Warner Brothers cartoons being restored to 1080 HD after 80 years

Classic/Golden Age cartoon reissues are a non-event for Warner Bros. The Golden Collection dvd sets sold less and less with each yearly release until they were stopped. A planned Volume 2 of Tom and Jerry cartoons on Blu-ray got yanked due to racial content in some of the planned shorts like His Mouse Friday. Warner's focus has been geared mainly to tv era Hanna-Barbera cartoons - a lot less expensive to restore those since they weren't shot on Technicolor 3 strip elements which are challenging (read that as expensive) to properly restore. MGMs nitrate 3 strips and prints burned up in a vault fire well before ownership landed in the Turner-Time-Warner conglomeration, Warner cartoon master elements appear to be available for the most part, an occasional bone gets tossed like the Fleischer/Famous Studios Superman cartoons, and an Avery Droopy set was released (which has its flaws such as poor source choice/minimal clean-up work done on the earlier shorts - at least these are being upgraded with the current Biu-ray Avery sets that are a huge improvement in video quality over earlier video tape/video disc/dvd releases). A number of the earlier cartoons are hamstrung by racial stereotype issues - like it or not the execs making the decisions to greenlight cartoons are not going to give a thumbs-up to Coal Black or other Censored 11 shorts. Cartoons are viewed as kiddie fare (it's debatable how many Golden Collection boxed sets selling for $65 bucks a pop when originally put out were picked up for kids). Adults (collectors) apparently didn't buy enough Warner Bros cartoons when dvd sales were strong to justify the cost of restoring and releasing more sets.

The small trickle of releases like the 2 Tex Avery and the recent Bugs Bunny Blu-ray sets released in 2020 came out after a long drought of no Warner Bros/MGM cartoons being reissued. The Avery MGM discs have been a tremendous upgrade over previous reissues, and the Bugs set filled in a chunk of his shorts (missing hares?). As Jerry Beck has said repeatedly - support the cause by purchasing the cartoon shorts that come out and support the program, or Warner stops reissuing them (again).

 

This is really cool. I would gladly pay good money to own as many of these as I can afford.

 

it was bound to happen... guess they are hurting for coin...they figure they'll be able to milk the source once again and again and again...; )

 

Thanks, Mike. Good background.

Nevertheless, these collections do exist, and doesn't that mean many of the titles listed on Mr. Ames' web source, should therefore still be under copyright protection for now? I'm not gettin' it.

Also, I do get you about the racially-sensitive content about what remains unreleased...after all, you can't expect Whoopi to come in and tape a disclaimer for everything. I'm fine for letting them be.

Nonetheless, if they end up fair game for Cartoon Renewal Studios, Thunderbean or Stathis or anybody else who wants to do their part to help preserve our history with an unblinking eye, more power to them. I can't say I'm gonna download, purchase or even make time in the rest of my days to look at the "Censored" collection, but it does deserve to be out there, even if the corporation that owns the rest of it, doesn't have the stones to do it.

 

What absolutely delights me about this whole thing, involves the constant disagreement I have had for years with many purists, on the validity of what started as mere colorization technology, being slandered early on as the antichrist. I always maintained, no matter what results you are seeing with the beginning of the craft, it will grow to become an important component of film restoration as time goes by, and without your begrudging support, it doesn't get a chance to prove itself...or, its' adjacent restoration technologies.

Just this past year, we had a thread about a late-19th-Century film clip on YouTuborama, involving digital cleanup technology, re-scanning and re-formatting to a visual quality approaching primitive video. It was posted with an attempt to re-create an audio accompaniment for purposes of merely demonstrating the improvement in the sense of realism as a way to impress casual viewers. And what happened? The video got picked apart for its' less-than-accurate soundtrack...! Talk about burying the lead.

Mere months later, we have a small que of new posts on the site, from some of the earliest examples of cinema that have survived, improved with digital correction, cleaning and blemish removal, something called "A.I." processes, and it is almost astonishing just how much improved these examples have shown to be, compared with just that one controversial sample posted only months before! And oh, it gets better...we are now seeing the same restoration technology applied to ancient portraits, and even statues...just to show what is possible...and to allow people to see these historic faces somewhat in the same context of reality, as the actual human beings they see today!

