The Extras
The Extras
Warner Archive August Release Announcement: A New 4K, Classic Hanna-Barbera, plus Four Classic Films
George Feltenstein announces the Warner Archive's August releases, featuring a diverse lineup including classic dramas, a Technicolor musical, a John Ford film, a 4K crime thriller, and a complete Hanna-Barbera series.
• "The Hard Way" (1943) starring Ida Lupino in possibly her finest performance as a driven woman advancing her sister's career
• "That Midnight Kiss" (1949) introducing Mario Lanza alongside Catherine Grayson in a Technicolor musical about classical music
• "Intruder in the Dust" (1949) addressing racism and lynching in the South with Juano Hernandez in a powerful social drama
• "Seven Women" (1966), John Ford's final film about female missionaries in 1935 China starring Anne Bancroft
• "Get Carter" (1971) on 4K UHD featuring Michael Caine as a ruthless killer, restored in partnership with the British Film Institute
• The complete "Huckleberry Hound Show" on 11 Blu-ray discs, featuring all 68 episodes as originally broadcast from 1958-1962
Check out the Warner Archive Facebook page for pre-order information and release dates for all these titles. Currently pre-orders are not yet available.
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Hello and welcome to the Extras. I'm Tim Millard, your host, and joining me is George Feltenstein of the Warner Archive to announce the August Blu-rays, and that includes a highly anticipated Hanna-Barbera series, plus a new 4K release. Hi, George.
George Feltenstein:Hello, Tim, great to be with you yet again, as always.
Tim Millard:Well, there's a lot of excitement around the August releases, and maybe a part of that is that the announcement is just a little bit later than usual, and I know that I was on vacation, so the 4th of July holiday maybe pushed it just a little bit, as others might have been as well, but that just built the excitement, and so it's great to see these new releases and I'm looking forward to going through these with you today.
George Feltenstein:I'm looking forward to talking with you about them as well.
Tim Millard:It's a very diverse group and a little something for everyone, I hope, yeah yeah, and I think that animation fans are going to be very happy this month. We'll hold off on that for just a little bit, because we do have quite a few titles to go through and I thought we'd kind of go through starting with some of the oldest ones first. So that means that first up we have the 1943 drama the Hard Way. What can you tell us about this film?
George Feltenstein:I've actually talked about this, I think, when we did our discussion about the man I Love, which I think maybe was a year ago, maybe more, but you know I've spoken on that occasion, as well as other occasions, about my opinion that Ida Lupino needs to be more significantly recognized for her really supreme acting ability, as well as completely unrelated in this particular situation. But, uh, she was a fine director and, uh, she was trying to establish herself as a director when the industry wouldn't even consider the idea of a female director. Uh, so I just have great respect for her. I think this might be her best film performance, which is saying a lot, and she did get a Best Actress nod from the New York Film Critics Circle for her performance in this film, the Hard Way, which is directed by Vincent Sherman.
George Feltenstein:This is a film that only really Warner Brothers could pull off. It doesn't have any of the Hollywood puffery or sheen that would have come from another studio, even some studios that I really admire. This is a tough, gritty film that is making really no secret of the fact that I Lupino plays a hardened, driven woman who will stop at nothing to support the stage performer career of her younger sister, played by Joan Leslie, stage performer career of her younger sister, played by Joan Leslie. And I did mention in the write-up that we put out about the picture that it's a little bit foreshadowing the true life story of Gypsy Rose Lee and her mother Rose Hovik. Rose Lee and her mother, rose Hovik who that whole dynamic between mother and daughter and the mother stopping at nothing to help Gypsy's career as a performer? Well, the role of Ida Lupino in this film and her kind of just tough as nails approach to doing anything she can to further the performance career of her sister, katie, played by Joan Leslie, is just she. I don't want to say she choose the scenery, because that would mean she's just right and more people need to know this film. And now it has finally morphed from looking ratty and awful in a 35-year-old analog video master, which is what we put out as a DVD-R 15 years ago, and what now is a 4K scan off the camera negative, the nitrate camera negative, and a stunning, gorgeous master. That does the film proud. And I also happen to be a fan of the director, vincent Sherman, who lived a long enough life that I actually got to meet him and we recorded some commentaries with him. Alas. We tried to record commentaries with him on films that hadn't been released yet and unfortunately the Hard Way wasn't one of them that got recorded. So I'm grateful for what we have, but it would have been wonderful to have had his particular thoughts on this film, because it wasn't Betty Davis, it wasn't Joan Crawford, it wasn't Bogart. You know it's a whole other thing.
