Just a reminder that this thread is about the Bugs Bunny Golden Carrot Collection. It is not the place to discuss the selection of shorts on a 14-year-old DVD set.

---

Given that the Bugs set is a rehash of those 13-to-17 year old sets, isn't it all the same? 😃

I've been watching the Popeye and Avery sets, and man... What a stellar restoration work by WAC. I wonder why they didn't do something like this since 2012. They (at Warner) had to see a lower quality release like PP101 selling well to come back to classic animation and put it in WAC. And you know what? Prices of $20, great picture and sound quality, no censorship, and the most important: good sales. Let's be real: classic animation is a vintage product, a niche market, so even if the sales are so low that you have to raise the price to the limit, making it relatively expensive (let's say, $40 for a single disc) you won't have financial losses at all - your niche customers are going to buy it anyway. The added benefit is preserving the studio legacy and history, and American history as well.

Which leads me to believe that the main reasons that Warner ceased the investment in Golden Collection and doesn't release a single LT/MM short with proper restoration in physical media since 2014 are poor marketing/business decisions, lack of will to preserve older material, and fear of PC backlash from people that buy from "family entertainment" retail shelves.

Warner still mantains the poor business decision of maintaining some IPs exclusive to the Family Entertainment branch. But the success of Popeye and Avery proves that there is a profitable niche market for classic animation and everything is about how you manage it - WAC is the right way.

I don't like the way Golden and Platinum Collections were handled as well. Take GC: they were releasing collector-oriented 4-DVD boxsets, spending a lot with restoration, and with manufacturing and distribution of those boxsets... But the latest sets had very little appeal to the general public: "Patriotic Pals"? "Most Requested Assorted Nuts and One-Shots"? "A Dash of Tashlin"? How is this going to sell well? How do you justify such massive investment to a WHV executive? The end of GC was predictable.

So I hope that LT and MM come back via WAC in more character-oriented approach, or at most a director-oriented approach. Sometimes character-oriented leads to director-oriented and vice-versa: Foghorn is McKimson, Yosemite is Freleng, Road-Runner is Chuck etc.

And I hope they try in the first place to fill the ridiculous gaps that the GC approach left behind. This is possible only if they change the business decision of keeping main characters exclusive to Family division. I would sit down, take a list of the cartoons, and compile character and director-based lists of family-friendly things not released in GC. GC released a ton of un-PC stuff and older material, but left behind many color shorts featuring well-known characters that we have fond memories of.

I'm half-and-half on some of your opinions and ideas. While there were a few disc themes that would've been tricky to sell to the public, there were also plenty of marketable themes, too (the character discs come immediately to mind).

While I can't argue with your sentiments about how stellar the shorts on the new Warner Archive discs look and how Warner's own shorts should continue being released on physical media, which way should Warner release them in? The bare-bones, no-frills approach the Archive usually takes, although better than nothing, just isn't ideal enough.

To be fair, Beck did the disc theming before in "The Golden Age of Looney Tunes" video/ laser disc sets and MGM/UA were able to release all of the Turner owned Warner shorts sans The Censored Eleven. I guess the only down-side was that they nearly ran out of character cartoons by the final volume. It was almost all one-shots and some Sniffles shorts (with some miscellaneous stuff thrown in for good measure).

The Golden Collections were programmed according to what was available and what WB was willing to spend on restoration. (The first Golden Collection was originally a "Chuck Jones" collection; Vol. 2's Road Runner and Tweety focus.) I think they're about as good as they could be given the circumstances (though the Speedy Gonzales disc is kind of terrifying, much as I like the cartoons). And Vol. 6 isn't a good example- that was programmed that way because, "This is it."

Good points!

If memory serves me right, Beck has said a couple of times that he had ten Golden Collection volumes mapped out in his mind, and when the series had to stop at six volumes, that final volume included a batch of shorts that otherwise would've been released in the next four volumes, but he thought were too good or essential to leave hanging. Anyone want to elaborate on that?

I'm half-and-half on some of your opinions and ideas. While there were a few disc themes that would've been tricky to sell to the public, there were also plenty of marketable themes, too (the character discs come immediately to mind).

While I can't argue with your sentiments about how stellar the shorts on the new Warner Archive discs look and how Warner's own shorts should continue being released on physical media, which way should Warner release them in? The bare-bones, no-frills approach the Archive usually takes, although better than nothing, just isn't ideal enough.

