Looney Tunes Bluray (1 Viewer)

[bigshot]

I've been very critical of the Warner cartoon DVD sets in the past... DVNR, Macroblocking, Color Manipulation, Bad Interlacing... the sets each had some problems. But after spending a couple of hours with the bluray tonight, I am totally sold on it. I've seen these films in theatrical projection and they didn't look this good. It's astounding how good these films look and how sophisticated the color is. Photo shot with my iPhone off my 10 foot projection screen...

I want more HD cartoons and less SD supplements. High res screen shots... http://animationresources.org/clampett/clampett01.JPG http://animationresources.org/clampett/clampett02.JPG http://animationresources.org/clampett/clampett03.JPG http://animationresources.org/clampett/clampett04.JPG http://animationresources.org/clampett/clampett05.JPG http://animationresources.org/clampett/clampett06.JPG http://animationresources.org/clampett/clampett07.JPG

 

[bugsy-pal]

Nice shots of one of the great Clampett cartoons - thank you. I wouldn't mind seeing more shots of actual animation frames rather than the static shots of those paintings, beautiful as they are. Can't wait for this release...

 

[Citizen87645]

Working my way through the set now. What I have seen so far is impressive indeed!

 

[Ethan Riley]

Good news so far. Better news would be a complete chronological series...

 

[Lord Dalek]

Originally Posted by Ethan Riley

Good news so far. Better news would be a complete chronological series...

It would be a sales disaster.

 

[bigshot]

Also difficult to watch. That chronological concept is great for anal retentive types who want boxes to set on a shelf and admire. But for watching cartoons, it's deadly. The Tom and Jerry set is a chore to watch. If they had mixed in Tex Avery and Harman Ising cartoons, it would have been a much more entertaining variety. The second disk of the bluray isn't nearly as good as the first because they throw in a bunch of mediocre leftovers that never made it to DVD and complete runs of the Tasmanian Devil and Witch Hazel that become repetitive. I wish they had just cherry picked the best Tex Avery and black and white and Foghorn Leghorn, etc and made the whole set "nothing but the best". To hell with complete runs.

 

[Lord Dalek]

I'm all in favor of complete runs as long as its a consistant series. LT/MM on the other hand is by and large utter garbage for its first whole decade.

 

[MatthewA]

Originally Posted by bigshot

Also difficult to watch. That chronological concept is great for anal retentive types who want boxes to set on a shelf and admire. But for watching cartoons, it's deadly. The Tom and Jerry set is a chore to watch. If they had mixed in Tex Avery and Harman Ising cartoons, it would have been a much more entertaining variety.

That's one of the trade-offs of chronological sets. They're useful for organizing them but the fact they were not meant to be watched one after the other does not make them good "marathon viewing" in that order. TV shows have the same disadvantage; if the first season of a long-running show is bad or strongly disliked by many fans, it often does not bode well for the remaining seasons unless there's a large enough base of fans who will buy it anyway. In the case of Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies, the only way to make it work would be complete sets (or as few sets as possible) of the core characters, similar to what Disney did with its short cartoons which are fewer in number to begin with. To do a complete collection in one giant box set could theoretically be done, but the MSRP would be more than most people make in a month. Assuming such a set presented the cartoons with the same video and audio bitrates as this set, how many discs would it fill if it had no extras, just all the cartoons from 1929-1969?


Yes, I know it's not going to happen, but it's worth discussing just for the sake of argument. The fact remains that there is no way to please everyone with Looney Tunes sets. I'm more concerned with the presentation of what does come out. I'm disappointed by the lossy audio, but

 

[bigshot]

Has anyone actually gotten all the way through the Pluto sets or the Yogi Bear collection? Chronological by character is the most unwatchable way to package cartoons.

 

[Rob_Ray]

Has anyone actually gotten all the way through the Pluto sets or the Yogi Bear collection? Chronological by character is the most unwatchable way to package cartoons.

Trouble is, chonological is about the only way to go if you want to ensure that every cartoon gets released. Releasing them piecemeal like Warner traditionally does just ensures that What's Opera, Doc? and One Froggy Evening gets released over and over again while a lot of the thirties stuff that some of us like lanquishes in the vaults. Personally, I like the idea of chronlogical character releases only because it ensures completeness. I don't watch cartoons one right after the other. They are appetizers for the main feature for me, as they were intended. So I frankly don't care whether they flow well as a complete program on their own or not. Each cartoon to me is like a book filed on the shelf, easily obtainable when I want to watch it. I guess I'm that anal-retentive type referred to earlier that likes to stare at my collection. And no, I haven't yet made it through the Pluto set. But when I want to find a given Pluto cartoon from a given year, I know exactly where to find it.

 

[bigshot]

What they should do is create a nice big collection of assorted cartoons... Different eras, different characters, different series.... and sell it for six months to a year as individual disks and bundled together as a set. Then retire that set and release another with no double dipping. Keep the cartoons in rotation like that forever. But they're not interested in long term marketing strategies. They only care about now. It's like DC restarting all their comic book lines again from number one again. They start over and never complete what they start.