George Feltenstein:My understanding is that the role that Lupino plays in this film was offered to Betty Davis and she turned it down, so that seems very plausible. She had also turned down Mildred Pierce, something she probably regretted for the rest of her life. But Ida Lupino is the real centerpiece of the film and her performance just makes it magnetic. I remember seeing this film on television as a kid and being really mesmerized by the fact that Ida Lupino's character is just so well. Let's just say maybe evil is a little too hard, but not a nice person and not a very ethical person and not a very considerate person.
George Feltenstein:Vaudevillians that come across, uh, joan lizzie's character when she goes to the vaudeville house. Jack carson gives a a very vulnerable performance, which isn't usually like him. His characters are usually very wise ass and of course he was downright applicably nasty in. A Star is Born in 1954. But here you actually feel compassion for him because he's basically destroyed by Ida Lupino in her wake to make her sister a success. So it's a great deal of fun in that respect. It's not fun watching somebody get destroyed, but when Ida Lupino is doing the destruction work it's impressive.
Tim Millard:Well, it feels like we've talked about this one, as you said earlier last year, maybe the year before. I mean, this has been requested by many people and we've talked about it because of the inclusion of Ida Lupino and Joan Leslie, so I'm excited to see this come out, and I know a lot of others are as well. Now, do you have any extras on this release?
George Feltenstein:Yes, we do, and it was an omission when we made the Facebook announcement yesterday that we didn't talk about the extras. So I will be happy to share that information here and then we're going to update our Facebook page. There was a radio show version on Lux Radio Theater, full hour, but none of the original cast were participatory in the radio version. It starred Miriam Hopkins and French O'Tone, among others, and it's a very good audio translation or audio edition of the storytelling. It's quite effective, uh, edition of the storytelling. It's quite effective, and miriam hopkins was very strong personality, uh, in her own way, and uh, she takes on the lapino role very, very interestingly, so I think people will enjoy that.
George Feltenstein:Then we have two 1943 uh warner brothers shorts Warner Brothers shorts, both of which are in HD. One of them is called Gun to Gun and the other is called Over the Wall, and they reflect the wartime activities of 1943. And then we also have, in addition to the original trailer, we also have two Warner Brothers cartoons, both of which are in HD and both of which I consider to be famous the Aristocat, which is a wonderful, wonderful cartoon Not with any of the most familiar characters, but it's tremendous, and then a very famous cartoon Scrap Happy Daffy, which is black and white, and both of those cartoons, as I said, are in HD, so this is going to be a really, really great disc.
Tim Millard:Yeah, yeah, it sounds like it. Well, next up, george, you have a Technicolor release, that Midnight Kiss from 1949. What can you tell us about this film?
George Feltenstein:Well, this is a production from what I jokingly refer to as the land of Pasternakia. Joe Pasternak, who produced a very specific kind of musical at MGM, of musical at MGM. His production unit was kind of in competition sort of at MGM with the Arthur Freed unit. The Freed musicals were very classy and used the very best talent and Freed musicals are generally trying to advance the form and they were much more in the direction of having music be a justified part of the screenplay. Joe Pasternak's films were much more light, they were lighter entertainment, but that doesn't mean that they weren't impressive productions. He tended to really love classical music and so performers like Catherine Grayson and Jane Powell they were often seen in Pasternak productions and Esther Williams swam more for Joe Pasternak, I think, than any of the producers and he liked to put novelty acts in his films. As a result, his films were often more profitable for the studio than the more culturally respected Arthur Freed productions were. Culturally respected Arthur Freed productions were, and that Midnight Kiss was a 1949 Technicolor entertainment gala. I would say it's based in the world of classical music and opera. You have pianist Jose Iturbi who was in several Pasternak films and many films at MGM. This was his last because he was getting word from various people that his performances in these movies were taking away from his reputation as a serious musician. So he decided to cast Hollywood aside after this. But with a goodbye there's also a hello, and this is the film that introduced Mario Lanza to the movie screen. And Lanza had already established himself he was a truck driver from Philadelphia and they changed his name. He started making recordings for RCA and when he was at the Hollywood Bowl performing, the story is I don't know if this is apocryphal or not that LB Mayer's assistant, ida Coberman, went to Mayer and said I heard the most amazing tenor at the bowl last night. We've got to sign him to the studio. However it happened exactly. However it happened exactly. That's probably how it happened. But whatever the methodology was, the studio signed him for a contract.
