Great news! I actually held the Foghorn Leghorn DVD in my hand and put it back when I saw the reference to widescreen on the back cover. I can hardly believe no studio ever considered this approach before, I am very pleasantly shocked.
There's no "good way" to release all the Warner cartoons which will please everyone. The difference between the Warner cartoons and something like Popeye, Tom & Jerry, etc., is simply a matter of volume. There are over a thousand of them and a good chunk of them are early B&W ones, and/or musical shorts with no "star characters." A lot of collectors will want them all, but they have to be able to market them in such a way so they sell. The Tweety & Sylvester DVD is really no different from the most recent Spotlight Collection that repeated cartoons from earlier Golden Collections. If anything, I appreciate them keeping the T&S DVD "all" repeats, so I (and other folks who have the Golden Collections) can skip it without missing anything. That's the whole reason they set it up that way -- so collectors don't have to double-dip -- still, I'm not crazy about repeating one cartoon on the Foghorn DVD, but I betcha that and the "and friends" business have to do with the whole widescreen issue and how somewhere along the way they decided to focus their restoration efforts on post-1953 titles. I'm just glad to see that if they're going to crop them, they are now at least providing a choice of cropped or non-cropped. That issue has become the new "pan and scan" and I had really been getting sick of it, though of course YMMV.
