Looney Tunes - Golden Collection, Volume Two

As a Looney Tunes fan from childhood, I'm thrilled that they are releasing these classic cartoons in these sets of DVDs. I love this volume particularly for the release of "What's Opera Doc?" on DVD. One of my favorites of all-time! This is a wonderful set for the Looney Tunes fan.

For once, the title isn't hype: This is a Golden Collection. Most of the classic cartoons missing from Volume One are here: "Dough for the Do-Do," "A Bear for Punishment," "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery," "What's Opera, Doc?," and the immortal "One Froggy Evening." You could overdose on the Road Runner and Coyote alone. More great commentary, special features, odd rarities, and a stand-out salute to Bob Clampett.

This is a great 4 disc set if you like old cartoon.

I remember eating cereal on Saturday mornings watching these cartoons. Well, sometimes it feels good to just be a kid again and catch the talent in these that couldn't be seen as a kid. I watch them now and they are funnier than when I was a kid. What they call cartoons today just isn't fun, these are! Well worth the purchase! I werrwee werrwee wike dem!

In this second volume of the Golden Collection series, fans are treated to another mostly tasty round of Looney Tunes classics. Disc 1 is again given over to Bugs Bunny, and there are actually more of the zaniest and most subversive Bugs shorts here than in Volume 1. These include the immortality hysterical, and often weirdly twisted, "The Big Snooze," "Little Red Riding Rabbit," and "Tortoise Beats Hare," and my nominee for the most astonishing artwork and animation styles ever in "Gorilla My Dreams." (Before computers came along, did animation ever reach the technical heights, not to mention artistic accomplishments, of the 1940s Warner Brothers classics? I doubt it.) Discs 2 and 3 offer heaping helpings of Road Runner & Coyote and Tweety & Sylvester. This set also gives us a much greater look at the wondrously bizarre classics from the cracked mind of Bob Clampett, especially the early Porky & Daffy workouts "Baby Bottleneck," "The Great Piggybank Robbery," and the animation/live action B&W treat "You Ought to Be in Pictures."

With the inclusion of Disc 4 (a themed disc for pop culture and Hollywood-oriented shorts), this volume offers a great amount of overall WB variety, with room for the immortal classics "One Froggy Evening" and "What's Opera Doc," not to mention the impossibly bizarre "Porky in Wackyland," which really makes you wonder if anything on Earth in the late 1930s was as weird as the shorts coming out of Termite Terrace. In that regard, also check out one of the DVD extras, an archaically cheesy live action short starring monkeys, "Orange Blossoms for Violet," a very early project by Chuck Jones and Friz Freling. But aside from those classics, this volume shows a few cracks in the greatest-hits strategy of these DVD collections, as the variety sometimes seems forced. Here we get a smattering of old shorts that won't really be of interest to anyone but completists, such as the awkwardly unfunny non-star episodes "Have You Got Any Castles" and "The Dover Boys," and a few installments of the unlikable and mostly forgotten mouse duo Hubie and Bertie. In just the second volume of this crucial DVD series, diminishing returns are already becoming evident as Warner Brothers selects cartoons for variety and some sort of poorly-defined representativeness. But fortunately, there are still plenty of classics, not to mention immortally high-powered hilarity, in Volume 2 to make it an essential purchase for fans and collectors. [~doomsdayer520~]