George Feltenstein:He does not get top billing in this movie. It says and introducing Mario Lanza. But so the top billed stars of the film were, in fact, catherine Grayson, jose Turbi and then Ethel Barrymore. And then there's in big letters and introducing Mario Lanza. So in the film like life, he played a Philadelphia truck driver who had a great voice Philadelphia truck driver who had a great voice and it's a romance between Catherine Grayson and Mario Lanza and this had an original screenplay, so the storytelling is actually very good and most of the music actually takes place on the stage in terms of operatic arias and so forth and so on. There is a scene where Mario Lanza serenades Catherine Grayson singing Jerome Kern from the street. He serenades her in her window. He sings they Didn't Believe Me by Jerome Kern, a very famous popular song of the earlier part of the 20th century. It's a highlight of the movie. I mean, they both had wonderful voices and they had good chemistry.
George Feltenstein:The film was a substantial box office performer and it did uh lead to them being re-teamed very shortly thereafter in a movie called uh the toast of new orleans, which also co-starred david niven, and that's the song where uh be my love was introduced, written for the movie it. It became a huge hit for Mario Lanza and he made several films at MGM and his tenure there was brief. He walked out on the studio when they were making the Student Prince in 1952. And there was a legal skirmish and eventually the settlement was that Lonza would not be in the film, that he would record the songs for the student prince character and it would be performed by actor Edmund Purdom. So that was the last MGM studio based production that Lonza was in. And then he made a film here at Warner Brothers Serenade, which was actually based on a book by James M Kane who wrote Mildred Pierce. And then a couple of years went by where there are no Lonza movies and Lonza hooked up with in the the late 50s a company called Titanis in Italy and made two films Seven Hills of Rome and then, for the First Time, both of which were filmed overseas but MGM ended up distributing, I think, for the entire world except Italy. So there's this irony that MGM and Lonza parted company after a lawsuit in the early 50s and his last two films were done basically for Titanus and MGM.
George Feltenstein:He died very, very young. He had a heart attack, he was a heavy smoker, he had fluct. Death was heartbreaking, but he still has a worldwide following, especially among opera lovers, and his recordings still sell all over the world. And his most famous film work was portraying Enrico Caruso in the Great Caruso, which was a huge box office hit and which we released a Technicolor restoration on Blu-ray of in, I think, 2019 or 2020. But it was one of our Technicolor recombinations and it looked and sounded fantastic, as does this.
George Feltenstein:This is another one of those films where we've taken the original Technicolor negatives, used our proprietary technology to make a sharp, colorful presentation and it's very entertaining. And it's very entertaining and we've added to the disc something we also had on the DVD of it almost 20 years ago a deleted musical number called One Love of Mine. And we also have two MGM cartoons in high def Heavenly Puss with Tom and Jerry and Señor Droopy with Droopy, from Mr Tex Avery and the original trailer. So it should be a very fun disc and I know that Lonza fans will be very happy by this news.
Tim Millard:They're coming out of the woodwork just saying how happy they are, so really looking forward to it. The Technicolor restorations are always home runs, so looking forward to this when it comes out in August. Well, next we have another film from 1949, and that's the drama Intruder in the Dust. What can you tell us about this release?
