tavm Just rewatched this Merrie Melodies cartoon on the Varsity Show DVD. It has the characters on the book covers in a big shelf full of them coming to life, often in the caricatures of the film actors that portrayed them. It also had some black characters portrayed with big lips which is considered offensive today so kudos to Warner Bros. for including a disclaimer to that effect. Quite musically pleasing and a bit funny in some scenes concerning the film stars being drawn. Frank Tashlin was one of the most creative animation directors at the time and he's done well with something like this. So on that note, I recommend Have You Got Any Castles?

Meaghan Edwards I have always loved this short, ever since I was a little girl. I had a copy of it on VHS along with a few others, but this one was always my favorite. I was very disenhearted when my father donated the VHS that this short was on to the library, as he felt then 11 year old me was "too old" for cartoons. After many years of having not seen it, however, I was tickled when I found it in a DVD set. I enjoyed it as much as I did then, if not more so. I would recommend "Have You Got Any Castles" to anyone. It is cleverly put together and well done, and the caricatures are spot on. The animation is colourful and very well done, with more creativity put into this than many modern animated features today.

ccthemovieman-1 The "town crier" inside a warm house on a snowy winter night dazzles us with his vocabulary, introducing us to various literature characters who come to life in this home's big library.Most of the characters were people seen on screen in the mid '30s, actors like Paul Muni (The Story of Louis Pasteur) or Williams Powell (Nick Charles of The Thin Man fame) or, well.....there are so many I'm not going to list them all. It starts with four horror stories: Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, Fu Manchu, The Phantom of the Opera and Frankenstein and runs the game to Topper, the Invisible Man, The Good Earth, The 39 Steps, on and on and on. We see dancers and singers like Bill Robinson and Cab Calloway represent some of the titles. With all the jokes and sight gags poured into this, you get a lot of silly, stupid, clever and funny, some of it depending on how familiar you are with the characters, and how much you enjoy puns.My personal opinion would involve three "c words" - clever, cute and colorful. Having seen almost all of those classic films, I thought this was a lot of fun to watch.

Lee Eisenberg One of the first things that I noticed about "Have You Got Any Castles?" was the racist portrayals of certain characters (Fu Manchu, Uncle Tom's Cabin). Other than that, it was a pretty neat entry in the "books come alive" genre. A previous reviewer noted that most of the books portrayed in this cartoon are books that had recently been turned into movies when the cartoon came out, and the characters in the books resemble the actors from their respective movies (Charles Laughton in "Mutiny on the Bounty", Victor McLaglen in "The Informer", etc). It was probably intended to appeal more to the movie-going audience than to bookworms. But of course, isn't it easier just to watch the movie than to read the book? Thinking about this cartoon in its historical context, I can't help but imagine what it would look like nowadays. Many of the novels portrayed would be pretty grim (e.g., anything by Stephen King), and there might be a number of political books, cookbooks, self-help books and foreign language dictionaries. Out of "The Shining", Jack Nicholson would chop a hole in a door and say "Here's Johnny!"; out of the James Bond novels, Sean Connery would bed the world's hottest babes; and then there would be Noam Chomsky's various books about US-foreign policy. Go figure! Anyway, it's a cartoon worth seeing. So is "Book Revue", starring Daffy Duck.