Tim Blair

That's insane. No disrespect to Bugs and Daffy, but that's the funniest WB cartoon ever.

Any word on whether or not this collection is uncensored? I used to watch the old Tom & Jerry cartoons as a kid (yes, I know, they're not WB), and there were obvious occasional edits. As years went by, there were more and more ("Hmm, I could swear Tom got scolded by a black mammy in that scene...")

I remember seeing a series of wartime Bugs Bunny cartoons at a college film festival. Hoo-boy, the things Bugs was doin' and sayin' to the "Japs" and "Krauts." Quite vitriolic to our enemies back then, we were...

Hey, got to save something for the second set (not just "One Froggy Evening" but also "What's Opera, Doc"). Still, I've gotten my money's worth watching "Feed the Kitty" half a dozen times.

TO: Tim
RE: Gotta Love It

Been watching a short a night, just before cranking up the nightly movie.

TO: Dave S.
RE: War Time Loonies

"I remember seeing a series of wartime Bugs Bunny cartoons at a college film festival. Hoo-boy, the things Bugs was doin' and sayin' to the "Japs" and "Krauts." Quite vitriolic to our enemies back then, we were..." -- Dave S.

We ought to bring that sort of spirit back for this war.

Regards,

Chuck(le)

Just before I left Australia, some channel or other was running "Wartime Cartoons", four cartoons from WWII, that included "Russian Rhapsody"---Hitler meets his Waterloo at the hands of gremlins (We are gremlins/From the Kremlin, etc---I hadn't seen that one since I was a kid), plus the Bugs and Herman Goering cartoon ("Herr Meets Hare").

Another cartoon shown was "Blitz Wolf", a retelling of The Three Little Pigs, with a Nazi wolf. On one of the pigs' houses was a sign that said, "No [something] allowed". The middle word was fuzzed out. This after the program made a big deal about showing these "long-censored" cartoons.

I googled a bit, but couldn't find a site that revealed what was censored.

By the way, you can get a collection of wartime cartons on VHS. It doesn't have Blitz Wolf, but it does have some other good 'uns.

They didn't put all the best in there because no one would buy the 2nd release. That's what a WB PR person said.

"Blitz Wolf" was great (if I'm remembering the right one). Sign on the side of his staff car:

Der Fewer
(Der Better)

That the right one, Angie?

The best of the wartime cartoons were Tex Avery's Wolf and Red cartoons. That is, the Big Bad Wolf and Red Hot Riding Hood. She was. See Red Hot Riding Hood and Swing Shift Cinderella.

I believe Red was the inspiration for Jessica Rabbit.

At last! It is amazing to think just how many of those cartoons wouldn't be shown now due to pc. I mean what would they think of Pepe , Foghorn Leghorn, The three bears just to name a few. I hope that I will be able to get my claws on those classics one day. Wouldn't mind getting my claws on Sophie Lee either...

Favourite Leghorn quotes:

That boy is as sharp as a sack of wet mice!
Hes got a mind like a steel trap - full of mice.
That boy is as sharp as a bowling ball.
I see a lot of chopping but no chips are flying.
C'mon Applejack!!!!

What about "Bye Bye Bluebeard? Truly psychotic.
Or for a real hoot, here's a link to a full version of "Russian Rhopsody" (originally titled "Gremlins From The Kremlin"), which has one of the truly great cartoons lines- "Nazis are the craziest people" being said by Hitler. Later ripped off by "South Park" for their Osama Bin Laden episode.
(File is over 100Mb, so don't bother if you are on landline).

Another favourite for bulimics is "Chow Hound", which features a dog with a grossly distended abdomen being force-fed gravy from a ten-gallon drum through a funnel. I believe this particular effort was the inspiration for "Seven".

Ken---I don't remember. It could well be, there were all kinds of silly little gags like that in it.

One of the few things uber-loon Ted Turner ever did that I agreed with was merging his company with Time-Warner back in 1996, which allowed Warner Bros. to regain rights to all their cartoons and make this DVD set possible. Warners just started the process of restoring the color cartoons previously owned by Turner to their original look -- out of the 56 cartoons on the DVD set, only eight are from that earlier (pre-1948) group, and the differnce between those cartoons as shown on TV for years using cheap Eastmancolor duplicates and the restored Technicolor prints is incredible.

The next DVD set will probably be weighed a little more towards the 1940-48 period, but I'm sure Warners will listen to their critics and include 1955's "One Froggy Evening" and 1957's "What's Opera, Doc?" in the set (even though it's not even my favorite musical cartoon from Warners from that year -- the Friz Freleng-Stan Freberg collaboration "Three Little Bops" is).

And let's not forget Three Little Bops and Cheese Chasers. The latter (warning: post-modern wankiness alert) brilliantly subverts the form, as seen in the dog's frantic attempt to work things out on an adding machine: "Mice don't wanna eat cheese (tap, tap, tap); mice want cat to eat dem (tap, tap, tap); cat don't wanna eat mice (tap, tap, tap); cat wants dog to massacre'im! (tap, tap, tap, looks at result, at audience, back at result, then back at audience). IT JUST DON'T ADD UP!!!!" He then runs after the dog catcher shouting, "Hey wait for baby!!!"

I find the lazy Mexicans (Speedy Gonzales' amigos) to be a rather insensitive stereotype. However, Pepé LePew's smelly Frenchman is spot on.

Yosimite Sam in "Knighty Knight" imploring the dragon he was riding to stop before hitting the castle wall by using the command, "Whoa mule, whoa mule!"

yeah Dave but Speedy Gonzales' cousin Slowpoke Gonzales didn't need to be fast because according to Speedy, "Slowpoke Gonzales he pack a gon."

More Fog:
That gal reminds me of Paul Reveres ride; a little light in the belfry.
That gal reminds me og the road between Dallas and Ft. Worth; no curves.
That boys busier than a centipede at a toe countin contest.
That boys as cool as a nudist on an iceberg.

I can't believe how well they did the restoration. On some of the later Bugs, you can see dark spots on his grey that I assume are small differences in the original cels. And on one of the credit screens, you can actually see the Scotch tape used to hold the name in place.

I understand WB is coming out with a second edition due to the high sales for the first. I hope so. I had mine on order for four months.