George Feltenstein:Well, it couldn't be more different from that Midnight Kiss in terms of what filmed entertainment is, and this was a social drama that was based on the novel by William Faulkner, and MGM was very brave to make this film. Mgm was very brave to make this film. It deals with racism, lynching prejudice, in a very adult, straightforward manner. That is not Hollywood. And in fact, director Clarence Brown, who had established himself as one of the great directors at MGM in the silent era he did many of the Garbo movies in the talkie era as well and Clarence Brown brought his cameras to Oxford Mississippi where this story takes place. Oxford Mississippi, where this story takes place, and one of my favorite actors, who is very underrated but has now been properly recognized in a contemporary sense Juano Hernandez. He plays a black man who is falsely accused of a crime. You know, a white man is murdered and the cops the Mississippi cops are completely corrupt and they're ready to lynch this man. And David Bryan portrays a lawyer who is helped by Claude Jarman Jr, a teenager who a lot of people will remember from his work as Jody in the Yearling. That really put him on the map as an actor, but he was a young man here. This is several years after the Yearling and there's like a trio. This is several years after the Yearling and there's like a trio. It's the David Bryan character, the Claude Jarman Jr character and also an older woman played by Elizabeth Patterson, who is best known. She was in some early 30s Warner pre-code movies. She did a lot of work but most people know her as Mrs Trumbull from I Love Lucy. She's terrific in the movie and the three of them, against all odds, fight for Juano Hernandez's freedom.
George Feltenstein:And at the time this movie came out, bosley Crowther, who was the reviewer for the New York Times, who very often didn't have many nice things to say about most films very popular films. He would usually trash them. And how he ended up being the Times film critic for as long as he was is kind of shocking. What ended his career was a terrible review he gave Bonnie and Clyde and when Bonnie and Clyde turned out to be revered as breakthrough in cinema, mr Crowther was sent packing. Mr Crowther was sent packing, but this was long before that and yet he referred to A Truer is in the Dust as one of the great cinema dramas of our times. If anybody wants to go back and use the New York Times machine and read Crowther's review.
George Feltenstein:It's just an out-and-out rave that speaks to the excellence of this film and the fact that MGM had the courage to make it in 1949, I think shooting probably started in 1948, but it was released in 49. And it is not a long film it's 87 minutes long. It is captivating, it is magnetic and here again we're able to take a film that wasn't looking very good in what we've been distributing in television and on DVD. Now it's got a gorgeous new master. It's a 4k scan from our preservation elements, which were second generation.
George Feltenstein:This is one of the many black and white negatives that burnt up in the Eastman fire in 1978. So fortunately we have fine grain that is quite beautiful and very well made and it almost looks like you're looking at the original negative. It's just that beautiful. This film was named one of the 10 best of the year by the National Board of Review back when they were doing the best films of 1949. But I still believe that it isn't well-known enough and I urge people to see it. And, of course, I urge people to buy it and make it part of their libraries, because these things don't happen without consumer support and I can't imagine anyone who loves film not wanting to have this film among their collection.
Tim Millard:It's just knockout performances, fine filmmaking and, uh, as they said on the poster, it's sensational and you also put in a nice uh amount of extras on here as well for the fans. You got uh shorts, it looks like.
George Feltenstein:Yeah, they're diversionary. One is this would be again if you went to a Lowe's theater and saw Intruder in the Dust, it would likely be with a cartoon in a short. We've got a Fitzpatrick Travel Talks short filmed in Technicolor talks short filmed in technicolor play lands of michigan, uh. And then we have another tex avery cartoon in hd, counterfeit cat. Both of these are from 1949 and uh. You know, I usually research and try to figure out what film opened with what short or cartoon, but it it changed from locale to locale. So I did find one theater that was showing Counterfeit Cat with Intruder in the Dust. So that felt like a right connection and it's ironic in the sense that the Fitzpatrick travel talk, which is talking about fun places to be in Michigan, it's completely the opposite of the serious, dark drama of Intruder in the Dust, how people were wanting to be entertained in the movies and how, after World War II ended, more dark, realistic, serious stories started to come from the major studios. And this was a very brave and wonderful piece of filmmaking by MGM.
Tim Millard:Well, next we have the John Ford film Seven Women, and that's from 1966. What can you tell us about this film?
