George Feltenstein of the Warner Archive and animation historian Jerry Beck join the podcast to discuss the LOONEY TUNES COLLECTOR’S CHOICE VOL 2 Blu-ray releasing December 12th. We talk about the selection process, the decision to arrange the cartoons alphabetically and preview some of the 25 cartoons to give you an idea of what you can expect. PLUS George hints at plans for future volumes and what is needed to ensure they continue. If you’re a fan of Looney Tunes or Warner Bros. Animation, this is one episode you don’t want to miss.
Purchase on Amazon:
LOONEY TUNES COLLECTOR’S CHOICE VOL 2 Blu-ray
Also available on Amazon:
LOONEY TUNES COLLECTOR’S CHOICE VOL 1 Blu-ray
The Extras Facebook page
The Extras Twitter
Warner Archive & Warner Bros Catalog Group
Otaku Media produces podcasts, behind-the-scenes extras, and media that connect creatives with their fans and businesses with their consumers. Contact us today to see how we can work together to achieve your goals. www.otakumedia.tv
George Feltenstein of the Warner Archive and animation historian Jerry Beck join the podcast to discuss the LOONEY TUNES COLLECTOR’S CHOICE VOL 2 Blu-ray releasing December 12th. We talk about the selection process, the decision to arrange the cartoons alphabetically and preview some of the 25 cartoons to give you an idea of what you can expect. PLUS George hints at plans for future volumes and what is needed to ensure they continue. If you’re a fan of Looney Tunes or Warner Bros. Animation, this is one episode you don’t want to miss.
Purchase on Amazon:
LOONEY TUNES COLLECTOR’S CHOICE VOL 2 Blu-ray
Also available on Amazon:
LOONEY TUNES COLLECTOR’S CHOICE VOL 1 Blu-ray
The Extras Facebook page
The Extras Twitter
Warner Archive & Warner Bros Catalog Group
Otaku Media produces podcasts, behind-the-scenes extras, and media that connect creatives with their fans and businesses with their consumers. Contact us today to see how we can work together to achieve your goals. www.otakumedia.tv
Hello and welcome to the Extras, where we take you behind the scenes of your favorite TV shows, movies and animation and then release on digital DVD, blu-ray and 4K or your favorite streaming site. I'm Tim Lager, host and joining me today to talk about Looney Tunes collector's choice volume 2, our animation historian, jerry Beck and George Feltonstein of the Warner Archive. I know many of you are just as excited as I am about this release, so I'll share some of my thoughts and then George and Jerry will provide some additional background on the release. But to be sure we don't have too many spoilers, we try to keep specifics to a minimum. Well, hi, george. Jerry, it's great to have you on the podcast to talk some more Looney Tunes.
Speaker 2:Great to be here, pleasure to be here, as always.
Speaker 1:From my perspective, looney Tunes collector's choice volume 1 was a huge success. It felt like a lot of great response. I think a lot of people purchased it. So there was a tremendous amount of excitement for this volume 2, I know when it was announced. So I think that this volume I just got done reviewing it it's just as strong as the first one and am I right that it actually has more cartoons in this one than volume 1 did?
Speaker 2:Right there, 25 as opposed to 20.
Speaker 1:I'm watching and I'm like, wow, I thought I would be done by now and I looked and I'm like, oh, there's more cartoons here, which I thought was a great thing.
Speaker 2:We also tried to take a unique approach that we haven't done before. Instead of trying to group by character or theme, we went alphabetically, so it wasn't chronologically, so it really is kind of like a shuffle playlist on a zone. It's really cool.
Speaker 3:Yeah, strangely enough, the alphabetical order for this disc really works If you just sit back, turn it on from the beginning and you watch your old 25 in a row, or you watch 12 and watch the others later. It really works as it's curated very well, kind of by accident, but it's wonderful.
Speaker 2:Well, it was just an idea that I had. I thought that might work, and it turned out to work out well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, what did you do on volume 1? You did them by grouping.
Speaker 3:No, we did them by famous characters, miscellaneous characters, different….
Speaker 2:One shots, wacky one shots yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1:Well, because I was going to ask you, before we dive into a discussion on some of these, how you went about selecting these. I know, like anything, we talk about the old collections and you had so much to start with, but then it whittles down, whittles down. You had volume 1 and you selected. How did you then go about volume 2 selecting?
