413 minutes worth of Looney Tunes cannot be bad. Why? Because I don’t think that there are 413 minutes worth of bad Looney Tunes cartoons. Even considering this thing, it is easy to be amazed at the quantity of quality being presented here in the sixth installment of Warner Bros. Loony Tunes Golden Collection. It is a splendid mix of the entertaining and the important, a balance of the short films that are engraved into the brains of most of us under 80 and cartoons which haven’t been shown since the end of World War 2.
This praise does come with a caveat: this set is for collectors. Each disc starts with a screen warning these are unedited cartoons which reflect some of the prevalent prejudices of their time. All things considered, it’s not that big of a deal. There is a less than flattering portrayal of Native Americans, a few insensitive stereotypes, and cartoons that might make the Germans uncomfortable.
(You won’t find Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips or any of the Censored Eleven here.)
This is a four-disc collection, each disc containing 15 cartoons as its main feature. Some have optional commentary or music-only tracks. Each disc also contains it own special features and 3-4 bonus cartoons.
Disc One – Loony Tunes All Stars
This is the disc which is probably the most entertaining to the casual fan. It contains the first appearance of Yosemite Sam, a Road Runner cartoon, a good amount of Daffy Duck, Porky, a Pepe Le Pew, and even a short from my father’s favorite, the Three Bears. Charlie the Dog gets some respect here too. (Fifty percent Collie! Fifty percent Irish Setter! Fifty Percent Boxer! Fifty percent Doberman Pincher! But, mostly, I’m all Labrador Retriever!”)
The contained cartoons are as follows:
1. Hare Trigger
2. To Duck or Not to Duck
3. Birth of a Notion
4. My Little Duckaroo
5. Crowing Pains
6. Raw! Raw! Rooster!
7. Heaven Scent
8. My Favorite Duck
9. Jumpin’ Jupiter
10. Satan’s Waitin’
11. Hook Line and Stinker
12. Bear Feat
13. Dog Gone South
14. A Ham in a Role
15. Often an Orphan
In addition to this, we are afforded two Looney Tunes Television Specials :Bugs Bunny in King Arthur’s Court and Daffy Duck’s Easter Eggcitement
The Bonus Cartoons here are:
1. Sniffles Takes a Trip (1940)
2. Hippety Hopper (1949)
3. Rabbit Rampage (1955)
4. Boyhood Daze (1957)
The highlight here, at least for me, is Rabbit Rampage wherein Bugs Bunny is tormented by the animator. Sure, it’s lesser Duck Amuck (1953), but I always loved those weird-meta-animator-as-a-trickster shorts.
Disc Two – Patriotic Pals
This is our disc of propaganda cartoons, most of which are a lot more entertaining than expected. If you ever wanted to see Bugs Bunny disguised as Hitler or Stalin, well, here is your chance. In fact, he impersonates both in the very first cartoon on the disc Herr meets Hare. Herr meets Hare is notable for having the first instance of Bugs commenting about that left turn in Albuquerque, for containing a proto-scene for What’s Opera Doc, and for featuring Hermann Goering as Bugs’s foil.
Apart from the war films, there are also pro-capitalist cartoons here. In Heir Conditioned, Sylvester inherits a fortune and must be protected from poor financial decisions and his mooching friends. By Word of Mouse was my first experience with economics, declaring the value of mass production and mass consumption by means of a city mouse explaining capitalism to an mouse relative from the old country.
The full set here includes:
1. Herr Meets Hare
2. Russian Rhapsody
3. Daffy the Commando
4. Bosko the Doughboy
5. Rookie Revue
6. The Draft Horse
7. Wacky Blackout
8. The Ducktators
9. The Weakly Reporter
10. Fifth Column Mouse
11. Meet John Doughboy
12. Hollywood Canine Canteen
13. By Word of Mouse
14. Heir Conditioned
15. Yankee Dood it
As a bonus, we also get a collection of Friz Freleng’s MGM cartoons from the late 1930s. We get:
1. Poultry Pirates
2. A Day at the Beach
3. The Captain’s Christmas
4. Seal Skinners
5. Mama’s New Hat
While those are a bonus and are cartoons, those are not our official Bonus Cartoons . Those ones are as follows:
1. The Fighting 69 1/2th
2. Hop and Go
3. Confusions of a Nutsy Spy
Disc Three – Bosko, Buddy & Merrie Melodies
This is a disc of older, black and white cartoons. As such they tend to be thinly plotted and heavy on the singing and dancing. Bosko, Foxy, and Buddy are in the spotlight here.