George Feltenstein:copyright because its first public performance, I believe, was in Japan in 1965, like about a month before, like December, if that information is correct. But this was John Ford's last film and this has never been on DVD legally. There's bootlegs floating around but there's never been a legitimate DVD release and the reason for that was is that our materials were really not good on the film and we needed to go back to the negative and that was like a no-no for a long time. But now we scan the negative at 4K, it looks magnificent and this is not a John Ford sweeping epic on the outdoor vistas. This is much more of a constrained atmosphere. It is very, very well written, very well performed and it is a story of female empowerment. Coming from John Ford, who is so well known as being a man's director, well, john Ford also directed Shirley Temple in Wee Willie Winkler, which is a very good film, by the way, and not ours. But Seven Women has been requested for so long because there was no DVD and what they've been showing on television is a four by three letterbox master that has been blown up to be in 16 by nine and looks wretched. So this so needed to be done and the performances are tremendous.
George Feltenstein:Anne Bancroft is the leading lady. She happens to be one of my favorites for a number of reasons. She gave so many wonderful performances but she's really the glue that holds us together. She was a last-minute casting change because the original person cast in this role was Patricia Neal, who suffered a stroke. And you also have Sue Lyon, who is in Lolita and Night of the Iguana, and Margaret Layton and Flora Robeson and Betty Field Really great group of women in this film. And, can't forget, there's even an appearance by Eddie Albert. He's one of the few major male roles in the movies and he probably started the first season of Green Acres after they shot this movie, I would imagine. But it's a terrific, terrific film and it's about, obviously, seven women who are missionaries in China in 1935. And it is not a long film but it is very tightly packed. And you have John Ford, clearly still in full faculties of his craft, and by this point he had been making movies for nearly 50 years.
George Feltenstein:I looked for something to put with this that would be appropriate. So what we added was an Oscar winning cartoon. That is not, I really should say, an Oscar winning short animated film made by Chuck Jones called the Dot and the Line and it's based on the writings of Norton Juster, who wrote the Phantom Tollbooth, a very favorite book, children's book for many people, and that Chuck Jones actually filmed for MGM in future years. The Dot and the Line is in HD and it comes with the feature along with the trailer.
George Feltenstein:I know this is going to make people very happy, because who doesn't love John Ford and his films? He's probably the, if not the, most respected American filmmaker from the golden era of the 20th century. He's certainly at the tip top. He was the very first recipient of the AFI Life Achievement Award, which says something so really important to his filmography that we bring this out. And we have other John Fords in the offing as well that we're working on. We're actually, I would say we have about 75 films planned or in various stages of pre-production or production right now, but which have all been approved and then we're working on. So we're even doing more than the four Betty Davis movies that I mentioned. I think it's six or seven now. So there is more John Ford coming as well, and people will be happy.
Tim Millard:Well, speaking of more, you are releasing your third 4K in August, which is terrific. It's going to be your third one in the course of about well, less than a year. What can you tell us about this one?
George Feltenstein:Well, I'd like to give credit where credit is due. This is our release of a major restoration effort that was undertaken under license from us by the British Film Institute, one of the very most important British films of the last 50 years Get Carter, starring Michael Caine, the British Film Institute. They're wonderful, wonderful people, wonderful to work with and they pulled out all the stops to make a 4K, uhd, hdr, amazing special edition of Get Carter. Our agreement was that they would give us access to their work on the feature, so it was a collaborative effort. We scanned the negative and they did beautiful, beautiful work. They were kind enough to give us access to several of the special features that they had in their deluxe edition. Not all of them were they able to share with us, but many of them were.
George Feltenstein:So this is a very loaded disc. It's a 4K disc, bd100, high bitrate, of course. Disc production, encoding, authoring, compression, done by Fidelity in Motion. David McKenzie is the best. I've've said it before, I'll say it again. We're so lucky to be working with him and the presentation is loaded with lots of extra features and yet we keep the high bit rate on the bd 100 for the 4K HDR UHD presentation, which has Dolby Vision and HDR10. But the Blu-ray which is on the BD50, is the same remaster with the same content in terms of special features. So when you buy the combo, if you haven't gotten your 4K set yet, you have that disc waiting for you when you upgrade. But you can get that new remastered Blu-ray in this presentation.
