User Reviews

. . . called something like "Springtime for (the H-word)." You might wonder what THAT has to do with this particular "Travel Talk," SPRINGTIME IN THE NETHERLANDS. If I'm not mistaken, much of this nine-minute short is similar if not identical to the same outfit's 1934 offering, HOLLAND IN TULIP TIME. Toward the end of the later episode, when its reprising narrator gets around to talking about the quest for black tulips and begins lamenting the waste and uselessness of all the colorful tulip petals, one could swear that a cheap movie studio is engaging in the wholesale recycling of 17-year-old footage. What's wrong with this picture? I suppose nothing, IF you've never seen A BRIDGE TOO FAR. That later feature film and hundreds of others dating back to the mid-1940s document that the Netherlands was one of many World War Two Ground Zeroes. Therefore, the main question any contemporary viewers of SPRINGTIME IN THE NETHERLANDS would have had uppermost in their minds was, "Is it safe?" In other words, have the land mines been cleared and have all of the deeply the buried "dud" bombs been located and disarmed. Then (and now) no one wants to be blown up during a leisurely vacation. Even Today, people cringe watching the kids cavorting in the discarded tulip petals, wondering if some deadly "war souvenir" just below the soil's surface is about to explode them into Kingdom Gone.