Fish Tales is scheduled on the Boomerang special channel on Wednesday. I'll check if I was wrong on the opening or not,

In regards to Jerry Beck stating that WB had used "down and dirty copies", what exactly does he mean by "down and dirty"?

In regards to Jerry Beck stating that WB had used "down and dirty copies", what exactly does he mean by "down and dirty"?

He meant they used unrestored interpositives for this set. Some things were fixed up, but the DVD was produced at a budget and they couldn't use the much more accurate negatives to "restore" the shorts that weren't yet available on DVD.

Oh okay. Got it.

I want to get it from WB Shop to ensure I get standard DVDs, but it's back to being $47.99 and Amazon still has it around $35. Where should my family get it from for the holidays?

I want to get it from WB Shop to ensure I get standard DVDs, but it's back to being $47.99 and Amazon still has it around $35. Where should my family get it from for the holidays?

You could try buying it from the WB Shop, but at this point most retailers will have switched to issuing burned discs. The best bet at this time is getting it used from another online retailer.

If you're not sure which version you'll get, the pressed discs come in a clear case and the burned discs come in a lower-quality black case.

I want to get it from WB Shop to ensure I get standard DVDs, but it's back to being $47.99 and Amazon still has it around $35. Where should my family get it from for the holidays?

You could try buying it from the WB Shop, but at this point most retailers will have switched to issuing burned discs. The best bet at this time is getting it used from another online retailer.

If you're not sure which version you'll get, the pressed discs come in a clear case and the burned discs come in a lower-quality black case.

I'm glad I got my copy of the set as soon as it was announced.

I want to get it from WB Shop to ensure I get standard DVDs, but it's back to being $47.99 and Amazon still has it around $35. Where should my family get it from for the holidays?

You could try buying it from the WB Shop, but at this point most retailers will have switched to issuing burned discs. The best bet at this time is getting it used from another online retailer.

If you're not sure which version you'll get, the pressed discs come in a clear case and the burned discs come in a lower-quality black case.

I'm glad I got my copy of the set as soon as it was announced.

Same with me. I own the press release too. I'm such a hard core fan of the black and white Looney Tunes from 1935-1943, that after hearing about this I immediately registered onto WB Shop so I can get the press release by the time it came out.

Hopefully someday I will fix the issues and flaws on the cartoons myself once I get a video editor and something to record from DVD and Blu Ray player in the future.

Same with me. I own the press release too. I'm such a hard core fan of the black and white Looney Tunes from 1935-1943, that after hearing about this I immediately registered onto WB Shop so I can get the press release by the time it came out.

Hopefully someday I will fix the issues and flaws on the cartoons myself once I get a video editor and something to record from DVD and Blu Ray player in the future.

In most cases, these flaws are easily fixable. So far, the only one I'm having difficulty with is Fish Tales, only because I just can't seem to find a copy of the redrawn print--which is currently the only known print that retains the original opening music.

Same with me. I own the press release too. I'm such a hard core fan of the black and white Looney Tunes from 1935-1943, that after hearing about this I immediately registered onto WB Shop so I can get the press release by the time it came out.

Hopefully someday I will fix the issues and flaws on the cartoons myself once I get a video editor and something to record from DVD and Blu Ray player in the future.

In most cases, these flaws are easily fixable. So far, the only one I'm having difficulty with is Fish Tales, only because I just can't seem to find a copy of the redrawn print--which is currently the only known print that retains the original opening music.

I do have good news for you, thanks to one user for uploading this video on YouTube, the opening theme is now available to use here .

A new, interesting piece from Michael Barrier  with more thoughts on the Porky Pig 101 set, parallelling it with a situation he found himself in decades ago when editing A Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics.

A new, interesting piece from Michael Barrier  with more thoughts on the Porky Pig 101 set, parallelling it with a situation he found himself in decades ago when editing A Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics.

...and yet he still bashed the set. See if he gets to do audio commentaries ever again. He mumbles anyway.

A new, interesting piece from Michael Barrier  with more thoughts on the Porky Pig 101 set, parallelling it with a situation he found himself in decades ago when editing A Smithsonian Book of Comic-Book Comics.

...and yet he still bashed the set. See if he gets to do audio commentaries ever again. He mumbles anyway.

Jeez... Bitter, much?

He critiqued the Porky set on the exact same terms as he criticized the handling of his own project. That's the point of the piece.

And I agree he sounds a bit like he's mumbling at times. 😉 But he also tends to have interesting things to say about the cartoons he comments on... so I enjoy his audio commentaries nonetheless.

"Bashed" the set is not entirely accurate. Barrier concluded his review post  with: "Despite my disappointment with aspects of the Porky Pig set, I'm still glad I bought it (at a price considerably higher than what amazon.com is now asking for it). Please forgive me if I don't urge you to do the same."

