Loopy De Loop
The Complete Collection
315 min. / Color / 1.37:1 / DTS-HD MA 2.0 Mono / SDH
Warner Archive Blu-ray $24.98
Available from MovieZyng
And now for something completely different, a cartoon series of which until recently I was completely unaware. It’s as if 48 forgotten theatrical cartoons from 65 years ago were suddenly discovered in a vault under a yogurt shop in Paducah.
The backstory is that Columbia Pictures wanted cheap theatrical cartoons to replace the UPA (Mr. Magoo, Gerald McBoing-Boing) cartoons they’d distributed in the 1950s, and turned to those masters of the cheap cartoons, Hanna-Barbera, of Huckleberry Hound and Quick Draw McGraw fame, to give them something. The something they got is a French-Canadian wolf in a wool hat and scarf, whose sole purpose in life is to persuade an unfeeling world that wolves are not bad critters at all, and many of the cartoons deal with Loopy trying to convince other wolves of that, too. Daws Butler, of course, supplies the voice of Loopy in an outrageous French accent; the usual H-B gang of voice artists contribute various characters as well. The result was roughly eight 6 and a half minute cartoons for each of the next 6 years, a total of 48 in all.
The first cartoon, Wolf Hounded (1959), is clearly the pilot for the series: it features better animation and more vivid backgrounds than you’ll find in the rest of the set. Also, get used to Loopy introducing himself and his goal in life: he did that to begin every cartoon we watched, and we watched a lot of them before the repetitiveness slowed us down. After that, it’s a magic carpet ride of situations and stories that lend itself Loopy’s purpose, from fairy tales with traditional Big, Bad Wolves like the Three Little Pigs and Red Riding Hood, to several cartoons with Loopy trying to teach a hairy sheepdog that he can be trusted around sheep or chickens or whatever. Other cartoons deal with fables that didn’t contain wolves before but do now, like Snow White and Hansel & Gretel, and literary characters such as the Three Musketeers and Robin Hood. And in at least one cartoon, Loopy has a lookalike nephew that we’d wished we’d seen more, it’s rather a Boo Boo to his Yogi (in fact, the kid is named Bon-Bon!) and it made for interesting exchanges. In general, Loopy is helpful, friendly, and charming (as he tells us on numerous occasions) but that doesn’t stop him from getting pummeled by people and animals who simply do not like wolves.
General observations on the series: the quality, such as it was, remained constant throughout the series, and the 1965 final batch of cartoons don’t look or sound any different from the 1959 group. People who know more about cartoons than we do insist that the budgets and animation quality were higher on these cartoons than on the H-B TV offerings, and we tend to agree, although to be honest, if they’d have mixed these in on TV as part of, say, The Peter Potamus Show, I doubt we’d have said “Hey, that wolf is better animated than Yippee, Yappee, and Yahooey!” The other thing to note is that we’re not alone in being unaware of Loopy’s existence; nobody of our generation that we asked knew who he was either, perhaps because there wasn’t much merchandise of him (not even a Soaky, apparently) and by the 1960s, at least in my town, theatrical cartoons were a thing of the past except for a handful of Pink Panther or Inspector cartoons that came out with United Artists releases.
The good news is that the Loopy cartoons – 4K scans from the original camera negatives, it says here – are bright and beautiful and the audio is impeccable, so you’ll have no complaints about the quality and we’re always grateful to Warner Archive for presenting such terrific cartoon collections.
Loopy’s 48 adventures are spread evenly across two discs, and surprisingly, there is no title listing on either the discs or the packaging, you’ll have to check the onscreen menus. There is no bonus material. And finally, note the great gag in the cartoon Not In Nottingham; Loopy wants to show his mettle by joining the Merry Men, but Robin explains that he already has a long waiting list, and unscrolls the names of Huck Hound, Touché Turtle, Pixie & Dixie, Augie Doggie, and other H-B characters! It got the biggest laugh in the set.