It isn't ideal enough, but it seems like the only viable and justifiable option at the moment we can hope from major distributors.

Jerry said last night (?) that it's not like WB has all money in the world they can spend releasing classic animation. If any release/collection doesn't make money, then it's cancelled, simple as that. Actually WB does have enough money, but the philosophy of major companies is strictly profit, unfortunately.

Non-major companies like Kino Lorber, Criterion etc. have a different approach. They use the best-selling releases to fund the ones that sell less copies. They want and need profit, but their very business purpose is to restore and release as much material as possible and care about such films.

It's a matter of effort. We won't see another Platinum-Collection-like release by WB any time soon. Classic animation isn't mainstream enough to convince executives of major companies to invest in boxsets full of booklets and extras - and implied production costs. The major companies are simply in their comfort zones. That's the reason Comcast ranks low in customer satisfaction indexes. It happens in Brazil with our 4~5 major banks and 4 major telecommunication companies.

---

Non-major companies like Kino Lorber, Criterion etc. have a different approach. They use the best-selling releases to fund the ones that sell less copies. They want and need profit, but their very business purpose is to restore and release as much material as possible and care about such films.

That couldn't be further from the truth. Kino rushed through the Pink Panther series, using DNR, causing irreparable issues and refusing to acknowledge or fix them - and because of that they have given up on animation. There's no way those sets didn't make a profit, it just wasn't big enough a profit for Kino to care about. Everything Kino releases (or continues to release) definitely makes a profit, they just don't need as big a profit as Warner does, because they've never made that much of a profit.

Non-major companies like Kino Lorber, Criterion etc. have a different approach. They use the best-selling releases to fund the ones that sell less copies. They want and need profit, but their very business purpose is to restore and release as much material as possible and care about such films.

That couldn't be further from the truth. Kino rushed through the Pink Panther series, using DNR, causing irreparable issues and refusing to acknowledge or fix them - and because of that they have given up on animation. There's no way those sets didn't make a profit, it just wasn't big enough a profit for Kino to care about. Everything Kino releases (or continues to release) definitely makes a profit, they just don't need as big a profit as Warner does, because they've never made that much of a profit.

I got your point.

Doesn't change the fact that major companies leave interesting material in the vault, and niche specialized companies are able to release lesser-known material because it's their business.

Selling and distributing vintage and independent movies in 2020 isn't the most promising business, profitwise.

Not saying that Kino or any company is doing their business for charity purposes. But a niche market requires more know-how and more of an effort that major companies simply don't put anymore, at a time when physical home video market as a whole is becoming niche.

Kino was able to release all DFE theatrical cartoons. Three box sets, 17 discs, for a vintage product with at least 9 discs of lesser-known characters. I just can't imagine a similar effort coming from Disney, WB, Sony, Paramount, Universal, MGM, right in 2016-2020. Of course there were problems/sloppiness, and profit comes in first place.

Imagine an hypothetical situation where there are no licensing fees, no copyright: can you imagine if Criterion or, I dare to say, even Thunderbean got their hands in LT/MM library? That is, for free?

Compare Disney's Sword in the Stone blu ray and Criterion's Watership Down. That's what I was talking about...

---

Seems like the collection's out already...and for some reason, the guys over at the Bugs Bunny Video Guide still don't know what's on it .

Since I already have all five Golden Collections the set's cannibalizing the first discs of (thanks for the term, Video Guide!), I'm certain that the set will contain:
- 74 shorts - yes, even the solo Daffy shorts on disc five (or Golden Collection: Volume Five's disc one) and the older, DVNR'ed masters of The Big Snooze, Gorilla My Dreams, and a few post-1948 shorts on disc one (or...you know the drill by now)
- Only half of the documentaries covered in full on the first, second, fourth, and fifth Golden Collections
- ...and more! (read: every single bonus feature that was on the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth Golden Collections' first discs)

Oh, and why not re-iterate these disturbingly accurate points:
"If the month of April hasn't been depressing enough with a global pandemic stopping all commerce and social activity in its tracks..."
"We keep saying this, but if you want to support the Looney Tunes franchise on home video and want to see newer and better compilations come out, then you have to vote with your dollars [and purchase the full collections]. Going for these warmed-over repeats will instead just tell the studio that they can rehash and recycle whatever's already ready to go and people will still buy it - and then they have no incentive or reason to keep remastering additional cartoons."

