
Sour steals the spotlight as she regales the others with an outrageous and constantly over-the-top tale of her and her sister’s adventures in the “Berry Deep Dark Forest”. Sweet starts to get frustrated that her sister won’t really include her in the story-telling, but eventually Sour realizes and lets her sister participate as well. - “The Berry Bitty Great Race” – Season 4, Episode 7
Likely the most humorous of the three episodes, this one sees Apple Dumplin recounting a wondrous and seemingly far-fetched tale of adventure complete with trio of enemies determined to keep her from winning. However little do the others know but Apple’s story may just be true after all.
What’s Included:
Episodes:
-
DVD:
- 480p Anamorphic Widescreen 1.78:1
- Audio: English Surround Dolby Digital 2.0, Spanish Surround Dolby Digital 2.0
- 3 episodes of the series (66 min)
“Tall Tale Trio”, “Berry Big Tale-Teller”, “The Berry Bitty Great Race” - English SDH, Spanish subtitles
- Closed Captioned
- Redeemable via iTunes, UltraViolet, Popcornflix or Google Play (Redemption Deadline 6/7/2019)
Digital Copy:
Extras:
- Printable Coloring Pages + Maze
- Strawberry Shortcake: Sweet Sunshine Adventures Montage (0:54)
- Season 4 Sneak Peek Montage (1:11)
- Best of Strawberry Shortcake Montage (0:48)
- Best of Sweet & Sour Grapes Montage (0:58)
- Strawberry Shortcake & Friends (Sweet & Sour Grapes, Blueberry Muffin and Lemon Meringue) (1:48)
Final Thoughts:
Despite my older daughter Emily turning 9 a couple of months back, it seems that Strawberry Shortcake somehow still has the ability to capture her attention away from her iDevice for an hour. My younger daughter Claire arrived home a few minutes late to our viewing, but as soon as she walked in the door and saw what we were watching, she immediately sat down on the couch and her eyes didn’t leave the TV as she laughed and giggled at these new, humorous adventures of Strawberry Shortcake and her friends.
The girls loved the new characters which we saw for the first time in this collection—twins Sweet and Sour Grapes (who were introduced at the start of Season 4 of the series, but we haven’t seen that episode) and Apple Dumplin, who we first got a glimpse of in one of the bonus features on the Strawberry Shortcake: Sweet Sunshine Adventures DVD.
Sour Grapes was especially popular with Emily and as soon as she heard Sour’s sister, Sweet Grapes, talk, Emily exclaimed “Hey, That’s Fluttershy!” I’m not sure how we never noticed before, but quite a few of the same voice actors who work on My Little Pony : Friendship Is Magic, also do voices for this series as well. In fact, as soon as Plum Pudding put on a fake Southern accent, we all immediately recognized Apple Jack’s voice!
Both girls really enjoyed the silly nature of these episodes which involved the cast making up outrageous and often giggle-inducing, far-fetched stories. They seem to enjoy these collections of episodes where they flow directly into one another giving the feel of one long feature instead of a disjointed set of seemingly-random episodes.
I’ve mentioned it before in these reviews, but it’s worth repeating…we’d really love to see a way (perhaps via the Play All button) to have it skip the opening credits for the second and third episodes and just play the content of each episode as if it were one movie instead of three sequentially-played episodes.
Once again, the picture quality of both the digital copy as well as the DVD are phenomenally good and are so crisp and artifact-free that it looks as good as a Blu-ray. The audio is clear and dialog is easy to hear and understand.
As a parent, one of the most useful new features is the addition of autoplay, which will immediately start up the main show about 10 seconds after the main menu appears. This will be particularly great for viewings in the car.
The extras were fairly decent with three printable coloring pages and a printable maze (all in PDF format), though I wish these were available via the web as I had to find and hook up an external drive to my MacBook just to access them.
There was a short 54-second montage of scenes from Strawberry Shortcake: Sweet Sunshine Adventures that is set to music. There are also several additional montages for “A Sneak Peek at Season 4”, “The Best of Strawberry Shortcake” and “The Best of Sweet & Sour Grapes”, all of which are set to an instrumental version of Cherry Jam’s “Anything Is Possible” song.
Finally there are several short featurettes on Sweet & Sour Grapes, Blueberry Muffin and Lemon Meringue which are were brief, but fun.
The included digital copy is redeemable for either iTunes, UltraViolet and a couple of other services as well.
Strawberry Shortcake: Campberry Tales offers up a single silly imaginative story broken up into three parts. With the amount of giggles I heard in just our first viewing, this one is sure to see more plays and is headed to the car for those long Summer road trips.