George Feltenstein:And the film itself was directed by a gentleman named Mike Hodges who just passed away. In the last few years I got to speak with him on the phone several times. It was his, I would say, dying wish because I believe he was in his 90s at the time to see this film get properly anointed the way the BFI did. And they not only created this amazing special edition, they also toured the film throughout the UK. We had released our own, not Warner Archive, but Warner Home Video had released a Blu-ray of the feature. I would say probably a little over 10 years ago, maybe 11 years ago, might've been 10, but that had an Americanized audio track where the Cockney accents had been kind of uh minimized to be more understandable, british uh accents by certain players and uh. That was an appropriate choice for 1970. But our domestic Blu-ray had that track and it really should have had both. What we've offered here is the original UK track, thanks to the work done by the BFI. So I really want to be clear that the reason we are releasing this through the Warner Archive is to give the proper treatment to all the work that the BFI did, and I want to thank all the folks at the BFI for their incredible generosity in sharing these elements with us so that we could make a US disc with a 4K Blu-ray combo that was affordable and that had plenty of special features that speak to the excellence of this British crime drama.
George Feltenstein:Because if you only think of Michael Caine, in his delightfully fun you know he had so many roles where he just loved him because he was, you know the cider house rules and all the films that came before he plays a ruthless killer. Now, the irony of it is this film was remade into a blaxploitation film that we just put out a few months ago. Hitman MGM was very they were very anxious to repurpose the property for a different audience, and that's all well and good. But this is the original. Uh, it's not sanitized, it's rated r and it's exactly how the film premiered in the uk, with its original audio and its mono. Because of that there's no Atmos, there's no remix. It looks and sounds tremendous because the BFI did a beautiful job restoring it from the original negative and I think people will be very much appreciative of the fact that this work is now available.
George Feltenstein:There will be more 4Ks coming from us. Not very many. They'll be occasional, as I said before, maybe three, four a year, just because of the increase in cost and also because some of the older films they don't really have 4,000 in the negative. They're just, it's just not there. So, um, this is a film where, courtesy of the bfi's work, the colors are tight and they snap and it looks really, really good and it's. It's a wonderful thing to be able to add to your library at a very reasonable price. So that's Get Carter and not to be confused with the Sylvester Stallone remake of the same name that came along in 2000. That's not what we're selling here.
Tim Millard:Well, as you mentioned, there is just a load of extras.
George Feltenstein:We won't go through all of them here, but that would take a whole podcast just to talk about.
Tim Millard:It's a lot. It's a lot. So this is going to be a great release, and it's really great to hear about the partnership between the Warner Archive, Warner Brothers and the BFI in this instance, for this release. Well, George, that leaves us with one TV series highly anticipated animated TV series from Hanna-Barbera. What can you tell us about this release?
George Feltenstein:Well, when I was growing up, this was, I think, my first favorite television show as a toddler, and this is a show that went on the air before I was born, so I was late to the party. But the Huckleberry Hound show finally arriving, not just on Blu-ray remastered but finally arriving in complete form. Arriving in complete form and we've spent, I would say, probably about three years working on this, because there was a DVD that was released with. The first 26 episodes came from interpositives and, strangely, the famous theme song was not there. It was in. They did reconstruct the pilot episode and, if my memory is serving me and I haven't seen the DVD in a very long time I don't think they had the main and end titles and they did the best they could at the time. But there was this rumor floating around that the reason why the rest of the series was never released was because the first DVD volume didn't sell well. That's absolutely not true. It sold very well.
George Feltenstein:The problem was that at this point in the early years of Hanna-Barbera, music was used for these cartoons in the Huckleberry Hound show. That was licensed and the licenses did not include home video, because home video didn't exist then. The licenses were for free television and non-theatrical. So we had to go back and clear all this music. And that was just the beginning. Not only did we have to spend quite a bit of money clearing the music, but we also had to put the shows back together. And that was a daunting task because it wasn't like and I think I may have talked about this before in a similar fashion with McGilligrilla there is no Huckleberry Hound show, episode one negative. That's the whole show, the individual segments which in the first two seasons were Huckleberry Hound, yogi Bear and Boo Boo, pixie and Dixie and Mr Jinx. Those three segments were saved and inventoried. As such, that represents the first two seasons. The third season, yogi Bear, left the Huckleberry Hound show and was replaced by Hokey Wolf for seasons three and four.
