Looney Tunes Golden Collection – Vol. One through Five + Warner
Bros. Home Entertainment Academy Awards Animation Collection (Warner Home
Video)
Picture:
B- Sound: C+ Extras: A Shorts: A
From the
VHS & Beta days to some fine 12’ LaserDiscs, Warner Home Video issued some
fine, fun collections of their Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies series. When DVD finally arrived, many wondered where
the shorts were. When Warner merged with
Turner Entertainment, they got their older films back, but with the rest of the
catalog came more responsibility to fix and preserve it. They settled on a great formula for DVD of
sets with extras within and outside of the shorts. First came the early volumes of The Looney Tunes Golden Collection.
To their
advantage, they added isolated music tracks (sometimes with sound effects) and
even audio commentaries by scholars like Jerry Beck, Paul Dini, Eric Goldberg, Daniel
Goldmark and Mark Kausler, as well as the legends who made them, including Frank
Tashlin, June Foray, Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng. The good news is that the shorts were choice
picks and each set was rich in content you could watch and rewatch for weeks on
end. Less extensive, expensive double
DVD sets dubbed Spotlight Collections
were even issued separately along with each set for those who wanted less.
All the
shorts are 1.33 X 1 and whether in black & white or color, were some of the
best-looking and memorable animated shorts ever made. The problem with the first three volumes was
quality control. Some of the transfers
were fuzzy, substandard, faded or have some damaged frames, while the Dolby
Digital 1.0 Mono in too many cases (especially frustrating when the image
looked good) would be so compressed and/or distorted it ruined watching that
short.
By the
fourth volume, things improved with better quality control and that is likely
because of more than a few complaints from fans. Therefore, the fourth and fifth volumes were
much better overall in playback quality, though all have included bonus shorts that
show restoration and preservation work is still needed to save this massive catalog.
Warner
has extended this treatment to other shorts collections like their Popeye series and MGM holdings like Droopy and Tom & Jerry (all reviewed elsewhere on this site), even
extending to a fine compilation dubbed the Warner
Bros. Home Entertainment Academy Awards Animation Collection. This 3-DVD set combined all of the above with
some classic MGM shorts we might not otherwise see and the first of the
Fleischer Superman shorts, an all
time classic that should head off a special edition collection of its own when
they can do HD versions of all.
The Looney Tunes Golden Collection will conclude with a sixth and
final installment we will look at separately, as the studio gears up to reissue
all these shorts and more on Blu-ray. A
few were already featured on the Blu-ray (and out of print HD-DVD of the 1938 Adventures Of Robin Hood, reviewed
separately elsewhere on this site) showing how promising those releases
are. The older sets will become cheaper
and this will hopefully only be the very beginning of all studios giving their
shorts catalogs this much respect.
- Nicholas Sheffo