Speaker 2:The concept here is cartoons that have never been on DVD or Blu-ray. I have to have the caveat about DVD because I think at least two showed up in a way that I was not supportive of originally, as quote-unquote bonus cartoons, unremastered old TV masters that were put on earlier collections as bonus cartoons by another colleague who meant well but didn't understand that it's confusing to the consumer because then they think well, it's been on they don't know remastered from not, and so forth and so on. Of course other people did, but he wasn't thinking that way, he just thought oh stuff, the discs was more fun. So there's at least two on here that I think had that kind of second tier bonus release. But for all intents and purposes these are 25 debuts. I think even a few of them weren't on any. Maybe one or two had no prior, like VHS or laser disc or anything.
Speaker 2:So we're trying to go for the rarities and since the prior collections the platinum collections and the golden collections on DVD before that primarily focused on the most prominent cartoons and a lot of the Bugs Bunny Holes were filled with its 80th anniversary birthday celebration, that kind of whittled down what was available. That's a good thing, because that means that so much more has already been made available. But if something, the way I look at it, if something has only been on DVD, the leaps and bounds of quality improvement, just in mastering techniques, no less what Blu-ray has to offer can be dramatic compared to what was done 20 years ago. So hence we have this new set that is quite varied and different and filled with the kind of laughter that only Looney Tunes and Mary Melodies can provide.
Speaker 1:Well, before we dive into a discussion on some of these, was there anything else that the fans should know about this release in general? George.
Speaker 2:I would say something I said previously, and saying it previously turned out to be fortuitous, and that is the more fan support we get for this release, the more it paves the way for future releases, and we are working on volume three right now and, unless there are unforeseen circumstances, within a couple of months we should be gathering together again to talk about volume three. So I'm hoping there are no unforeseen circumstances, yeah yeah. Because we're working too hard right now.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, it's great that this is coming out just in time for people to get you know before Christmas, and I know a lot of people have pre-ordered, but those who haven't yet, we're going to go through some of these, you'll hear about it, you get the review on them and hopefully you'll you know, go ahead and make your purchase if you haven't already. But it comes out December 12th, when this podcast releases should be right about the same time, and I was looking and watching these and there's a lot of variety, just like I think the last one had as well. But I was going to just ask you about a few of these that I thought had either I had some questions about or I just thought I was kind of blown away by and I hadn't really paid attention to the fact that it was alphabetical on there. But so I'm just going to grab these, I guess out of order as well. But one of my wanted to bring up right away at the beginning is this one Ghost Wanted, edited by Chuck Jones.
Speaker 1:Tell me about that. Is that Casper?
Speaker 2:No. No, no, casper, no, no, this is almost nine, I guess nine years before Casper Actually about four or five, but it was another studio on the other side of the country.
Speaker 3:It's funny because Chuck Jones who directed this cartoon it's one of his earlier ones, one of his cuter, softer earlier films. He and later years would go around claiming I created Casper because of this cartoon. But I don't know why Chuck, with all of the wonderful things he did, would want to claim some kind of creatorship of a friendly ghost like this. But yeah, that's the general premises, sort of there, but it's not the character. It's a great cartoon, a real classic from the early Jones period where he was trying to emulate Disney. So the animation is fuller and the background artwork is intricate and on Blu-ray it's eye-popping in a way we've never seen it before. So I'm very proud of that particular cartoon being on this set.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I watched it. I'm like this has got to be one of the highlights, at least in my estimation of the cartoons on here. That was just my opinion, of course.
Speaker 3:Well, I want to say that to the general public. Now we do aim this toward the collectors. We know people are collecting physical media. They're collecting Looney Tunes on physical media. But if you are like a general public type person who happened to come on to Tim's podcast here today, you're going to love this set and I sound like a shill saying that, but you're going to love this set. It's 25 Primo Looney Tunes from the 30s through to the 50s, I think even into the very early 60s 50s.