George Feltenstein:So what we have here in effect now are the 68 shows as they were originally broadcast across four seasons. We have included as many bumpers and bridges as we could find. They were all buried in a mass inventory listing. That required our people to pull their hair out trying to find as many pieces as possible. And then we had to deal with the fact that when the show was originally broadcast, that as early as I believe the 10th episode, there was a repeated Huckleberry Hound segment. So we were really at a crossroads. What do we want to do? So what we chose to do was to replicate as close as possible how each show was broadcast during the original 1958 and 1961-62 seasons. So there are 68 shows. Within those individual half-hour shows there will be on occasion repeated segments that were in earlier shows.
George Feltenstein:So this is almost a reference series and if you want to binge all the episodes, you may want to fast forward through a segment that you saw earlier or we added as many original commercials from our good materials that we could find. They're all black and white commercials, but some of those commercials and some of the interstitials are repeated. We did find some guide paperwork from the advertising agency that had put the package together, because Kellogg's Cereals was the sponsor. We have the original Kellogg's rooster, the picture of the cornflakes, in color. We were thrilled that we could find the original main titles in color because they were changed for syndication later. We have the original main titles, which is wonderful. The end titles that we have are original and we could only find black and white for that. So that's what we used and we used as many of these commercials and interstitial pieces as we could find.
George Feltenstein:So the shows actually, with everything put together, are just a hair longer than 30 minutes. So that's why we're on 11 discs, because we're being as comprehensive as possible. It isn't 100% perfection. 100% perfection would have been if we had every bumper, every commercial. Uh, they just weren't saved. Nobody thought there was a need to use these things again. So, to reconstruct this properly and faithfully as we could, I look upon this as course entertainment and something for the animation collector, but also as as much of a record of what people saw.
George Feltenstein:For those four seasons we had the Yogi Bear segments. They had been mastered already a few years earlier, I believe, for the launch of HBO Max back in 2020. But everything else was newly done for this from the original negatives, and the result is quality that is quite remarkable. Quality that is quite remarkable. I had only seen them in 16 millimeter, you know, until the DVD came out, which wasn't complete. Those came from interpositives, this came from the original negatives, and I can't tell you the amount of work our mastering and preservation and inventory teams put into all of this and trying to find the guide to making sure we were doing as close as possible a re-approximation of the four seasons and what they entailed.
George Feltenstein:All the segments are there in full.
George Feltenstein:There are a lot of bumpers and bridges that I had never seen that we were able to find.
George Feltenstein:The vintage Kellogg's commercials are a treat, but again, they have to be repeated so that every half hour show is similar to or exactly as broadcast.
George Feltenstein:Certainly, in terms of the segments in each show are the segments as broadcast, and I'm very grateful to my colleagues for the incredible amount of research and work that they put into this, along with myself and ever since we started the warner archive back in 2009, people were asking for the rest of huckleberry hound because all they had was the first 26 episodes and now you have all 68 shows that ran across the four seasons with all the segments, and Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear really set the stage for what Hanna-Barbera was about to do. Pixie and Dixie are terrific and Mr Jigs is a great character and Hokey Wolf and Ding-a-ling were fine fill-ins as Yogi Bear got his own show and I just think people are going to be really, really happy I hope they will be with what we've put together here, because it's been really a labor of love and dedication to treating hannah barbara right and uh, 15, 16 years of people writing to us saying when are we going to get the full huckleberry hound show?
Tim Millard:well, the day has finally come I remember george you mentioning this a year or two, I mean, you have been mentioning to me this ongoing work. It's been a huge task and now it's finally ready and it's fantastic the way that you chose to do it so that you get the experience. It's the Saturday morning, get your bowl of cereal, watch the episode with the commercials, with the repeated, repeated. You know it's that experience. It's not just here's a bunch of episodes, it's the experience that you absolutely.
George Feltenstein:And I mean I know like when I think of this series or rocky and bullwinkle, there are little interstitials. You know fan mail from some flounder on Rocky and Bo Winkle. The repetition was something that was actually welcomed by the younger audience. The great thing about these Hanna-Barbera early works is they were written more for all ages, not talked down to children, and so they can be entertaining to adults as well as kids. But the fact that each episode is there either exactly as it was presented or as close as we could get as possible, that's very, very important, because it then becomes more of a reference as well as a piece of entertainment. And if anything is something you've seen repeated, uh, if you've seen that commercial like five times over the watching three discs, you just skip through it. There's ample chaptering, like every bumper, every bridge, every commercial, every segment, every main and end title, they all are chaptered.
