March On, America!

Here's one of the patriotic, propagandistic color shorts that were a long-term feature of Warner Brothers productions, and which reached their peak in the 1940s, with World War Two on. Unfortunately this one doesn't hang together too well, in no small part because in trying to offer more than three hundred years of history in two reels, Carleton Young talks so fast that it turns into a flooding river of "Manifest Destiny" mush with a mention of the Kellys and Moskowitzes in the Massachusetts colony.

There are also technical issues in its editing: because it uses clips from eight earlier Warner Brothers Technicolor shorts, there's quite a large variation in the Technicolor prints. Technicolor was a flexible system, by which color values, both of hue and saturation could be minutely controlled. That meant that if different standards were used in different movies -- and they were -- that results here in sharp, distracting changes in tint from one frame to the next.

In the end, this is a cheap effort to monetize old material by reworking it into new form. Its value largely consists of adding a movie to the many in which Sidney Blackmer plays Teddy Roosevelt.