Speaker 3:yes, and it's a real roundabout collection. You got most, if not all, of the great famous characters. You got a lot of interesting miscellaneous ones that never show up anywhere else. It's just a barrel of fun is really what it is. So you have no hesitation. And if you're collecting, really a majority of this set is not on any other Blu-rays or DVDs. So if you're a collector, this is something you want to have.
Speaker 2:Tim, let me ask you a question, sure, since we haven't talked about this, and just would like to get your opinion and thoughts having now watched it. What did you think of the disc from both an entertainment point of view as well as the quality?
Speaker 1:Well, the quality I thought was great and there's a few that I really kind of made little notes of I'm kind of looking at my notes here but in general all of them were great. I mean, I watched every single one and I thought that the quality was terrific in terms of the picture, the sound, as always. Per usual, I should say and again, I'm not the fine tune person, I'm going to be more of the average viewer who loves Looney Tunes. I have all of the Looney Tunes collections as well, but I get them for the enjoyment. I get them because they're art, they're film and they're such a great history and part of Warner Brothers. But really they're art, they really are these films, and one of them that I thought were really really kind of hit, that point of art for me, was this one Cross Country Detours, directed by Tech Savory. I mean, I'm watching that one and I just felt like that they were just like this beautiful artwork set against this story. Tell me a little bit about that one.
Speaker 3:That's an interesting cartoon. That was a very famous cartoon in its day and that fame has been kind of forgotten. It's beautiful and it's funny. It's a parody of the travelogues that used to be in theaters. Tech Savory and the Warner cartoons in general were the Saturday Night Live, the Mad Magazine of its day, making fun of the other media that people were watching in theaters, whether it was Disney cartoons or newsreels or whatever. Tech Savory really started that and it was kind of a revolution at that time. There hadn't been before Avery started doing these travelogues and newsreels spoofs, there hadn't been any cartoons with a narrator and spot gags. That was a new thing and it went over wildly with the theaters and the audiences.
Speaker 3:One thing I like about that cartoon is that one has that scene remind me, tim, if I'm wrong, is that scene where they do a split screen between a lizard and a little girl? They do. Yeah, I'll tell you. That scene is interesting from a historian point of view because I'm always telling everybody, everybody, that these cartoons were never aimed at the children. It was aimed at the whole audience in the movie theater. And right there, with that gag, they're telling us that, they're demonstrating it. This side of the screen is for the grownups, this side of the screen is for the kids, and that's a way of the cartoon itself telling us who the audience for these cartoons were. I love that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I made a note of that because I thought that little girl was so cute and so of its time with the girls and everything. But, like you said, on the other side there's this lizard. But it was noteworthy. I just thought that was a really real treat, that one. So it's interesting to hear the story.
Speaker 2:One of the things I think we should mention about cross country detours. It's one of the opportunities we had to restore the original titles, because when these cartoons were re-released theatrically, they got these blue ribbon titles that remove the creative credits and really the opening design of the film. So we've tried, where possible, when we can get them, to reinstate the original titles. It's not an easy thing to do, but happily we were able to do that here and that's worth noting yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm just going to jump to a couple others here. Next I wanted to ask you about was this Daphys Southern Exposure. That is a black and white, and I was just amazed at how beautiful that one looks on Blu-ray.
Speaker 3:Well it does. That one's one that people grew up with. It's been around, but I don't think it's ever been as good looking as it looks on this Blu-ray set. It's not one of the ones directed by any of the famous directors like Clampett or Jones or whatever. It's Norman McCabe. He was an animator who they promoted for a short time to do some of the black and white cartoons, but it's just as good as any of the color ones. Color was coming in. Color didn't come in completely for the Looney Tunes series until, I think, 1942. It's a Curio. It's one of the few black and white ones that doesn't feature Porky Pig from that period. It's one I personally felt we needed to have on this set. It's kind of a classic Looney Tune and because of the black and white and things like that, it shouldn't be overlooked. And of course, the collectors really, really want all of those black and white cartoons. I do, yeah.
Speaker 2:It should be noted, in the early 90s a lot of these black and white Looney Tunes were I hate to use the word colorized for airings on Nickelodeon, and there's a whole generation of people that grew up watching colorized versions of these cartoons and they need to see them as they originally made. Now they can.
