Looney Tunes Golden/Platinum Collections

[GeorgeC]

To be honest, I don't think any of the Looney Tunes feature films, let alone the compilation stuff done in the past, are particularly great. This is one area where I think Disney has done better with its legacy shorts characters (Mickey, Donald, Goofy). There have been multiple appearances in features where those characters have shined and there's been a point to having those characters there. Mickey has great appearances/cameos/main roles in Fantasia, Fun & Fancy Free, Mickey's Christmas, and The Three Musketeers. It's gotta be at least the same number of films each for Goofy and Donald both of whom I like better than Mickey.

(On the LT side, I'm partial to Daffy Duck. The Ducks are better characters in both animation stables, IMHO. Marvin the Martian and Taz, to a point, are LT faves, too.)

I can't think of a film (aside from Who Framed Roger Rabbit with Mickey AND Bugs falling through the air in one scene; 'the dueling piano ducks' scene is great, too) where the WB/LT characters have been THAT good. It's a shame because by contrast the LT/MM shorts have held up a lot better than most of the classic Disney shorts with only a few of the Goofy shorts and Donald shorts coming close to the level of the great supervised craziness that was the late 1930s/1940s/early 1950s LT shorts.

(My favorite LT stuff is still from the World War II... there was less restraint in the shorts during that point and I haven't seen anything newer on TV or from more recent theatrical shorts that approaches the best MGM and LT shorts of WWII. The artwork, timing, personality is brighter and more distinct in those films. It was a great era for pop culture in general, period, but my favorite animated shorts and features are from those years. This is decades before I was born...!)

Still, LT: BiA was at least 5 times better than Space Jam. That film was pure junk IMHO and a crying shame...

[Ben]

Yeah...I have Space Jam on LD and never saw the reason to upgrade. I nearly went for the two disc DVD that had the more recent toons on it but waited for the inevitable Blu release...which then dropped those cartoons! So I never got it yet, despite the $7.99 price tag.

As a completist (and, in some cases the first way I saw LT cartoons), I like to have the Warners compilations. And I personally thought Back In Action was a riot. I can't wait to run that again in HD and notice a whole new bunch of things I missed and don't remember from first time around.

[EricJ]

Joe Dante reportedly loathed Space Jam's total cluelessness of the characters (and wrote Lola Bunny out of BIA with an in-joke), said that he wanted to make LT:BiA the "anti-Space Jam", and...in a way it is sort of the diametric polar counterpart of SJ, but not in a good way:

There's the clueless fan who invokes character shticks without really having seen the cartoons (like Taz showing up in a Geico commercial), and there's the "Cameo-itis" of the determined Uber-fan who wants to can't-see-the-forest bring up EVERY SINGLE micro in-joke reference to one-cartoon characters and cult lines, without really capturing any humor remotely resembling Chuck Jones:
"Look, there's Nasty Canasta! And Witch Hazel! And Cottontail Smith! And ACME products everywhere!" Um.....so??
(Like Roger Rabbit, if a neo-Looney has Bugs quoting "Ain't I a stinker?", that's your first warning sign of fan-posing--What kind of fan goes around quoting Friz's Bugs cartoons??)

Also BIA was going to be a half-dozen different ideas for Space Jam 2 before they tried to slop them all together and hope they stuck:
The villain plot was from when it was going to be "Spy Jam", and the car chase at the end was from when it was going to be "NASCAR Jam".

[GeorgeC]

I'll give the Looney Tunes: Back in Action story people this --

They sorta fixed Daffy Duck after the 40+year revamp that Chuck Jones made to the character.

Lemme explain...

Daffy was a much more hyper, kinetic character before Chuck Jones got his hands on him. Sure, some of the great Daffy Duck moments DID come after Jones made his changes ("Duck Dodgers," the 'Dragnet' spoof, Daffy's greediness in the LT short with him, Bugs, and a genie, etc.) but I always preferred the way Bob Clampett handled Daffy. Clampett's Daffy was an utterly different character than what Jones directed later on. Jones's Daffy was a stingy, miserly character and in some ways TOO close in character to Donald Duck for my likes. The big difference I see between the two ducks is that Donald could be VERY sadistic in his behavior and the way he tried to get revenge on other characters. For all the craziness they have, I don't think any of the major LT characters were really THAT sadistic.

Funny thing that... The stinginess and greed works better with Donald -- I mean you have to have a character that's near-polar opposite to balance off the goodness in Mickey and Goofy -- but I never liked those character traits in Daffy so much. I think Jones over-emphasized those character traits in his Daffy and that it was an almost completely different character compared with what Bob Clampett did in his shorts.