George Feltenstein:And uh, I also want to talk about the way this will be packaged. There will be an elite case. It's kind of along the lines of what we did with Cheyenne. There will be an elite case with the first season episodes in their own elite case, then an elite case with seasons two and three and an elite case with the discs of season four. They will be inside an outer sleeve, so this is sturdy packaging. You don't have to worry about something that is DVD-sized. It's Blu-ray packaging and you don't have to worry about opening up the case and having the disc fall all over you. This is very important to what we do at the Warner Archive and I'm delighted to. We've been working on this a very long time and I'm delighted that the day is finally here that we can present it to the fans, who have been very patiently waiting.
Tim Millard:Now you have a lot of extras. Are those on the 11th disc or are they spread out?
George Feltenstein:11th disc or are they spread out? Uh, they're on the last disc and we carried over the dvd extras, with one exception. The one exception we didn't carry over because it really makes no sense now. Uh, is reconstructing the pilot. They did a whole piece on how they were trying to piece together the original. That was also a passion project for the people who were involved at the time. But they also weren't able to find a lot of the things that we have subsequently found and they didn't have as much support within the company for their efforts. So it's not to denigrate their efforts. They were thinking along the same lines that we are now. But that one piece isn't there.
George Feltenstein:But we have a piece that is a tribute to Dawes Butler who did so many wonderful voices for Hanna-Barbera. He was Elroy Jetson, he was Huckleberry Hound, he was Yogi Bear. He did just an amazing amount of voices and there's a piece dedicated to him. There is something that was very cutely put together as like a little music video and another piece that cut together the way huckleberry hound would fracture the language with this southern drawl. So those pieces are on here.
George Feltenstein:But the extras not to pull the title of your podcast really are built into every episode with the vintage commercials from catalogs and the bumpers and the bridges. And to have you know, huck and Pixie and Dixie introduce the next Pixie and Dixie cartoon. Those pieces weren't seen. I can't be exactly certain of this but I'm pretty sure that after the 1966 rerun, syndication airings began and everything got re-chopped up. I know there were certain bridges that were kept for the syndication reruns and then less as years went on, but most of this material hasn't been seen until there have been some recent television broadcasts as a result of the work that we've been doing for the last couple of years, but the commercials have not been part of that and Kellogg's has not not been part of that and Kellogg's has not been a part of that and Kellogg's sponsorship of the Huckleberry Hound Show led to Kellogg's sponsorship of the Yogi Bear Show and Quick Draw McGraw and there was a very good relationship between that company and Hanna-Barbera really helped them off their feet because the first Hanna-Barbera series was Rough and Ready, which I hope we can release someday.
George Feltenstein:That was made in 16 millimeters so it's a technical challenge because it doesn't look particularly wonderful, because it was made quickly on a low budget. Bill and Joe were fired from MGM and they wanted to get something on NBC, hence Rough and Ready, but we do want to tackle that at some point. But Huckleberry Hound through the sponsorship of Kellogg's and their ad agency, leo Burnett, they were able to go to over 100 stations and get the Huckleberry Hound Show broadcast once a week, sponsored by Kellogg's, and that is what we now can bring to the fans and the enthusiasts who've been waiting. So I hope people appreciate the work that went into it and, most importantly, I hope they enjoy it, because it's really entertaining, right.
Tim Millard:Well, George, August is another terrific month. I love the fact that you've got a brand new animation that has been highly anticipated by the fans. You've got that wonderful 4K from the BFI and then, of course, the classic films, including another Technicolor.
George Feltenstein:Well, thank you for the opportunity to speak about it, tim. I'm glad to share with the folks what's coming up, and we'll have lots more to talk about in the future. A lot of exciting things happening.
Tim Millard:That's for sure. Thanks again, george. Thank you those who would like more information about the films George announced today. Be sure and check out our Facebook page and our Warner Archive Facebook group. You can find links to those and all of our social media sites in the podcast show notes. Facebook is also the best place to get the pre-order links for these titles when they become available. If you aren't yet subscribed or following the show at your favorite podcast provider, you may want to do that so that you don't miss anything. We have coming up Until next time. You've been listening to Tim Millard. Stay Slightly Obsessed.