Speaker 1:Right, I was just amazed at how well it looked for being black and white. I just thought it looked fantastic and it's a lot of fun. Of course, it's always deaf. It's always a lot of fun. Another one I wanted to ask you about was Fair and Wormer. Yeah, that's a lot of fun, but did I see a skunk in there? And is that skunk Peppie Le Pew?
Speaker 3:That's funny. I didn't think about that and when we put that cartoon on there it isn't Peppie Le Pew, but it is a Chuck Jones cartoon and Chuck created Peppie around this time and the design is similar. You're right, in this cartoon that skunk is really kind of used as a gag. That skunk, he doesn't have his personality, he doesn't. I don't believe he speaks. It's a great cartoon for it's kind of the ultimate chase cartoon and I think that was a thing that Jones was into. Obviously, he later did the Roadrunner series and many other cartoons featuring that chase motif and this is one of the early ones for him on that.
Speaker 1:I'm just kind of picking here, george, if you have anything to add on these, but I thought this Hemature Night, another tech savory with egghead. I thought that one was very noteworthy. It's obviously a vaudeville routine, but I just thought I got a kick out of it.
Speaker 3:I really like this cartoon the amateur hour in the vaudeville theaters is the equivalent of what we have today who's got talent? The reality shows where people would get up and perform and a winner would be selected. That was happening live at theaters back in those days. Here's the perfect parody of that.
Speaker 1:It's like the Gong show thing Gong on there, the floor opens up the axe to disappear and then it's got some cutaways to the audience and all of the characters there.
Speaker 2:I mean it's very funny this is one of the Avery Warner cartoons where you get to see little seedlings of what his style would be like once he was non-repressed and could run wild with his ideas at MGM. It's kind of foretelling what is going to happen three, four years later.
Speaker 3:It's funny that MGM who were restricted Buster Keaton when he signed up with them. Even one could say that about Laurel and Hardy in the 40s but Avery, they let him go. You can cut that out if it's so good. No that's one man's opinion. Yeah, it's one man's opinion, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, one of the ones that I think probably people will. I don't know, I guess it was a little surprising to me to watch it, but probably a lot of people love it. It's probably his hair breath hurry, yes.
Speaker 2:I'm watching that.
Speaker 1:That's from the 60s, which I didn't realize. I mean it's got Bugs Bunny in it, but it's a road runner cartoon.
Speaker 3:I love your puzzlement over that cartoon. That's what everybody should feel when they see it. Like confusion. It's a strange one. I'll be honest Another one man's opinion here. I really do think that might have been conceived as a bridging material for the Bugs Bunny show. That's my guess. It doesn't make any sense as a short, but it actually makes more sense because Bugs talks to the audience directly through most of the cartoon. You have to be in theory familiar with the Roadrunner series, which I suppose most people were in 1960 or so. It's a very, very strange take. If you like the Roadrunner and Coyote, you're not quite getting that. If you like Bugs Bunny, you're not quite getting that either. But that said, it's got great Jones designs, great layouts, beautiful looking cartoon, mel Blank. I mean, it's an oddity and I enjoy it for that reason.
Speaker 1:What did you think, George?
Speaker 2:I feel exactly the same way Jerry does.
Speaker 1:You do have another, actually an actual Roadrunner, and Coyote on here, liquity Splat. That's also from the 60s. That's an additional one yeah.
Speaker 3:I mean the Roadrunner series on physical media. It's really hard to do a whole set of the Roadrunner because really, I'm going to be honest, you can't watch 10 of them in a row. It's monotonous. If you do that, they're great in small doses. Because of that, they've been very gently placed on our previous sets. We never ignore them, but we never go whole hog with them. Thus, we have many like this one that have never been on physical media before. So that's why it's there.
Speaker 1:The other, Bugs Bunny. I think you have two Bugs Bunny cartoons in this volume. I thought was kind of blew my mind. I was curious to hear your take on it, Jerry. And that's the rabbit rampage from 1955. And I'm watching it and it's like a meta cartoon. It's a cartoon about the making of a cartoon.
