- We?ve saved the best for last? more of your favorite Looney Tunes?your wish is our command. The concluding release from the Golden Collection Series is a 4-disc set with 60 more of the most looneytic Looney Tunes ever unleashed. Plus, 15 bonus shorts to make this the biggest collection of Looney Tunes ever! Indeed, some have never before been on home video!Disc 1 ? Looney Tunes All Stars, featurin
We’ve saved the best for last… more of your favorite Looney Tunes…your wish is our command. The concluding release from the Golden Collection Series is a 4-disc set with 60 more of the most looneytic Looney Tunes ever unleashed. Plus, 15 bonus shorts to make this the biggest collection of Looney Tunes ever! Indeed, some have never before been on home video! Fifteen cartoons dating from World War II give Volume 6 of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection more focus than previous sets. Many of the 1940′s cartoons remain very funny. Bugs Bunny dresses up as Brunnhilda and rides in to the strains of “Tannhauser” in “Herr Meets Hare” (1945), a gag Chuck Jones re-used to greater effect in “What’s Opera, Doc” a dozen years later. In “Russian Rhapsody” (1940) some of the gremlins who sabotage Hitler’s bomber are caricatures of the Warner Bros. artists. Chuck Jones appears as a chunky, pinkish-tan homunculus swinging a mallet; Friz Freleng is a little green man with a saw-like nose. Younger viewers may find the references to wartime shortages puzzling–or fail to recognize the caricatures of Hermann Goering, Hideki Tojo and Joseph Stalin. Some of the other cartoons can still bring down the house, including “Satan’s Waitin’” (1954), in which Sylvester manages to lose all nine of his lives in pursuit of Tweety, and “Bear Feat” (1949), another exercise in futility for Jones’ Three Bears. The early musicals featuring Bosko, Foxy (or Freddy Fox) and Buddy have not aged well. Created by Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising, these characters were modeled on Felix the Cat and Mickey Mouse, but lack charm and personality. Some more recent films reveal how social attitudes have changed. “Wild Wife,” a spoof of a suburban housewife’s tribulations, may have seemed hilarious in 1954; today, it’s just a laundry list of sexist gags. Like the previous installments, Volume 6 comes loaded with extras. The rarest are five shorts Friz Freleng directed at MGM in 1938. Producer Fred Quimby lured Freleng away from Warner Bros.–only to insist he adapt the comic strip “The Captain and the Kids,” Rudolph Dirks’ version of “The Katzenjammer Kids.” Freleng correctly predicted the films would flop as the characters were “the meanest little bastards in the world,” and soon returned to Warners. (Unrated, suitable for ages 6 and older: cartoon violence, ethnic stereotypes, mild risqué humor, alcohol & tobacco use) –Charles Solomon
(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, 16. Herr Meets Hare, 17. Russian Rhapsody, 18. Daffy the Commando, 19. Bosko the Doughboy, 20. Rookie Revue, 21. The Draft Horse, 22. Wacky Blackout, 23. The Ducktators, 24. The Weakly Reporter, 25. Fifth Column Mouse, 26. Meet John Doughboy, 27. Hollywood Canine Canteen, 28. By Word of Mouse, 29. Heir Conditioned, 30. Yankee Dood It, 31. Congo Jazz, 32. Smile Dam Ya, Smile! 33. The Booze Hangs High, 34. One More Time, 35. Bosko’s Picture Show, 36. You Don’t Know What You’re Doin’! 37. We’re in the Money! 38. Ride ‘em Bosko, 39. Shuffle Off to Buffalo, 40. Bosko in Person, 41. The Dish Ran Away with the Spoon, 42. Buddie’s Day Out, 43. Buddie’s Beer Garden. 44. Buddie’s Circus, 45. A Cartoonist’s Nightmare, 46. Horton Hatches the Egg, 47. Lights Fantastic, 48. Fresh Airedale, 49. Chow Hound, 50. The Oily American, 51. It’s Hummer Time, 52. Rocket Bye Baby, 53. Goo Goo Goliath, 54. Wild Wife, 55. Much Ado About Nutting, 56. The Hole idea, 57. Now Hear This, 58. Martian Through Georgia, 59. Page Miss Glory. 60. Norman Normal)
Buy “Looney Tunes: Golden Collection, Vol. 6″ For Only $22.63
February 24, 2006
#1
with each year my excitement was diminished and my expectations fell. to read this is the last set in the series and to see what shorts are included is the last shovel of dirt on the grave. four disc of exactly what i do not want to see. one whole disc of patriotic war cartoons? ugh. two disc from waaaaaaaay in the back of the vault and another disc of “all stars” aka generic watch em once and pack em off to collect some dust. and a bizaro world bargain at forty something dollars. no thanks and zero stars.