This is seriously as much a middle finger to us as the Mickey's Christmas Carol Blu-ray (with its smothered-in-DVNR transfer of the titular featurette and paltry selection of shorts) was to nearly every Disney shorts fan who was yearning for a Blu-ray release of those shorts. I feel depressed that hardly any of the studios (whether it be Warner, Disney, Universal, or anyone who has access to a backlog of classic cartoons) can be bothered to dig into their back catalog and do something with the shorts they have in their possession, but they're more than happy to put out bare-bones scraps or (in Warner's case) rehashed repackages of previous discs or toss nearly all of the stuff they don't give a s**t about onto a streaming service that would cost, say, $70 per year versus much less for one purchase of a physical copy of any of the same material the service has to offer...

I feel depressed that hardly any of the studios (whether it be Warner, Disney, Universal, or anyone who has access to a backlog of classic cartoons) can be bothered to dig into their back catalog and do something with the shorts they have in their possession, but they're more than happy to put out bare-bones scraps or (in Warner's case) rehashed repackages of previous discs or toss nearly all of the stuff they don't give a s**t about onto a streaming service that would cost, say, $70 per year versus much less for one purchase of a physical copy of any of the same material the service has to offer...

Warner Archive's Blu-ray releases since 2018 is a very strong exception to what you're saying here.

I feel depressed that hardly any of the studios (whether it be Warner, Disney, Universal, or anyone who has access to a backlog of classic cartoons) can be bothered to dig into their back catalog and do something with the shorts they have in their possession, but they're more than happy to put out bare-bones scraps or (in Warner's case) rehashed repackages of previous discs or toss nearly all of the stuff they don't give a s**t about onto a streaming service that would cost, say, $70 per year versus much less for one purchase of a physical copy of any of the same material the service has to offer...

Warner Archive's Blu-ray releases since 2018 is a very strong exception to what you're saying here.

I agree wholeheartedly (and the picture quality on each and every one of those discs is stellar), but still. If there's obviously a market for, say, the Looney Tunes, Disney's "Fab Four/Five"/"Sensational Six", Tom and Jerry, Woody Woodpecker, and the like, why not cater to it more often? Wouldn't it be something for the "Looney Tunes" franchise's 90th anniversary this year (and Bugs' 80th) to be given a proper due, nearly every Walt-era Disney short to be available on physical media again, and the Tom and Jerry Golden Collection to finally continue? (Warner Archive's current bread-and-butter seems to be the MGM Tex Avery shorts; they ought to focus on more than one property if they really want to pick up Warner Home Video's slack)

I regret not being who I am today during - and consequently missing - the classic animation on home video boom of the 2000s. If I heard that 60 Warner Bros. cartoons, half (or a fourth) of each major Disney character's filmography, and bushels of other classic animated shorts were coming out each year for modern consumers to collect and enjoy, would I willingly purchase just about every classic animation DVD that was coming out then? You bet your sweet bippy I would!

Okay, WaltWiz1901, let’s calm down for a bit. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m tired of the frequency and attitude of these rants. (And believe me, these gripes are not shared by just me.) Specifically:

• You rehash the same points repeatedly without adding anything new. (You discussed this topic back in March of this year.)
  
• You engage in wishful thinking on occasions where it isn’t needed.
  
• You act like the studios have a vendetta against you, personally, or against the classic animation community as a whole (ex. Your “middle finger to us” quote.)
  

There’s nothing wrong with venting, but this forum is not a blog, and rants like yours are better suited elsewhere.

In conclusion, please cool it with your constant rants on studios not releasing classic animation on video unless you have something productive to say.

Thanks,
PopKorn Kat

---

Okay, WaltWiz1901, let’s calm down for a bit. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m tired of the frequency and attitude of these rants. (And believe me, these gripes are not shared by just me.) Specifically:

• You rehash the same points repeatedly without adding anything new. (You discussed this topic back in March of this year.)
  
• You engage in wishful thinking on occasions where it isn’t needed.
  
• You act like the studios have a vendetta against you, personally, or against the classic animation community as a whole (ex. Your “middle finger to us” quote.)
  

There’s nothing wrong with venting, but this forum is not a blog, and rants like yours are better suited elsewhere.

In conclusion, please cool it with your constant rants on studios not releasing classic animation on video unless you have something productive to say.

Thanks,
PopKorn Kat

FINALLY, someone is saying this! Thank you! (I find it kind of funny that WaltWiz1901 also liked this post, by the way.)

Just out of curiosity, but are there any online reviews of this hodgepodge rerelease set?

