Salutations, traveler of The Internets! Welcome to William's Bloody Hell, so named after our founder, Sir Bloody William.
He is seen in the likeness above in a rare, 19th century woodcut. This
image was rumoured to have been
commissioned after a bout of unpleasantness
in the White Chapel district of London. Do enjoy your stay and peruse our many, varied offerings, much of which cannot be found elsewhere!
:: Looney Tunes Golden Collection (4 DVDs) ::
by William the Bloody
Overture! Curtain, Lights! This is IT! We've hit the heights! You all know it. You've all seen them. The original, Looney Tunes shorts! On this 4 disc DVD collection of classic tunes, we have 56 animated shorts (restored and remastered!), a greeting from legendary director Chuck Jones, 26 shorts with commentaries, 12 Behind the Tunes featurettes, a Cartoon Network Toonheads episode featuring the "lost cartoons", and by god so much more.
With a collection like this, the animated shorts would have sold themselves, but Warner Bros. went and did it right by compiling so many wonderful features to sweeten the deal. I, myself, personally, have always preferred the Warner shorts to those of Disney. The Disney feature length animation was grand, but they then scrimpted on the shorts. They always seemed a bit like comparing Mother Goose to the Brothers Grimm; Disney was cute and sweet and Looney Tunes weren't afraid to, say, shoot somebody square in the face for a laugh. Okay so watching Donald Duck lose a fight with a folding chair is funny, but not nearly as funny as the fight between Daffy and the animator. Hearing one of the Looney Tunes directors say that he hadn't intended these cartoons for kids spoke volumes to me.
Many of the classics are compiled here, including such outstanding greats as The Rabbit of Seville, Duck Amok, Duck Dodgers and the 24th and 1/2 Century, The Scarlet Pumpernickel, Dough for the Do-Do, 2 out of the 3 rabbit season/duck season shorts (the one missing is Duck Rabbit Duck, which ends on the "I'm a fiddler crab! Shoot me it's fiddler crab season!"), one of the many Tortoise and Hare hare shorts. These are all separated out, Disc 1 features Bugs Bunny, Disc 2 features Daffy and Porky, and Discs 3 & 4 are the Looney Tunes All-Stars where they fit in 1 Pepe LePew, 2 Foghorn Leghorns, 1 Speedy Gonzales, 1 Goofy Gofers, 1 featuring Claude Cat and those 2 troublesome mice, 1 of those sheep dog guarding the flock shorts, 2 Tweeties, 1 Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner, 1 Tasmanian Devil, and 1 featuring that dopey Vulture ("my momma done told me, to get something for din-ner"). I was very pleased that they did NOT include any of those baby kangaroo mistaken for a mouse shorts. The collection more or less features the definitive directors of the golden age of the Looney tunes, mainly Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, Robert McKimson, and Friz Freling. Who, if you pay attention and contrast and compare, you can learn to feel the differences in.
All of the great featurettes offer wonderful insights. Such as, I had been under the impression since youth that Mel Blanc did ALL of the voices, barring the occasional female. The is NOT true! There were only a handful of them but Arthur Q Brian is the voice of Elmer Fudd, and Stan Freberg did many including that hyper little yellow dog ("so what do you wanna do now, Spike? you wanna chase cars, Spike?"), one of the Goofy Gofers, Baby Bear (that great big bear in the diaper whenever they do the three bears), and that mouse that always says "yeah-yeah sure-sure", to name a few. There were 2 women voice artists, Bea Benederette (Mama Bear of the 3 bears and Granny in the Tweety shorts) and June Foray (that fat green skinned witch who takes off trailing bobby pins, later Grannies, occasionally the voice of Prissy, that blue bonneted chicken, she's probably MOST famous for later being the voice of Rocky the flying Squirrel). I find out that Mel was the only one to get CREDIT onscreen because he wanted more money, but the studio didn't want to pay and so said "well how about a screen credit instead?". The features did a great job of not only touting the directors and the voice talent, but also musical genius Carl Stalling who composed over 600 shorts in over 22 years (and inventor of the plucked violin strings to accompany tip-toes), layout and design man Maurice Noble (the man who gave us those surreal backgrounds when on Mars, you know all those weird red pathways all over the place) and the man who put it all together, Leon Schlesinger, producer extraordinaire. Kudos to you, boys.
Glaringly OMITTED however, are such classic shorts as What's Opera, Doc ("Kill the wabbit! kill the wabbit!") and One Froggy Evening ("Hello m'baby! hello my honey! hello my ragtime gal!"). The featurettes also mention several times that it was thanks to revolutionary cartoon director Tex Avery that the Looney Tunes were able to find their unique voice, however I do not believe there were ANY Avery shorts included in this collection. I would have liked to at least seen Al Jolsen sing-a about the moon-a and the June-a and the spring-a, but not even that. It's probably because Avery worked for Warner in the early days, before their primary characters were fully formed. It is also too bad that it took them so bloody long to release a set like this to begin with. Had they put it out maybe 2 years before, Chuck Jones would have still been alive and available for commentaries! Sure the commentaries by the historians and such are fine, but the ones with voice artist Stan Freberg stand out as having first hand info, the same could have been done with Chuck. Of course if I had total cosmic power, I would have not only made these cartoons available as soon as DVDs were invented, I would have sorted the cartoons by directors, also. But, hey, I'm still waiting for the likes of MGM to follow suit and release some of theirs on a supreme DVD collection, where I can get my post-Warner Bros Tex Avery fix (Red Hot Riding Hood and Symphony in Slang, please!!).
So, this set has it all. Cartoons to entertain and wonderful features to enlighten.
A+ all the way, baby.