And, yes, they are going to be disdained by a lot of traditionalists, who will pooh-pooh at the disturbing artifacts of the processes, which may not be perfect. But these luddites cannot claim, it isn't a bold start...and, will only get better results with time, and support for seeing these processes as what they truly are: amazing, revealing...and, improving, week-by-week.

I promise you, someday, somebody's going to conjure a "mustache on the Mona Lisa", that will be so realistic...you would have always thought she had one, and da Vinci was just covering it up all this time, just to be nice!

 

Who is hurting? Warner Bros.? They aren't releasing this. Did you read the OP? It's a third-party company upscaling cartoons now in the public domain.

 

This looks great! Thanks for letting us know.

Assuming the description on that Web page referenced above is correct, and the films have entered the public domain because of a failure to register or renew copyright, which for works published before 1978 was required to renew the term after 28 years, the mistakes quite likely would have been made more than 50 years ago (perhaps even in some cases before anyone ought to have known there would be more money to be made from re-releasing or licensing the films). I don't think anything WB might have done in the past 40 years, in the era of home video, would have made any difference; re-releasing or re-licensing material doesn't change the length of protection anyway. (It's an open question whether a new mastering would itself get a copyright period. It probably shouldn't and wouldn't, but the question hasn't really been addressed in case law; regardless, the answer to that question would not affect when older copies of original elements enter the public domain.)

EDIT: I just clicked on one example, Lady, Play Your Mandolin! | Looney Tunes Wiki | Fandom, and the page gives an explanation -- apparently the cartoon entered PD in 1960 due to WB's failure to renew the copyright. So WB would have gotten its initial 28 years after publication with notice and that was it.

 

YouTube link is dead

 

There's just over 1,000 Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies starting with 1929's Sinkin' in the Bathtub and ending in 1969 with Cool Cat. Out of those about 170 are out of copyright for various reasons; for instance, government funded wartime shorts like the SNAFU and Hook training series and a handful of public service shorts are part of that number, The others fell/lapsed into the public domain after their initial 28 year stretch (most likely a screw-up on someone's part in a legal department ). The non-renewals may have had something to do with the sale of the pre-1949 cartoon library to A.A.P. - copyright would have needed renewal starting around 1958/1959 and perhaps someone at A.A.P. dropped the ball in filing the paperwork for another 28 year stretch. Those shorts are fair game for public domain usage. A lot of the Warner shorts that are in the public domain were/are sourced from well-worn/faded A.A.P. tv prints. As Joel Cairo/Kevin noted in an earlier post:

Warner doesn't have a lot of financial reason to clean up out of copyright shorts - they don't own them (and quite honestly there's plenty of mediocre to poor cartoons among them). They have demonstrated over the years that reissuing the shorts that are still under copyright protection as hi-res/Blu-ray quality level discs isn't of much concern, either. The important thing with Warner is they have negatives they can work from and have kept/stored them properly - when they decided to reissue cartoons in 2020 they were very nicely restored.

 

Correct. An unprez is not a restoration. In fact, there are die hard film restoration people who argued for years against the concept that you can do a digital film restoration at all. I think they eventually came around in the last 10-15 years.

I've been told that 90% of the Warner Bros.' library was restored to HD & 2K years ago, and a select number (I think the Oscar-winners and the ones with very good surviving elements) were restored in 4K as well. The trick is getting WB/MGM to release them to the public. As far as I know, the masters are just sitting on servers; I don't know what percentage is available via streaming or syndication.

 

Here's a new link:

 

Thanks, SBurke, that is probably the answer I was looking for. And...not sufficient for me, I guess. The first title I saw on the "Public Domain Films" link was "I Love To Sing'a", which I remembered watching on the first Golden DVD collection from 2003; I couldn't see how, a brand new release, with a copyright of "2003" on the box could possibly be public domain material, and you've explained it...I...suppose...?