Okay, WaltWiz1901, let’s calm down for a bit. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m tired of the frequency and attitude of these rants. (And believe me, these gripes are not shared by just me.) Specifically:

• You rehash the same points repeatedly without adding anything new. (You discussed this topic back in March of this year.)
  
• You engage in wishful thinking on occasions where it isn’t needed.
  
• You act like the studios have a vendetta against you, personally, or against the classic animation community as a whole (ex. Your “middle finger to us” quote.)
  

There’s nothing wrong with venting, but this forum is not a blog, and rants like yours are better suited elsewhere.

In conclusion, please cool it with your constant rants on studios not releasing classic animation on video unless you have something productive to say.

Thanks,
PopKorn Kat

FINALLY, someone is saying this! Thank you! (I find it kind of funny that WaltWiz1901 also liked this post, by the way.)

I sincerely apologize if my venting has been excessive and unproductive, but my point nevertheless still stands (if somewhat less hostile than before). To quote Thad Komorowski's negative review of Porky Pig 101 ...

Do it right, or don't do it at all.
...
[But] it is [even more] unfair when a giant corporation slings hash, knowing the stupid audience will buy the set anyway. If it's this or nothing, fine. Nothing it is.

(While these were, in-context, said to make a point about how wrong releasing a set with numerous glaring flaws present throughout is, they very aptly sum up my feelings on how classic animation should be treated on home video going forward. There's nothing wrong with marketing them to a more universal audience (not just the classic animation community) per se, but in my humble opinion, neglecting to celebrate a monumental anniversary with anything more than even more rehashed discs (and just one truly new disc - with only three (unrestored) new-to-disc shorts and a hefty amount of double-dips) is not ideal.)

As to why I liked Emily's post, I wouldn't be lying if I said I got at least something out of it - from now on, I will calm down and keep my ranting about the lack of classic cartoons on home video to a minimum.

I think it's crazy that the set's been out for a week and we STILL don't have an official list of its contents.

I think it's crazy that the set's been out for a week and we STILL don't have an official list of its contents.

It may not be truly official, but here's my educated guess on what will be on this set:
- All 59 shorts listed on the Bugs Bunny Video Guide's news articles about the set (every short on the first discs of the first four Golden Collections...plus all 15 shorts on the first disc of the fifth Golden Collection (yep, you heard it here first: the couple of solo Daffy shorts that made up a third of that disc (apparently) were indeed ported over to this set as well)
- Every bonus feature on each of the five aforementioned discs (including only half of most of the documentaries included in full on the sets these discs were lifted from)
-...nope, that's it (as if this "lazy afterthought" wasn't lazier enough, the packaging is simply a regular keepcase; you'd think they'd go for something a bit more special than that, like a slipbox (or, heck, even a slipcover) over the case, and maybe include a program insert/booklet)

As if the lack of an official content list isn't enough, get this: the Video Guide did indeed approach Warner for one (numerous times, I might add), but every time, this request fell on deaf ears. Warner really doesn't feel like having anything to do with their own classic cartoons (not counting the new Looney Tunes Cartoons or the other shorts they own (like the MGM shorts and some of the Paramount shorts)), do they?

I think it's crazy that the set's been out for a week and we STILL don't have an official list of its contents.

Most likely, no one around these parts will ever find out exactly what's on this set. Every real cartoon fan is too wary of buying something that's probably 100% recycled from earlier sets. :P

I think it's crazy that the set's been out for a week and we STILL don't have an official list of its contents.

Most likely, no one around these parts will ever find out exactly what's on this set. Every real cartoon fan is too wary of buying something that's probably 100% recycled from earlier sets. :P

Well, there's always Greg (Method) and I's educated guesses...

I think it's crazy that the set's been out for a week and we STILL don't have an official list of its contents.

Most likely, no one around these parts will ever find out exactly what's on this set. Every real cartoon fan is too wary of buying something that's probably 100% recycled from earlier sets. :P

Well, there's always Greg (Method) and I's educated guesses...

Sure -- and most likely it's all double-dips. But educated guesses are not the same as verified facts.

There’s nothing ambiguous about this. The back cover art at the WB Shop literally says that all the shorts in this set were previously released in the Golden collections.

There’s nothing ambiguous about this. The back cover art at the WB Shop literally says that all the shorts in this set were previously released in the Golden collections.

Ah, that changes it then. Didn't know that. So the only thing that isn't known is the exact contents.