Looney Tunes Collector's Vault Vol. 3
Warner Bros.
363 min. / Color & B&W / 1.37:1 / DTS-HD MA 2.0 MONO / SDH
Warner Archive Blu-ray $24.99
Available from our partner Movie Zyng
The third volume of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies for collectors is here, and it may be our favorite yet. The cartoons across the board in all three sets so far (three volumes of 2-discs each, between them all totaling 150 cartoons) have looked and sounded terrific (if you want nit-picking about minutia on this or that cartoon, look elsewhere, we’re here for the fun and laughs) but the deeper Warner Archive goes into the vault, the more unfamiliar cartoons that are trotted out for our enjoyment, so if we’re not seeing everyone’s favorites in any new sets, for the most part, we are seeing many cartoons that are “new to us.” More, there are some key cartoons here to enjoy that help tell the animation studio’s history.
Volume 3: The 25 cartoons in Disc 1 have never before been available in HD remastered form in a WB cartoon collection before; the 25 on disc 2 are remastered for the first time in HD in a WB cartoon collection. Here are some general thoughts I scribbled down as we went through the set…
The very first cartoon is probably our favorite in the entire set, so it started us off with a bang. Billboard Frolic (1935) is a 2-color gag-filled cartoon with parodies of famous Hollywood stars (a favorite cartoon genre of ours) and it also happened to introduce Merrily We Roll Along as the series’ theme.
After some random mice and dog cartoons we’ve got our first look at series superstars with Don’t Axe Me (1958), one of many Elmer-Daffy battles, and at this point we should remind you that the cartoons are presented in alphabetical order on each disc, allowing us to experience a wide variety of styles and characters as we binge watch.
The one-shots are a delight through the entire set, and next up is a Tex Avery winner, Don’t Look Now, with a li’l cupid and a devil that looks a lot like Hot Stuff from the much later Harvey comic books.
After a Foghorn Leghorn cartoon that, while funny, recycles footage from older cartoons, we get our first look at Bugs, outwitting a Native American in A Feather in His Hare (1948). We’ll skip over the next offering – our distaste for cartoons with termites, ants, and wailing babies being well-known – and on to a really good patch of cartoons, Bugs in the Cavalry against Yosemite Sam in Horse Hare (1960), followed by a pair of gorgeous B&W cartoons, Joe Glow the Firefly (1941, and see, we don’t dislike ALL cartoon insects) and the very first Merrie Melody, Lady, Play Your Mandolin (1931), another favorite of ours, followed by The Lyin’ Mouse (1937), a very colorful take-off on the Aesop’s Fables.
The next batch isn’t as good; there’s one of the Honey-Mousers adventures with rodent Ralph and Norton characters, a mid-1930s cartoon with would-be cute bunnies, a not-so-good Elmer Fudd cartoon, and one with mosquitoes, and we don’t like THEM, either.
Things pick up after that; Granny and Tweety go to Venice and meet, who else, Sylvester in A Pizza Tweety Pie (1958), followed by two more gorgeous B&W cartoons, Shake Your Powder Puff (1934) and the first Looney Tunes, the ever-popular Sinkin’ in the Bathtub (1930).
These are followed by a handful of oddities; we’d just seen Sleepy Time Possum (1951) so it must be a bonus on some Warner Archive release or other. That’s followed by a Cavalry cartoon with Daffy this time, the oft-seen A Star is Hatched, and then we move to the Tweety portion of our program, since as mentioned the cartoons are in alphabetical order, they’re frequently grouped together. Here we have Tree Cornered Tweety (1956), an outré Dragnet parody(!); Trick or Tweet (1959); and Tweet and Sour (1956).
On to disc 2 and the cartoons making their Blu-ray debuts. Not a lot of surprises here, but some very funny cartoons and nearly all of the Looney Tunes stars are showcased.
Highlights on this disc: We loved the goofy song Daffy sings in Boobs in the Woods (1950), and Daffy and Elmer are back in maybe their funniest outing, Duck Soup to Nuts (1944). If you like WW2 action, you’ve got Daffy – The Commando (1943) and Herr Meets Hare (1945); Goldimouse and the Three Cats (1960) gives us the Sylvester family in a parody of you-know-what, and it’s a pip. We loved the other fairy tale parody here, with the shoemaker and his elves in Holiday for Shoestrings (1946). Hollywood Daffy gives us parodies of Bette Davis, Jack Benny, and others; in the hilarious A Star is Bored (1956), Daffy has dreams of grandeur (“I would be sent to prison for the scenes I’m gonna steal!”) but ends up as Bugs’ stunt double. Ouch. Want a weird one-shot? Check out a lone wolf starving for something besides his soup bone in the fascinating and unusual I Got Plenty of Mutton (1944).
A couple of favorite Bugs-Yosemite Sam cartoons follow, Mississippi Hare (1949) and Mutiny on the Bunny (1950) and yeah, we know that technically the guy in Mississippi Hare isn’t Sam, but he’s a clone, so what th’ heck.
Puss N’ Booty (1943) is far from a great cartoon, but it’s the final B&W Looney Tunes, and the cat and mouse aren’t Sylvester and Tweety, but they would be in a few years. We were also delighted to see Really Scent (1959), one of the few Pepe Le Pew cartoons that has a different plot from all the other Pepe Le Pew cartoons.
We bring down the curtain with another good fairy tale offering, Bugs mixing it up with the Big Bad Wolf in all his incarnations in The Windblown Hare (1949).
Five of the cartoons carry vintage optional commentary tracks handed down from the DVD days, the only bonuses on the discs.
All in all, a set that – like the first two Vault releases – we are going to visit and revisit many, many times. If they opened up the Vaults with a new release every month, it'd be swell by us.
