The Warner Brothers chat ANIMATION question you have been waiting to be answered..... (1 Viewer)

[Jay Pennington]

Concerning Mammy Two Shoes, she has been redubbed at least twice. Back in the day, she was outright replaced with animation of another character with a new voice...and sometimes the soundtrack of one version is married with the visuals of another, to perplexing results.

There's a rather recent redubbing that I could swear is Whoopi Goldberg. The sound quality is crystal clear, which really stands out against the more limited range of the older material around it. However, the performance is actually pretty good--it still sounds like an African-American lady, but it doesn't have the mispronunciations nor other "offensive" qualities.

Not that I condone alteration of the cartoons, mind ya.

 

[Geoff_D]

The laserdisc "Art of" sets did not totally avoid these edits sadly, but most of the shorts on the LDs are untouched. The first two sets are indispensable for me (I don't have Vol.3 because I hate the Chuck Jones ones) and even the transfers are quite solid considering their age. They're good enough for me!

I'll return to Tom and Jerry on DVD, but only when uncut versions become available. Even Disney has the cojones to release largely uncut DVD collections of their classic cartoons...

 

[Brandon Conway]

Re: not pre-ordering any WB product due to this fiasco.

What you're really saying is that you'll never pre-order anything anymore. Because, let's face it, every single studio has screwed up on a DVD release and failed to own up to it at some point. If you want to have that standard, that's cool. I find that there have been instances where I do indeed wait for online info before purchase. But WB is one of the studios with the least occurances of these type of issues, so it seems arbitrary to scold them any less than the other groups or to hold them to a different standard if one is gonna indeed be that cautious.

 

[ChrisPearson]

No mention of excusing or punishing Warners there. Just my advocation of caution when ordering their animation titles, confidence when ordering anything else.

 

[dana martin]

I know this is off topic, but i still feel slighted, was kind of upset about the first tom and jerry collection, if WB really wanted to do this for those of us that are collecting the gold collection, then i think that they could do something like "The M-G-M Gold Collection" , Make it chronological, and i wouldn't care if they took a year to remaster it all them it's self, this is a treasure trove, 315 shorts, all uncut, now lets see , normally about 60 shorts per set, and with 315 cartoon shorts, from M-G-M that equates to about 5 gold sets that way, and we get droopy, barney bear, Tex Avery, it's a no brainier, that these would sell, we as a collective got the tunes released the correct way, lets see that the rest are treated just as fairly, and not as stepchildren

Uncertian how the WB ultra high resulution proocess works, with out the original source material, but if it could help the older ones with out the negatives, that would need to happen; also if you go crono, then the Cinimascope be presented with out bouncing around on the disc.

 

[Michael Elliott]

I'm somewhat glad to see so many people aren't going to be buying this release. That'll make it a lot easier for me to find the thing on release date. :b

 

[ChrisPearson]

Sorry to resurrect this dead horse for another flogging, but...

In the light of the Tom and Jerry debacle, Warners' response to the issue surrounding their Thundercats DVD (here) really beggars belief.

Apparently ONE episode on the Thundercats disc was missing background music – a typical Warner animation screw-up – yet it was deemed appropriate to issue a corrected replacement disc. This is in spite of there being no replacement offered for THREE cut cartoons on the Tom and Jerry spotlight collection, as well as no remastering on many shorts and rampant DVNR.

We have also not had replacement discs or corrected releases for the following faulty Warner animation sets:
Looney Tunes Golden Collection 1 & 2: SEVEN cartoons with DVNR or non-progressive interlacing;
Jonny Quest: one episode has a line of dialogue missing
Penelope Pitstop: wrong title music/narration on all episodes
Flintstones S3: one episode cut for syndication

If a small problem on the Thundercats set can be addressed (as it should be), then why not these? Or is it simply that Thundercats is perceived as appealing to an adult demographic whereas classic Hollywood theatrical cartoons and vintage Hanna-Barbera TV series are viewed as kiddie fodder and not worth the trouble?

 

[Eric Peterson]

I couldn't agree more. Certainly Tom & Jerry have a large fanbase and sell more units than the Thundercats.

As I've already said, I will not be purchasing anymore WB animation titles. My LDs will do just fine until they get their act together.

 

[Patrick McCart]

I regret to say that I'll pass on the 3rd Golden Collection until it can be confirmed that all 60 cartoons are properly mastered.

Why?

Because this reveals that if there IS a problem, there will be no replacement. Why WB can replace a whole disc because of missing music cues, yet not do the same for one disc of incorrectly flagged cartoons (GC 2) and edited-for-TV masters (T&J 1)?

Warner needs to announce that they're replacing those two discs within the next two weeks. We've waited long enough and never got a real explaination.

 

[TravisR]

If I had to venture a guess, I would say because there was an easier fix for the Thundercats problem then all those other problems. I'm not saying that correcting the other problems would require a vast amount of effort just that the Thundercats problem was easier than the others. And if you haven't seen any comment on any of the other problems, you're probably never going to.

In all fairness, some people didn't find that to be a small problem on Thundercats either.