Speaker 2:That means that you say you're thinking you must have met it before, and the reason is it's basically a remake of sorts of Duck-a-muck, which was made a few years earlier by Chuck Jones, except Bugs is being tortured by the animator, which is Elmer Fudd, and in Duck-a-muck, Daffy was being tortured by the animator, who we find out at the very end is Bugs Bunny. So I think this cartoon has been underappreciated because of its similarity to Duck-a-muck and it just feels like oh, this is a Duck-a-muck ripoff. If you hadn't seen Duck-a-muck, you would love Rabbit Rampage a lot more, Because it's actually a very funny, clever cartoon. It's just that those of us watching these things almost 70 years later and knowing them as well as we do, you go. Well, it's not Duck-a-muck and in its own way it really deserves the recognition and it shouldn't be tossed aside as a bonus cartoon. This is one that needed to get a proper treatment and here it is.
Speaker 3:You know, this set has and you've pointed it out two of the most unusual Bugs Bunny cartoons ever made. I think both of these qualify for that. And, as George said, these cartoons back in the day, even as late as the mid-50s, they were never really thought they were going to be seen again. There was no Bugs Bunny show, there was no television syndication, there was no physical media the internet so people just saw them when they came out. In fact, during when this one came out, there was reissues. They finally figured out the idea of reissuing them to theaters. But people who might have seen Duck-a-muck and enjoyed it it would have been two or three years earlier and maybe either forgotten about it or wouldn't have minded seeing another take on the same idea. And Jones, I had a lot of great ideas for this format and this setup. Duck-a-muck came out and was so celebrated it's still remembered as one of his top cartoons today that this film has been kind of shunted aside, kind of not there, kind of it's kind of the scrappy do of the Looney Tunes.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean. You got to admit, though, that Daffy Duck, frustrated, is a better. Well, he's better at being frustrated, and that's why Duck-a-muck gets that feeling.
Speaker 2:That's why Chuck Jones said Bugs Bunny is the person we hope we all could be and Daffy Duck is the person we're all afraid we really are. That sums up everything. I'm paraphrasing what he said, but he said it when I interviewed him many years ago.
Speaker 3:And I know he said that often before- yeah Well, if you can't have the two weirdest Bugs Bunny cartoons on a set aimed at the collector, I don't know where else you can put them. So here they found their perfect home.
Speaker 1:Well, I've given you some names and titles that popped out to me, but which one of these are you kind of most excited to have on this collection? Or you can be more than one, but Jerry.
Speaker 3:If you're going to me directly first, I guess, and it's very hard, very hard to make that decision. But I do have a decision and it's a film on here called Brother Brat and the parody of the title, Brother Rat. Right George, that was a Ronald Reagan film.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, it just came out about six years earlier. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and the and this cartoon is a Frank Tashlin. Ok, it's a porky pig, it's wartime era, it's particularly slapstick, let's put it that way. And on Blu-ray for the first time it's eye popping. And honestly, if you just told me I have a Blu-ray and it just has that cartoon on it, I think I would definitely be buying this just for that. So there's my answer right there, brother Brat, a classic porky pig looney tune that you've never seen on physical media before.
Speaker 1:George, we have to ask you the same question.
Speaker 2:It's very hard to pick one. I love so many of them. I think if I had to pick one then I was surprised when I came to the conclusion that this hadn't gotten or released before of the highest caliber, because it deserves it. Now it has one A Hound for Trouble, charlie Dog. I could have used a lot more Charlie Dog cartoons and Charlie Dog is great in every cartoon, but Hound for Trouble is something I remember, jerry. I think it was part of those 1985 Looney Tunes evenings at the Thalia in New York when we were children. Hound for Trouble is just fantastic. It's pure Chuck Jones. There's some great gags in it. It looks amazing. That's just what came to mind. I didn't know you were going to ask that question, but if I had to pick one that just was the top of my head, that would be it.
Speaker 3:It's really hard. There are many great cartoons on this set. Oh yeah, I mean, george, remember when I was a kid. I remember that cartoon, ding Dog Daddy, that gave me nightmares when I was a kid. Sure, I was like, oh my God, the lightning bolts and everything in that was like a kid's nightmare to me. But I love that cartoon. It's beautiful, it's got a great story.
Speaker 1:It's got a tan to the war as well, right.