What Barrier is commenting on here is how frustrating (and arguably, complex) the situation regarding Warner Brothers' cartoon releases has become these days. Quite frankly, the last two paragraphs of his latest post  sum up my feelings about the whole thing more succinctly than anything that's been said so far:

What happened to me with the Smithsonian book has happened again and again, on a larger or smaller scale, on many of the projects I've been involved with. I don't know if Jerry Beck and George Feltenstein have suffered from the same lack of sympathy and respect that I've encountered—and I don't think we can expect them to tell us if they have—but certainly the shortcomings of the Porky set are suggestive. Using poor source material when better was available...patching in an obviously wrong soundtrack not just once but repeatedly...these are not accidents of the kind that could befall anyone trying to do the best possible job. They're more like expressions of indifference or even contempt.

So, we're left with a Hobson's choice: buy the deficient Porky set and endorse implicitly the shoddy work of the people who shortchanged not just Jerry and George but everyone who has paid good money for the set. Or don't buy the set and add to the likelihood that more (and better) such sets will never appear. I've bought the set, but I do hate having been boxed into that corner. Oh, and I don't expect to ever see that phantom complete Tex Avery set.

Fish Tales is scheduled on the Boomerang special channel on Wednesday. I'll check if I was wrong on the opening or not,

If this is of any help, I just got mine a couple of weeks ago (through Warner Archive directly) and they are real DVDs. That's a bummer if you missed the sale, but it's worth it, just to have the complete set of all the black and white Porky Pig cartoons.

As far as the various issues with the shorts, this is not the first Warner release to have anomalies with the soundtracks. For instance, the end title music on some of the Fleischer Superman cartoons, one of the Popeye two-reelers, and I think even a few Warner toons in the Golden Collections.

I suspect that if they were going back to original negatives for the above, and since original negatives and soundtracks are on separate reels, maybe in the above cases, they just took the audio from whatever source they had handy.

On the first release of the first episode of Batman (Adam West series) which had the missing narration on the first episode, the 20th Century Fox end logo is visually correct, but the audio is a later (1990s?) TV syndication version. (The later revised version has the correct fanfare audio.)

A friend told me he went to see a revival screening of some black and white Porky Pig cartoons in a theatre back in the 1980s, and some of them had no audio at all on the Looney Tunes portion of the titles. It wouldn't surprise me if some of the cartoons on the DVD set came from a source like that, i.e. on whatever source print they were using, there was no intro music at all. Why else would they have bothered messing with them? But it would have been nice if better care had been taken in doing this.

For the few that seem to be clipped a little at the beginning, at least some of them appear to be spliced on whatever source print they were using. I note the audio sometimes comes in a second or two late. So it may not be utter carelessness in mastering as much as that being the way those particular "down and dirty" prints are. Now, could those have been artificially reconstructed? Sure, or they could have gone back to the negatives, but then that would have cost a lot more money they didn't want to (or couldn't) spend.

It would have been nice if these had been restored at a Golden Collection level. But there is something to be said for just having transfers of whatever is on those reels, no DVNR or any of that stuff, etc.

Anyway, Jerry Beck has said if they do another set like this, they will be remastered. Hopefully there will be more sets. Maybe a companion set of "the rest of" the black and white cartoons? I never went through the list to see how many that would be. I guess Daffy Duck would be the selling point, although the bulk of it would be Buddy and Bosko. I'd buy it.

(EDIT: The post I'm replying to is not the one that got quoted above. Whoops!)

Well, that explains the opening and closing problem on some cartoons. To be honest, how many people are experts on what opening and closing music goes to which cartoons? I'm most certainly not. I know Toonzone used to have a site that went through all the opening and closing themes used in the black and white shorts, but I could never memorized them.

Is it a bad thing I actively enjoy watching the cartoons off Porky Pig 101?

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Well, my family ordered by eventual Christmas copy from Amazon. And a day or two later, the discount was back on WBShop! Take it from God's personal toothpick.

That said, a few black-and-white Mickey Mouse cartoons also had replacement music over them. I went to a screening of 35mm Mickeys at Film Forum at NYC a few years ago and their print of "Puppy Love" has no audio at all over the title cards, so I guess the original audio is lost.

Is it a bad thing I actively enjoy watching the cartoons off Porky Pig 101?

They were made to be enjoyed.

Well, my family ordered by eventual Christmas copy from Amazon. And a day or two later, the discount was back on WBShop! Take it from God's personal toothpick.

That said, a few black-and-white Mickey Mouse cartoons also had replacement music over them. I went to a screening of 35mm Mickeys at Film Forum at NYC a few years ago and their print of "Puppy Love" has no audio at all over the title cards, so I guess the original audio is lost.

On the second volume, a few of the shorts are preceded by a disclaimer saying the intro music for that particular cartoon is lost.

On the second volume, a few of the shorts are preceded by a disclaimer saying the intro music for that particular cartoon is lost.

Well, those shorts were from 1929. A few Silly Symphonies of the era began silent also, so I guess those shorts ("When the Cat's Away" and "The Jazz Fool") had their titles silent to begin with.