 

[JoHud]

There are some cartoon characters that I found held up rather well back-to-back--The first volume of Woody Woodpecker, Popeye, Goofy, and Donald Duck. However, I agree that the nature of LT would make it better to mix it up. I would still prefer chronological sets, however, I think that would only be financially possible in a collector's niche market such as the WAC. Same with the non-T&J/Tex Avery MGM library. The "all-stars" Platinum Collections are probably the best bet in mass retail.

I'm all in favor of complete runs as long as its a consistant series. LT/MM on the other hand is by and large utter garbage for its first whole decade.

That's a matter of opinion, though I may agree on the "post-Bosko/Pre-Porky" era. Though even those aren't that bad and have some interesting curios.

 

[bigshot]

The early music based Rubber Hose cartoons aren't garbage. They're just totally different than the later story driven cartoons. It's Got Me Again, You Don't Know What You're Doing, Hittin the Trail for Hallelujah Land and many of the early Boskos (before Harman and Ising lost steam) are great cartoons.

 

[Ruz-El]

Originally Posted by bigshot

Has anyone actually gotten all the way through the Pluto sets or the Yogi Bear collection? Chronological by character is the most unwatchable way to package cartoons.

*Raises Hand*


On the Pluto set anyways. And the Goofy's, all the treasures. I'd love a chronological by year. To be honest, those discs that are all Bugs Bunny can be a chore, the Roadrunners a bloody nightmare to get through. If it was by the year though, that would be sweet.


I'd love a "Disney Archives" type set, where it would be for the year 1942 and include all the shorts and features released by the studio for that year. As an example. It would never happen, but man alive would it be cool. You couldn't do it so much with Warners due to the amount of output, but a by the year set for the toons would still be great. Keep them around 4 Blurays in size, do multi-volumes per year depending on the out put. Motown did a similar thing with their complete Motown Singles sets, and those were popular (though now abandoned I think) with collectors.


I just want all the toons ultimately. I fucking hope that Warners keeps up with these Blurays since they dumped the DVD line and those all stars/spotlight discs or whatever they're called seem to be a bit bunk quality wise. I've bought them cheap but not sat down with them yet.


Looking forward to this set to arrive!


Now if we could get the non-Tom & Jerry MGM cartoons, and Betty Boop....

 

[Ruz-El]

Originally Posted by bigshot /t/316345/looney-tunes-bluray#post_3873184

 

[bigshot]

*Raises Hand* On the Pluto set anyways.

You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din.

 

[Ruz-El]

Originally Posted by bigshot

Originally Posted by Russell G [url=/t/316345/looney-tunes-bluray#post_3873186]

*Raises Hand* On the Pluto set anyways.

You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din.

Nah, they weren't that bad. That Roadrunner disc though in whatever Golden Collection, just awful. I remember not minding that series as a kid, but watching that disc put me right off them.

 

[Kevin L McCorry]

I have given up trying to understand the people who worship Clampett and diss the collective works of Freleng-Jones-McKimson (i.e. the for-40-years popular post-1948 network TV and syndie packages) and cartoon series of the Road Runner, Tweety & Sylvester, etc.. They're like aliens, and I can't hope to see eye to eye with them. No adversarial combination of characters was meant to be presented in bulk, one cartoon after the other. And a difficulty in watching a long series of cartoons with the same pair of characters should in no way be spun as a quality-based indictment against that series of cartoons. The cartoons look nice on Blu-Ray, but I prefer to watch them in configurations matching The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour et al.. And that's an option only possible on my private reconstructions of that, inferior picture quality and all.

 

Wow! The image is so crisp and clear, it is almost as if I could reach out and touch the cels! The colors are beautiful as well!

 

[bugsy-pal]

I have given up trying to understand the people who worship Clampett and diss the collective works of Freleng-Jones-McKimson (i.e. the for-40-years popular post-1948 network TV and syndie packages) and cartoon series of the Road Runner, Tweety & Sylvester, etc.. They're like aliens, and I can't hope to see eye to eye with them.

I don't think it's quite so cut and dried. I think it's the case that Clampett was neglected for many years because he left the studio so early - his output is relatively meagre, yet he was responsible for some of the most incredible, imaginative efforts of the early to mid 40s. I think his work outshines that of Tex Avery at the time (at Warners and MGM). Yet I also appreciate the brilliant work Chuck Jones was doing at the time. I think his 40s stuff is brilliant, in a very different way from Clampett's - and Jones was able to continue his golden period into the 50s. Same goes for Freleng and McKimson. I think the differences of opinion arise when it comes to some of the later work of Jones, Freleng and McKimson. I find Jones' cartoons from around the mid-50s onwards to be unappealing. As mentioned by Russel G above, he made Bugs and Daffy into rather obnoxious characters, lacking the saving grace of looniness they had before. I love One Froggy Evening, but What's Opera Doc? is a cartoon I have never liked, and I can't figure out why it's so revered. Give me Baby Bottleneck or Kitty Kornered any day. We all know that budgets, the decline of the cinema and rise of TV contributed to a drop in quality of cartoons. The fact is that Clampett left Warners in his prime, whereas the other guys stayed on through the twilight of the golden age of cartoons.