Looney Tunes: The Golden Collection [Volume 2]

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I mentioned in my review of the first volume of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection that since childhood I have always liked the Warner Bros. cartoon characters a little more than I liked the Disney gang or the MGM or other big-screen animated folk. Bugs, Elmer, Daffy, Porky, Tweety, Sylvester, Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote, and the rest always seemed to me more energetic, more adventurous, more zany, and more daring. In contrast, Mickey and Goofy seemed rather slow. In any case, as if the first four-disc set weren't enough, this second volume presents sixty more of WB's best animated shorts, mostly from the forties and fifties, plus an assortment of additional items. Great fun.

One of my only disappointments in the first set was that it didn't contain one of my all-time favorite Warner Bros. cartoons, "What's Opera, Doc?" At the time, I could hardly believe they hadn't included it; I mean, it's among the studio's most popular animated subjects. Had they forgotten it? Of course not. They were saving it for this second volume, and I'm sure I would buy the whole new package for this one feature alone.

I was also mildly disappointed that the first Golden Collection did not feature enough of my favorite characters: Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. Well, I'm happy to say that this time out the folks at WB have devoted most of an entire disc to the characters I love so much.

Everyone will have their own favorite WB cartoons, and it would be useless of me to try and rank order the sixty-odd shorts in this collection according to my own personal tastes (beyond my aforementioned preferences for "What's Opera, Doc?" and the Road Runner entries). So let me just give you an idea of what's on the discs, and you can decide for yourself if it sounds worthwhile.

The Contents and Extras:
It's pretty easy to find what you're looking for in the set because the four discs are each given over to a separate character or pair of characters: a disc for Bugs, one for Road Runner and Coyote, one for Tweety and Sylvester, and one for miscellaneous others. Moreover, each disc is identified by a picture of the character on the top: Bugs's picture is on disc one, Road Runner on disc two, etc. All four discs come in a foldout, plastic-and-cardboard case that is further housed in a laminated cardboard slipcover.

Disc One:
Here we get fifteen Bugs Bunny "masterpieces," as the liner notes describe them. I don't know that I would call them "masterpieces" exactly, but some of them are pretty funny. They date from 1941 through 1955, with the earliest ones not yet settling on the familiar Bugs design, the middle years bringing out the best in the animation, and the later releases done in a typical 50's simplistic, angular style. In a few cases the titles outshine the contents of the shorts, "Gorilla My Dreams," "Rabbit Transit," or "Hare Conditioned," for instance. "Slick Hare" is cute because it features animated cameos by famous movie stars of the day--Frank Sinatra, Ray Milland, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Sidney Greenstreet, Carmen Miranda. And in "Little Red Riding Rabbit" there's a wolf that looks suspiciously like Disney's Big Bad Wolf. All of the Bugs' cartoon are amusing, as are the voice characterizations by Mel Blanc and the direction alternately by Robert McKimson, Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Friz Freleng, and Chuck Jones. Some of the shorts include audio commentaries by the filmmakers who worked on them; others include optional audio tracks, music-only, for example.

In addition to the cartoons, there is Part One of the TV special, "Bugs Bunny's Looney Tunes All-Star 50th Anniversary," made about twenty-some years ago and lasting about twenty-four minutes. Then, there's a seven-minute "Behind-the-Tunes" featurette, "A Conversation with Tex Avery." And from the old "The Bug Bunny Show" on television, there are two sequences, "Do or Diet" and "There's No Business Like Slow Business."

Disc Two:
This disc is one of my favorites, eleven Road Runner cartoons and four "friends." The Road Runners are set up chronologically from 1951 to 1957, all directed by Chuck Jones. The hapless Coyote is continually thwarted in his often elaborate but always futile attempts to annihilate the Road Runner. It's interesting to not that as the cartoons march through the decade, you can see them getting more and more minimalist, as Warners apparently decided to spend less and less money on them.

Incidentally, the Coyote is never specifically referred to as Wile E. Coyote in these shorts. Also, "Road-Runner" is most often hyphenated in the series, but sometimes not; and sometimes the Road Runner's name is preceded by the article "the," as in "the Road Runner," and sometimes not. Sometimes it's just "Road Runner." (Both the Random House and Merriam-Webster's Unabridged Dictionaries spell the real-life bird's name as a single word, "roadrunner.") But as far as I'm concerned, a Road Runner and a Coyote by any other name are still the same old, lovable characters. Along with the Road Runner cartoons are two Hubie-and-Bert short subjects, one Dover Boys cartoon, and one Henry, Mother, and Little Junior Bear feature.

Also on the second disc are a twenty-five minute TV pilot for "The Adventures of the Road Runner"; an eleven-minute "Behind-the-Tunes" featurette, "Crash! Bang! Boom!: The Wild Sounds of Treg Brown," providing information on the man who contributed to much of the sound in the Warner Bros. cartoons; and the famous two-minute opening sequence to television's "Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show." As before, some of the shorts include audio commentaries by the filmmakers who worked on them; others include optional audio tracks.

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