(Well, Daffy dancing around and swimming in that gold loot in the one pairing with Bugs and the Genie WAS funny but that's almost more like a Scrooge McDuck moment than a WB/LT character... except none of the Disney characters were ever quite that hyper from what I can remember of the shorts. Go figure -- WB and Disney 'borrowed' things from each other all the time. Heck, some of the crazier things you see in the Jack Kinney and Ward Kimball Disney shorts makes me believe they either had a sense of humor similar to Tex Avery and Bob Clampett or that they really studied the competition VERY well to borrow some good gags and story ideas. I think it's a bit of both 'Column A' and 'Column B.')

They even went back to the old Clampett characterization of Daffy, sorta, in Who Framed Roger Rabbit to differentiate Daffy from Donald. They would have been too much alike otherwise except for the differing speech impediments.

[EricJ]

Well, that's just it: The posing fan wants to quote the Clampett "Woo-hoo, woo-hoo!" AND the Jones "You're dethpicable", and blithely ignores that it's a little hard to do both.
Have to make a choice, and that involves a little actual field experience. So the posing fans without any go on right ahead without a second thought.

And personally, I also liked Robert McKimson's attempt to tone down his Clampett roots, find a middle ground between wacky and eloquent, and make Daffy "elegantly" deadpan-silly, in "Daffy Duck Slept Here" and "Stupor Duck", but again, that requires actually seeing the cartoons.

[droosan]

A rather interesting article detailing the history of Mel Blanc's on-screen voice credits was posted on the Cartoon Research blog today.

[Ben]

For some reason I have not been able to visit CR for the past two or three months now. It doesn't seem to just be an iPad thing, either, since I can't access it from a Windows laptop.

After hanging for around a minute, I get an Error 522 page telling me the connection timed out. It says my browser is working and that CloudFlair is working, but that this is a host error: "the initial connection between CloudFlare's network and the origin web server timed out. As a result, the web page can not be displayed. If you're a visitor of this website: Please try again in a few minutes. If you're the owner of this website: Contact your hosting provider letting them know your web server is not completing requests. An Error 522 means that the request was able to connect to your web server, but that the request didn't finish. The most likely cause is that something on your server is hogging resources."

Can someone maybe contact Jerry and let him know he has some kind of issue?

[droosan]

Ben, I just sent the CR site admin a copy of your description of the issue. Hopefully, it gets resolved soon..!

I have not experienced this issue at all, however; and the CR blog has definitely been chugging along with daily posts, all this time .. so, at least you'll have a lot of great reading to catch-up on!

[Randall]

... except I was crushed that Thunderbean Thursday was absent last week!

But yeah, lots of great stuff on there.

[Ben]

Thanks, Droo!

I'll let you know if/when the matter is resolved and I can start to enjoy CR again. It's weird, since other people can get to it, but it just doesn't want to load from any computer device I've been able to try!

Thanks

[Randall]

Weird. I wonder if any other UK readers have the same problem.

[Daniel]

Bugs Bunny Golden Carrot Collection has been announced. Pretty much sums it up: "ALL repeats from the Golden Collection series! Avoid!" No kidding, only the first half of the features? What a waste.

Chuckled seeing the cover of the Parodies DVD underneath. I pictured the scene from "Carrotblanca"; "♪ - I thought I told you never to play that song!"

[Ben]

I think all of the Parodies disc's toons are on disc already too...?

[Daniel]

With the exception of three; "Jack-Wabbit and the Beanstalk", "Rabbitson Crusoe" and "Hare-Abian Nights".

[Daniel]

A new collection coming from Warner Archive:

Good news for Physical Media collectors – Warner Archive Collection is giving its fiercest collectors their choice of rare titles in the Looney Tunes catalog. Announced by George Feltenstein (and yours truly) earlier today on The Extra’s podcast, a new 20-title collection, Vol. 1 of a new series called Looney Tunes Collector’s Choice, is expected to release in late May on blu-ray. And with it a group of first-time-on-blu-ray, restored HD Warner cartoon classics – not the same restorations from HBO-Max and MeTV: an upgrade.

All blu-ray premieres – uncut – with physical media exclusives that are not on HBO-Max streaming, or MeTV broadcast: including Bugs Bunny in Chuck Jones’ Beanstalk Bunny (1955) and Arthur Davis’ 1947 Catch As Cats Can – a zany cartoon featuring a Crosby parrot and a Sinatra canary and a loopy, early version of Sylvester. Other cartoons on this hilarious set include Frank Tashlin’s A Tale Of Two Mice (1945), Robert McKimson’s Daffy Doodles (1946) and Friz Freleng’s His Bitter Half (1950).

Additional titles will be announced shortly; as will the official street date, which is looking now like late May. We’ve said this before – but its true: future volumes depend on sales on this first set. Pre-orders should begin later this week (we will update this page with an Amazon link as soon as we get one).

Beanstalk Bunny! Sounds promising so far.