Rating:  -
My husband loves the Looney Tunes cartoons. Our (now-grown) children remember laughing with their father on Saturday mornings at the antics of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Wylie E. Coyote, The Roadrunner, Yosemite Sam, Elmer Fudd, and all the other characters. My husband watched this DVD with our almost-5-year-old granddaughter and she laughed as loud as her pappaw. It is a wonderful bridge between generations. Highly recommended.
Rating:  -
This is not as "strong" a collection as previous volumes in this series. The packaging of the DVDs is an issue,since they are stacked one atop another. This increases the risk of damaging a disc considerably.
As for the material,disc 3, is almost completely unwatchable. Speedy Gonzales on a whole Disc? Please. Disc one is the best one, all Bugs, not necessarily at his best but, it is the best disc of a mediocre lot. Conspicuous by his relative absence, Daffy Duck. But he is up to par when he does appear. Sadly, the producers had to put in a disclaimer about ethnic stereotypes. The statement was just so much hogwash. The viewer should understand that this material is a product of the times in which they were made.
Rating: -
This new collection of Warner Bros. classic cartoons contains many of my favorites that have been missing from earlier releases. It also has some of the same annoyances and a few fixes as compared to earlier collections. The cartoons are still "cropped" so that you miss some action. Why WB feels they need to fill the tv screen at the expense of some of the action I'll never know. It's like watching a Cinemascope movie on a tv. Something is always missing. That said, the cartoons in this collection have been cleaned up nicely. Lovers of Speedy Gonzales will particularly like this collection. A nice change from the last release is the omission of Whoopie Goldberg's appology for racial slurs contained in the cartoons that played automatically EVERY time you inserted the disks. Every disk. I found that very annoying. The new set has a simple splash screen with the same warning that only lasts a few seconds, and to me, is much more acceptable.
Rating: -
A disclaimer happens on all four DVD's-however, it is just a text message, and I liked that a LOT better this time around, so that was an improvement. The physical packaging is worse though, as you have to remove one DVD to get to the other-each DVD in the past editions had their own insert within each boxed set.
Like the other volumes, this is a great addition for a collector, not a casual viewer who is looking for episodes that were only broadcast on television. Disc 3 for me was not as engaging as the other discs because it's mostly made up of Speedy Gonzales versus a nemesis over and over again. With other characters, you have more variation, although in the documentaries, Friz Freleng admits Speedy Gonzales was not his favorite character. In this particular volume, there were many alternate memorable characters who appeared a handful of times, or maybe even once, never to be seen again, like Dodsworth and Heathcliff (NOT related to The Creators Syndicate Heathcliff).
One of the episodes, "Porky's Poor Fish", was slightly blurry for a few seconds, so who knows what happened with that particular episode. The documentaries are especially good on this volume-for example, they discuss the fact that Warner Brothers originally wanted to use the cartoons to help market Warner Brothers' music they were currently selling. However, today, when you hear those songs, people associate the songs with the cartoons and don't consciously think of the music separately-an unintended side effect in modern times. "Porky's Breakdown" and seeing the Army promotional material in addition to more Private SNAFU were also great additions. Several episodes have Daws Butler doing voice acting, which is historically significant as Daws Butler later left for Hanna Barbera and did everything from Mr. Jinks to Quick Draw McGraw and Huckleberry Hound.
Hopefully, Warner Brothers will release a theoretical volume 5 (which will match the number of laserdisc collections) about a year from now...and several people on YouTube have uploaded some of the Private SNAFU episodes as well as the "Censored 11", which haven't made it into any golden collection yet. Then again, there is enough material in the library to do at least ten volumes of Looney Tunes DVD boxed sets.
Rating: -
I think we are coming up on the meat of the Warner collection, and with as many rarely shown racial-suicidal-sexual joke filled shorts as was in this collection, the next couple of sets should have the shorts people have been waiting for, namely the censored 11, a slew of toons that have become taboo and have only showed up on public domain videos and dvds. This will allow fans of Clampett, Avery, even Jones and Freleng to further their collections.
Also, I noticed that there were no Tex Avery shorts here. Luckily they did include two early Clampett shorts, so I'm guessing the next set or two will have an Avery disc, especially when they did a Tashlin disc this time. That shows you how out of touch whoever is compiling these discs are with the audience buying them. Tashlin was never that popular a toon director, even with diehard fans. Specifically not enough to sell a set. Avery and Clampett should already have had a disc by now with that logic, so I figure they are saving them so that when they run low on good toons and they have a set with a disc of Kool Kat toons, they'll throw a Clampett disc together or an Avery disc to sell it. Who knows. Either way, keep em coming. I'll watch Kool Kat. He's kool, I hear.
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