Looney Tunes Golden Collection – Volume Six + Spotlight
Collection – Volume Six (Warner Home Video)
Picture:
B- Sound: C+ Extras: A/C+ Shorts: A/B
With
Blu-ray here, Warner Bros. has decided to wrap up the DVD releases of their
extensive sets of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts on DVD with the sixth
and final releases of The Looney Tunes
Golden Collection and The Looney
Tunes Spotlight Collection. You can
read more about the previous releases in the series at this link:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/7722/Looney+Tunes+Golden+Collection
The final
themes this time out are the WWII animated shorts, the peak of the black and
white Bosko and separate Buddy shorts, an all-star disc to open the set with
and a sort of one-hit wonders and other favorites disc to end the series. Sadly, not all of my favorite shorts surfaced
in this series, but many of them did and at this point, they are often looking
remarkable for the DVD format.
If you
have not heard of Bosko, you have seen him and it turns out that the character
moved on to another studio, where the character and his related characters were
suddenly in full color. None of those
are here, but the transfers on the black and white shorts are newer because
they needed to strike new copies due to them being out of print for so long and
they remain some of the best monochrome animated shorts ever made.
One of
the highlights among the main shorts are three sponsored and co-funded by the
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to teach young people about how capitalism works, or
is supposed to work. By Word Of Mouse, Hear-Conditioned and Yankee
Dood It all are very entertaining and shows how the marketplace can work
through humor and gags. They are three
of my favorites and it is nice to see them finally collected in one space.
Warner
has been putting out the money out to save and upgrade these classics and most
prints look like upgrades. The 1.33 X 1 image
on the main shorts are clean, clear and detailed as a result, with the pre-1948
shorts Warner owns again from buying the Turner Entertainment catalog benefited
from his efforts. The Dolby Digital 1.0
Mono on those main shorts are good, but sometimes come up short, while oddly,
some of the bonus shorts are in Dolby 2.0 Mono to their advantage. Either way the arc of improvements over the
six box sets show the increased care Warner is putting into their classic
cartoons.
Extras are
spread over the four DVDs with select commentary and isolated music/sound
effects tracks and include the following.
DVD 1 adds the TV specials Bugs
Bunny in King Arthur’s Court and Daffy
Duck’s Easter Egg-Citemen, plus bonus shorts Boyhood Daze, Hippety Hopper,
Rabbit Rampage and Sniffles Takes A Trip. DVD 2 adds five of Friz Freleng’s MGM shorts
and though they are good, they seem to be at the expense of some missing Warner
classics. You also get bonus shorts Confessions Of A Nutzy Spy, The Fighting 69˝th and Hop & Go. DVD 3 adds a World of Leon Schlesinger Featurette Gallery including a Martha
Sigall/Jerry
Beck
intro, Crying For The Carolinas, Haunted Gold title sequence from the
live-action short and Schlesinger Productions Christmas Party with a
Sigall/Beck commentary, plus bonus shorts How
Do I Know It’s Sunday, I Like
Mountain Music, I Love A Parade
and Sittin’ on The Backyard Fence. DVD 4 wraps things up with Mel
Blanc: The Man Of A Thousand Voices and bonus shorts Bartholomew Versus The Wheel, Punch Trunk, Sleepy Time Possum and Wild
Wild World.
This is
the conclusion of the series, as meant for serious adult collectors, but the Spotlight Collection sets are child
friendly and a less expensive alternative with the same quality, but we prefer
the full sets.
- Nicholas Sheffo
