Looney Tunes DVD Box 2 Coming Nov. 2nd

My son and I have the Bugs Bunny disc running right now -"Stitchen Tyme, will save nine"....

 

A Fry ad in this morning's paper says $39.99 ... they open at 8 AM ...

 

I haven't heard any of the commentary tracks yet, is there any discussion about the alternate ending to "The Heckling Hare"? It's the cartoon that got Tex Avery fired, after he refused to make the changes Jack Warner and Leon Schlesinger demanded (Bugs and Willoughby took a second fall off of a cliff in the original cut. Schlesinger just did an abrupt fade out for the common ending).

 

I watched the bonus material - watch the Avery chatting to the camera scene closely - the clips of toons look wunnerful (making me hope Volume 3 has things like A Wild Hare included). Great scene has a short clip of Avery, Clampett, Jones and others in drag doing some mugging for the camera...

 

I ended up ordering this set thru Amazon because with the free shipping/ no tax, it ends up cheaper.

 

I got a chance to watch the commentary tracks on the first disc last night, too bad Ford hasn't been able to locate a print with the original ending.

Hard to say if Avery quit or got bounced over this one. Apparently after butting heads with Schlesinger over the ending, Avery walked out. Then Schlesinger suspended him for six weeks, and after that, fired him outright. Sounds like a "you can't quit, I fired you" type of scenario.

 

Only 11?

What about "Tokio Jokio" (Norman McCabe) and "Bugs Bunny Nips The Nips" (Fritz Freleng)? The caricatures of the Asians in these cartoons are very offensive. I saw "Tokio Jokio" along with "Coal Black" on 16mm at the Minneapolis Science Fiction Convention c. 1978. "Tokio Jokio" was unwatchable. Not funny at all. The audience reaction was mostly nervous laughter.

In the first edition of the Will Friedwald/Jerry Beck (1981) The Warner Brothers Cartoons book it says in the "Bug Bunny Nips The Nips" write up, "not shown on television for obvious reasons".

Also there were several early Bosko cartoon that are not very PC today, along with the two Beaky Buzzard cartoons, "Bugs Bunny Gets The Boid" (1942) and "The Bashful Buzzard" (1945) both directed/supervised by Robert Clampett. Character actor Sara Berner was the voice behind "Mama Buzzard". In the Beck/Friedwald book it says "Threatre owners...were warned not to show the cartoons to their Italian patrons". I've never found "The Bashful Buzzard" to be very funny.

There are a lot more than 11 Warner cartoons not suitable for TV today.

 

The Spokane, Washington CBS affiliate used to run 3 old Warner Cartoons Monday thru Saturday from 6 to 6.30, in the late 1980s. I saw Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips and a few other questionable cartoons on there from time to time. I figure no one was watching and the station obviously wasn't screening the toons before they aired.

 

On Disc 4 it says that Sinkin' In The Bathtub is part of the From The Vaults bonus features but I can't find it. Anyone else have any luck?

 

I think Warner's plan is to include one or two non-Bugs "character series" discs with each set. The first volume included an all-Daffy disc; this time around it's Road Runner/Coyote and Sylvester/Tweety; I wouldn't be surprised if the next edition features a Pepe disc, or one devoted to Foghorn Leghorn.

The first box featured a Pepe cartoon (the Oscar-winning "For Scent-imental Reasons"), so I don't imagine P.C. is the issue here.

Incidentally, for anyone who's already viewed Vol. 2 in its entirety...did you notice a lot of DVNR artifacts? On the GAC forum, there were complaints about this on at least a few shorts.

 

What is DVHR artifacts?

 

Actually it was half Daffy, half Porky, with the emphasis seemingly on Porky, and if you ask me, Daffy's gotten rather short shrift on Volume 2. What I really want is an all Bugs disc, and all Daffy disc, and a couple of discs of everybody else, but that's just me.


I've always seen Tweety as kind of the Davy Jones of Warner Brothers cartoons, a little too cute to take in more than small doses. I guess I've just seen him on too many teenage girls' T-shirts. Consequently, I wound up skipping through most of disc 2. I had a lot of fun with the Road Runner disc though.

If anyone saw the show Mythbusters last night on the Discovery Channel, they had a real Wile E. Coyote moment with a crane rigged up as a catapult and a crash test dummy. I felt like I was watching a real live Road Runner cartoon.

 

DVNR = Digital Video Noise Reduction. Basically the video equivalent of what Sonic Solutions and CEDAR do.

This page explains it far better than I could.

 

I've seen about 60% of content on Vol.2 so far, and the only two cartoons with visible DVNR artefacts are "The Big Snooze" and "Gorilla My Dreams", both on disc 1. A clip from restored (and still unreleased) version of "The Falling Hare" on one of the bonus features, also suffers from the very heavy use of DVNR. Everything else looks great, and I guess no other cartoon on Vol.2 has been affected by DVNR, especially since nothing else has been reported on GAC forum. However, there is a serious video transfer flaw on disc 4, where five cartoons have been incorrectly encoded as interlaced, instead of progressive. They look fine on most of standard DVD players, but there are problems when they're viewed in progressive mode.

 

I got my copy at Costco for $40.99, plus tax.

Best price I've seen anywhere yet.

Chris

 

Not sure of the title offhand, but it's definitely one of the earliest Elmer cartoons (where he's drawn much larger than usual). And yes, Bugs does let the towel drop for a couple of frames.

 

"Wabbit Who Came to Dinner" was released on VHS years ago. Any idea if this is on the slate for a future DVD release?