Treasures from the Disney Vault, December 2018

Tonight brings another installment of the roughly quarterly series of Treasures from the Disney Vault to TCM. I don't know how much choice TCM gets in these selections, but at least this time out the movies seem to be well thought out thematically.

It's a sports theme, starting off with a a Goofy basketball short at 8:00 and perhaps the most well-known of the movies, The Absent-Minded Professor, which is also listed as being in the 8:00 slot, which I presume means that if you want to DVR them you're going to get both together.

Later in the night there's Kurt Russell taking steroids in The Strongest Man in the World at 2:00 AM. Well, not quite; it's "vitamins", but nowadays it would be considered a performance-enhancing drug by some people.

The last feature is Gus at 4:00 AM, about a field-goal kicking mule. Francis must have been unavailable since Disney didn't have his rights.

The one thing I notice is that there are none of the Herbie movies; I wonder if Disney thought those were too big to let out to a non-Disney channel. The other thing is that there are a couple of non-Disney shorts in between the features, notably Football Headliners, an RKO Sportscope that I think I've mentioned in the past about some of the big college football games of 1955. That comes on in between The Strongest Man in the World and Gus. There's another one about bowling just before The Strongest Man in the World that I think is a non-Disney, too.