Wither Woody Woodpecker? (1 Viewer)

[JoeDoakes]

I was watching some of the cartoons on the Volume 2 of the Woody Woodpecker set last night with my children and they were really enjoying it. I wanted to ask if anyone had thought about future releases. Last year, Jerry Beck said on Stu's Show that there would be a special Woody Woodpecker set for Universal's 100th (http://www.hometheaterforum.com/t/288885/jerry-beck-on-stus-show-tommorrow-at-4/60 post 89), but it never happened (although there was a bonus disk in the Universal 100 Mega Set with many previously released cartoons). One thought I had was that, since Sony did well by selling the UPA set through TCM, perhaps Universal could release more Woody Woodpecker that way. Any thoughts?

 

[Peter M Fitzgerald]

I really liked the first two volumes of WOODY WOODPECKER & FRIENDS, although the fact that they burned through pretty much all the worthwhile Woody and Chilly Willy shorts presents a problem for further collections. While a lot of the other series/characters (most notably Andy Panda, but also Oswald, Swing Symphonies, Ma & Pa, Hickory Dickory & Doc) and one-shot cartoons are represented, there are still a bunch of these, particularly from the 1930s-1950s, that are still in the vaults. With 99% of the worthwhile Woody and Chilly cartoons already covered, a Volume 3 would be heavy with really lackluster (barring a tiny handful of exceptions) Woody & Chilly cartoons from the mid-1960s through 1972. They'd need to feature Woody, as he's the star character, and the one with lasting public recognition, to allow for the higher-quality earlier shorts to be included, but I think most people, apart from completists, would be pretty disappointed with the remaining Woody/Chilly cartoons they'd get in a Volume 3 (unless the double-dipped a number of the classics, but I think most would be against that, myself included), and they'd outnumber the non-Woody/Chilly shorts in the set... and a Volume 4 then probably wouldn't have any unreleased Woody Woodpecker shorts left to work with, and so would be really tough to market to a general audience. For me, ideally, the remaining older shorts would be a TCM Vault release (or MOD), simply titled 'Walter Lantz Cartoon Classics', focusing on the unreleased rare and earlier stuff that classic-era cartoon buffs me really want, along the lines of the non-Magoo UPA set they put out last year.

 

[Randy Korstick]

I enjoyed the 2 volumes and was hoping they would complete it as well. Didn't they stop at around 1958 or 1959? So a volume 3 would probably only go to 1965 or 1966. Still alot of good material there, it wouldn't be until Volume 4 that we get mostly bottom of the barrel stuff. I believe volume 2 did not sell well enough just like Popeye Volume 3 which is why they were stopped.