The Spike & Mike animation festival has gained parallel reputations over the years—first as a forum for innovative animators (such as Tim Burton, Nick Park, and even John Lasseter) to show off their short wares, and second as an adults-only showcase for the rudest, most vile animated flicks in creation. If you attend a "classic" Spike & Mike Animation Festival, you're in for some cartoon fun for the whole family. But if you go to one of their Sick & Twisted showcases, you might consider stuffing a barf bag into your back pocket.

This DVD contains a "classic" Spike & Mike showcase, featuring 14 short films that have seemingly been randomly selected from past theatrical showings. The selection is a bit puzzling: I certainly wouldn't call these shorts representative of the best the festival has offered in its history—there are some genuine stinkers here. At the same time, there are a few gems. There are films that are a year old and films that are decades old. This is a very mixed bag. The presentation also seems awfully short and, in the end, unsatisfying. Here is a rundown of the disc's contents:

Bambi Meets Godzilla—This is the classic black-and-white amateur short that actually helped spark the Spike & Mike phenomenon.

Ah, Pook Is Here—Based on the recorded works of William S. Burroughs, this extremely weird little stop-motion piece is very nicely done.

Fruhling—This visually interesting stop-motion short has chairs and pea pods dancing to Vivaldi.

Monkey vs. Robot—A supremely annoying cartoon.

Slim Pickings—This amusing claymation ends on a surprisingly downbeat note.

Tightrope—This recent computer animation finds two circus jesters facing off on a seemingly endless tightrope. I was impressed by the characters' fluid movements and facial expressions.

Chicken Coup—This traditional animation is mildly humorous, revealing the consequences of a hen mating with a fish.

Nose Hair—The always reliable Bill Plympton comes up with a stream-of-consciousness narrative that springs from the titular hair. I love this guy's hilarious pencil-sketch style.

Graveyard Jamboree—This combination of stop-motion, rod puppets, and silhouette animation has a nice weird feel but ends up being not much more than puppets bouncing to music.

Bsss—This nice-looking little piece has a fly studying a drawing of an elephant.

Barflies—Here's a rather gross model-animation short involving belching and barfing flies.

The Queen's Monastery—This serious little film seems to be inspired by the art of Ralph Steadman. There's a message about tragedy and memory that seems pretty heavy for a cartoon.

Panther—This is a rich-looking appreciation of the panther, inspired by a Rilke poem, but it seems oddly out of place here.

Son of Bambi Meets Godzilla—This lousy-looking, very early stab at CGI is irritating and silly.

HOW'S IT LOOK?

Slingshot Entertainment presents this Spike & Mike festival in its original fullframe 1.33:1 aspect ratio. The image quality is all over the map. Some shorts, like Panther, seem to hide image flaws with constantly flowing imagery and dark color palettes. Shorts that have static images, like Chicken Coup, show severe shimmering and artifacting. Even films that should look terrific, like Tightrope, suffer from softness and lack of detail, and I'm afraid this is a more accurate representation of the entire disc. In short, this is an unimpressive transfer, but animation is kind to even the worst efforts.

This Dolby Digital 2.0 track is generally serviceable, but some of the films (such as Fruhling) seem to have been recorded at too-high levels, producing distortion. Strangely, there's one brief moment—the "Hear Andy Belch" feature accompanying Barflies—when the soundtrack defaults to full surround, to startling and gross effect.

WHAT ELSE IS THERE?

The first thing you'll notice when you plunk in the DVD is a minute-long pre-menu introduction that you can't skip past. That will certainly get tiring after the first couple times. Another irritation is that the chapter insert shows the films out of order.

The DVD's first feature is called Scotty the Shredding Dog, a red icon in the shape of a terrier that appears during some of the features, letting you instantly access bonus footage such as storyboards and work-in-progress effects. You can also view a short live-action piece of the real-life inspiration for this feature—a balloon-popping terrier that Spike & Mike would put on stage before theatrical showings.

The disc's most interesting feature, though, is the ability to access separate bonus-feature menus for most of the individual films (all but Chicken Coup, Panther, Bsss, and Fruhling). Here's a rundown of the notable special features you can access from these menus:

Ah, Pook Is Here—an illuminating director's commentary and a funny "How boring is the stop-motion animation process" featurette.

Tightrope—An 11-minute technical making-of piece that examines the computer-animation process, featuring interviews with the director and animators.

Graveyard Jamboree—An informative commentary from the directors.

Barflies—A "Hear Andy Belch" clip in full surround sound that will envelop you in burps.

Son of Bambi Meets Godzilla—A ridiculous and embarrassing trailer.

Having been to many Spike & Mike shows, I'm accustomed to a potpourri of animation, both excellent and weak. Still, I'm disappointed that this foray into the DVD medium isn't a more carefully selected batch of animation. This DVD should have been twice as long and twice as entertaining.