February 24, 2006
#2
If you are perhaps a cartoon historian you might appreciate this collection, however, this set of cartoons is not entertaining. There are a lot of cartoons that are just not funny. So if you are a casual cartoon fan, I would stay away from it.
February 25, 2006
#3
I’ve purchased all the Golden collections thus far and when I saw that “Speedy” had a disk all to himself I was sure it wouldn’t be long till “Pepe” and “Foghorn” had the same. Who picks these? Bosko? I don’t think anyone’s left alive that remembers him. I know everyone has there own favorites, but come on! When they played “Overture, dim the lights” and they all marched out I didn’t see Bosko in the line.
February 25, 2006
#4
What a disappointment. If I want a study in early black and white cartoons I will buy the Disney MICKEY MOUSE BLACK AND WHITE set. At least they were honest. This Looney Tunes set features an entire disc of black and white very unfunny cartoons. I didn’t mind that in earlier sets they featured a few early black and white Porky Pig…but these are the very very early Bosco, etc. Come on guys….what happened to ROAD RUNNER, BUGS BUNNY, SPEED GONZALAS, etc? I can see what Warner is trying to do….stretch out their library so they can go up to VOLUME 100. At least Disney broke their sets out – DONALD DUCK SET, MICKEY MOUSE SET, GOOFY SET, PLUTO SET, ETC. Come on Warner….lets get more of the good stuff…you are going to make enough money with the 100′s of quality Mel Blanc cartoons to keep em coming for the next few years.
February 25, 2006
#5
It’s hard to believe that Warner Bros. was once one of The Great Studios. The Looney Tunes Collection is potentially outstanding — one could even say of historical note, given the role of cartoons from the 40s through the mid-60s. But with two great releases in Volume 1 and Volume 2, the collection has steadily declined to this sad excuse in Volume 6.
Warner Bros. has taken the same approach that the music industry has taken with CDs — with the same result, namely a decline in public interest and a public turn to online downloading.
That approach consists in putting one or two great tracks on a disc to attract buyers and ramming garbage down our throats with the remainder.
What made Looney Tunes great was outstanding animators — Chuck Jones, Bill McKimson, Friz Freleng, Bob Clampett, Tex Avery, Ken Harris, Abe Levitow, Ben Washam. Some of their work has become iconographic in American culture, as much as any great movie (like Wizard of Oz or Gone With the Wind). Warner drops any attempt to capture this. Certainly by Volume 4, Warner has established it’s plan to ram less interesting material down our throats.
This wouldn’t matter IF Warner included more of the gems. But entire characters are almost unrepresented in the series. Most notably to my mind is Claude the Cat — hilarious and absent but for two cartoons (if I remember correctly). Better known and almost as unrecognized is Pepe le Pew.
Warner destroyed what could have been a consistently great collection just as they destroyed the Batman series.
Again, a triumph of moronic marketing over substance and quality.
PLEASE TAKE NOTE: I have a huge personal collection of these cartoons on tape. Since Warner has effectively abandoned these treasures, practically putting them out with the trash, I will now treat my collection as in the public domain. Look for Looney Tunes online.