I saw this film on the DVD entitled "Cartoon Crazys: And The Envelope Please". This is a rather poor compilation of supposedly award winning and nominated films. Poor because several of the films are very lame and are NOT award nominated, the prints are rather bad and parts of some of the cartoons are missing! While all of SUMMERTIME appears to be included on the DVD, it was never an award-nominated film.
As for SUMMERTIME, it's a very, very typical film for 1935. Throughout the 30s, the cartoons were generally quite lame knockoffs of Disney's so-called "Silly Symphonies" and I don't think they're very watchable today. There are of course many wonderful exceptions, but the average film of the era featured cute singing characters and very few laughs. It's a typical Ub Iwerks cartoon in his post-Disney career and it lacks the spark of the early Mickey Mouse films or the Silly Symphony films. Now it does have decent Two-Color Technicolor and good animation when most cartoons that year were black and white. The music is very good as well. But too much singing and cuteness doom this one to be seen only in public-domain collections, as I can't see anyone wanting to renew the copyright for this drivel.
My score of 6 is for how it compares to other cartoons from 1935. However, for watchability today, I'd rate it a 2 or 3. It really is amazingly limp today.