But...if this is the case, when what was that 2013 digital dump of 1963 outtakes all about? There were considered fresh products and able to copyright fresh, while re-releasing cleaned-up versions of once-dingy and scratched cartoons doesn't count? A controversial cartoon with a fresh preface by Whoopi doesn't count? An entire collection as it has never been assembled before, along with new disc opens and menus on DVD for the first time...that doesn't count?

I guess your explanation stands, I just don't follow the reasoning. You've got a pile of A.A.P. cartoons, and you attach their original WB-logo opens and closes to them...isn't that technically a new version? What about all those Mickey Mouse cartoons that Disney won't let lapse, with no upgrading except for releasing them one more time?

 

Sooo, basically you got the ice cream truck; it's playing the tinkly-music; it's even driving through your neighborhood...so, all you need to find out whether you can make money on this, or whether you're wasting your money driving through that neighborhood, is to stop the frikkin' truck, and open a window...!?!

How hard would it be to put a paywall up, and make a little cash off the products you've already got loaded-up on those servers...! Maybe they're afraid it might take market share away from streaming the new Wonder Woman extravaganza...?

I really think, the problem here isn't that I don't know how the world works...but rather, I don't understand why it doesn't.

 

No, copyright law specifically says "substantial changes" would be necessary to take a public domain film and copyright it again. They have allowed colorized versions of B&W films and stereo remixes of mono films to qualify, as far as I know.

You'd have to ask whoever is running HBOMax at the moment. If you look back at the Warner Bros.' C-suite executives, they've been shuffled around a lot over the past 3 years, particularly since the last few Superman-related movies didn't do as expected and since AT&T took over the corporation. I've said many times here that there's usually four reasons why something isn't available on home video:

1) the studio doesn't think it will make any (or enough) money

2) the studio doesn't believe there's a big enough audience interested in it (see also #1)

3) no executive is willing to make a case as to why it should be released, which is particularly tough with anything pre-1970 (that is 50 or more years old)•

4) there's an issue with the copyrights, music, or ownership

and 5) the picture and sound elements are missing, damaged, or incomplete.

Sometimes it's more than one of these things. I chided one of my colleagues over at Warner MPI as to what the hold-up was on Citizen Kane many years ago. He sighed and said they had thought it was finished six times, but just as they'd get ready to release, suddenly a better film element would be located, and the process would start all over again. They did finally get it out and it did look and sound extremely good. But it took over a year to get it done, and I think the final cost of the restoration... no man can say.

* a close friend of mine used to call this the "nobody gives a ***t factor," which is a very real thing with film, TV, and album reissues.

 

I came here for the friendliness of the forum members....
I STAY for the 'copy-write law' discussions!

 

Wow, very cool. Thank you.

 

It works in the United States.

 

I watched some of “A Fresh Hare,” linked above. There was still a lot of dirt/noise/artifacts in the restored version. I wonder what it looked like before.

 

Ugh! Not only is it in Stretch-o-Vision, but the sound could use some cleanup.

 

This might be a later cartoon, but it looks a lot better!

 

I believe there are only 3 official volumes of Looney Tunes Platinum Collection on Blu-Ray.

 

Finding suitable sources for the remastering and subsequent upscale of public domain material is challenging, to say the least.

 

indeed!

 

much worse - with raster lines - that was just one pass with the AI system - I'm working on better cleanups, I will post an example here soon.
I will also clean those PD WBs properly and re-post, this was just an appetizer...that assignment will take much time...
Stay tuned - I'm going to show you what this system is capable of with a post tonight of a cleanup I worked all day on- not WB, but you will see that capability of this AI is def. star trek-like in nature ...

 

yes
that was only one pass with AI for cleanup/upscale
- after I finish the demo I'm working on tonight,
I will do a top to bottom manual cleanup of falling hare
- that will take a few days
- then I will repost and you can compare the one-pass AI automated job to a multi-day manual cleanup.