At one point, Bosko was a huge star. Bosko and Mickey Mouse were neck and neck, in a fight to be the most popular poorly disguised minstrel cartoon character. Oh yeah, Bosko is pretty much a blackface character.
The even more forgotten Foxy is also on full display here; two out of his three cartoons are included. Smile, Darn Ya, Smile, one of the better cartoons on this disc, is eerily similar to the classic Mickey cartoon Steamboat Willie.
Especially since Foxy looks exactly like Mickey Mouse with pointy ears and a big tail. (It’s more of a Swamp Thing/ Man Thing situation than a ripoff, if you get into the history, but now’s not the time for that discussion.)
The other black and white character getting the star treatment here is Buddy. I’ve always hated Buddy, whose cartoons were more boring versions of Bosko cartoons. His cartoons were so boring that Animaniacs dusted the character out of the mothballs to make fun of him. In their fictional history, the Yakko, Wakko, and Dot were created to liven up the notoriously dull Buddy cartoons.
The best short on the disc stars neither Bosko, nor Foxy, nor Buddy. It’s a Beans the cat cartoon called A Cartoonist’s Nightmare. In it, an animator gets sucked into his drawings and is forced to match wits with villains from his previous cartoons. If you watch the commentary track on this one, Jerry Beck points out which scenes were animated by Chuck Jones, which scenes were animated by Bob McKimson, and all the other future superstars involved on this project.
Here is the full list:
1. Congo Jazz
2. Smile, Darn Ya, Smile!
3. The Booze Hangs High
4. One More Time
5. Bosko’s Picture Show
6. You Don’t Know What You’re Doin’!
7. We’re in the Money!
8. Ride ’em Bosko
9. Shuffle Off to Buffalo
10. Bosko in Person
11. The Dish Ran Away with the Spoon
12. Buddie’s Day Out
13. Buddie’s Beer Garden
14. Buddie’s Circus
15. A Cartoonist’s Nightmare
We also get The World of Leon Schlesinger featurette gallery. This contains an Introduction by Martha Sigall and Jerry Beck , the 1930 short Crying for the Carolines, the title sequence for Haunted Gold and the Schlesinger Productions Christmas Party with Optional Commentary by Martha Sigall and Jerry Beck.
The Bonus Cartoons are as follows:
1. I Love a Parade (1932)
2. I Like Mountain Music (1933)
3. Sittin’ on a Backyard Fence (1933)
4. How Do I Know It’s Sunday (1934)
Disc Four – Most Requested Assorted Nuts & One-Shots
This is a random assortment of cartoons missing from previous collections. It includes the Warner Bros. version of Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hatches the Egg. We also get two “parents get the wrong baby” stories, once with a Martian and once with a giant.
Fresh Airedale is a deliciously dark cartoon about the evil yet beloved dog Shep who never gets his comeuppance.
The best cartoon here, though, is probably The Hole Idea, in which an eccentric scientist invents portable holes only to have them stolen by a professional thief.
Cartoons have never been the same since.
The complete list is as follows:
1. Horton Hatches the Egg
2. Lights Fantastic
3. Fresh Airedale
4. Chow Hound
5. The Oily American
6. It’s Hummer Time
7. Rocket Bye Baby
8. Goo Goo Goliath
9. Wild Wife
10. Much Ado About Nutting
11. The Hole idea
12. Now Hear This
13. Martian Through Georgia
14. Page Miss Glory
15. Norman Normal
This disc also treats us to an hour long documentary called Mel Blanc: The Man of a Thousand Voices. While it maintains a James Lipton level of fellatio, it really is an interesting look at the first voice-over superstar. The man has over 1000 imdb credits to his name, did 14 popular radio shows a week, reportedly had an 8 octave range, and was the first person to receive screen credit for voicing a cartoon.
Our Bonus Cartoons include:
1. Sleepy Time Possum [1951 WB Cartoon]
2. Punch Trunk [1953 WB Cartoon]
3. Wild Wild World [1960 WB Cartoon]
4. Bartholomew versus the Wheel [1964 WB Cartoon]
All in all, the collection offers over 80 cartoons, and is a must have for the serious collector.
Warner Home Video presents Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 6. Directed by Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, Robert McKimson, etc. Starring Mel Blanc. Running Time 413 minutes. Unrated. Released on DVD: October 21, 2008. Available at Amazon