Speaker 3:Yes, I didn't know that when I was a kid. Later years looking at it, I'm like holy moly, this is wartime munitions. I mean it's very interesting watching it as a grown-up. It's put it that way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I noted that as one that I really really liked as well.
Speaker 2:So many of these cartoons are not always the ones people think of immediately and get written about, but they're all really at a level of excellence, because Looney Tunes were funny, mary Melodies were funny, warner Brothers cartoons were funny and I really don't think anyone, the exception of Avery going over to MGM and he's a graduate of Warner Brothers cartoons. The Avery cartoons at MGM and the Warner Brothers cartoons period are the funniest cartoons ever made and nobody else comes close. In terms of the humor and the quality of the animation is fantastic. The artistry of the boys' characterizations, in addition to the magnificent Mel Blanc. There are many people who never got credited, but we now know who they are. Jerry has seen to it over the years that they get the recognition they deserve. Just the artistry of so many men and women that came together to make over a thousand cartoons during the prime era were blessed and we hope the support continues that will enable us to keep going.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah. It's a great collection and you have just all of the favorites as well as some of the lesser maybe known outside of the collector community on here. I mean, I was thinking of the wacky worm that I actually really like Greetings Bait, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, those are actually the only two that that character appears in. We have the only two A three-year-old wacky worm and they're on this set. That's what this set's about Classics that have been neglected before. We didn't really plan it in advance. Let's do them in alphabetical order, but it came out so well that way this time around. Whether we do that next time around, I don't know, but it really is just a load of fun. I used to call it set like this a party reel. You put it on at the beginning of a party and you almost can't.
Speaker 2:That's why I said it was like putting your iPhone on shuffle.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:You don't know what's coming next unless you're looking at the box or you've looked at the menu. And of course the cartoons are separately selectable. But the beauty of it is you play all. You never know what's coming next. Right, and it really keeps your attention that way. And there's also great value because based on the list price, of course it sells cheaper than that in many places, but with a $22 list price you get 25 cartoons. That's less than a dollar a cartoon. Yeah, I can assure you that is great animated value.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we've said it a few times, but I was not looking at the packaging and I just hit the play all George. So for me every time was like a surprise, because it wasn't all one character and it wasn't all one director and it wasn't all from one decade. So you went from Civil War or World War II to Civil War and everywhere in between and all of these different characters. So I just think it's a blast. I think it's a no brainer if you're a Looney Tunes fan, and the fact that it just hasn't been available with these volumes, that you're putting together these collector's choice volumes, just makes it extra special because you don't have it. That's the fact you don't have these. So this is a great collection. And then you mentioned the volume three that's coming up. It's going to be a similar kind of collection of great cartoons that you haven't seen before again.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, there'll be a couple of very familiar ones and then some unfamiliar ones. Of course, there are people out there that are astute enthusiasts, who are familiar with every frame of everyone. We have a wide breadth of fans that really love these cartoons around the world. It's a much greater universe of people than some people would think and we know the fans are out there and that's why we got behind pitching this, and now our colleagues are very happy with the support these releases are getting. Like I said, I just hope the fun continues because we have a lot of exciting plans in store. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well as always, guys. I appreciate Jerry you coming on bringing all of your animation expertise, and George, of course, it's always a pleasure to talk about the Warner Archive releases and I thank you both for coming on the podcast.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you Tim.
Speaker 1:It's always great to have George Felton, steve and Jerry Beck on to talk animation and Looney Toons. As you can tell, I think this is another terrific release, full of thoroughly enjoyable cartoons, with a wide variety of your favorite and lesser known characters and a diverse list of directors. So if you're interested in purchasing the release, there are links in the podcast show notes and on our website at wwwTheXforstv. So be sure and check those out. If you're on social media, be sure and follow the show on Facebook or Twitter at TheXforsTV or Instagram at TheXforstv, to stay up to date on our upcoming guests and to be a part of our community. And you're invited to a Facebook group for fans of Warner Brothers films called the Warner Archive and the Warner Brothers catalog group. So look for that link on the Facebook page or in the podcast show notes. And for our long-term listeners, don't forget to follow and leave us a review at iTunes, spotify or your favorite podcast provider. Until next time you've been listening to Tim Mallard. Stay slightly obsessed.