Warner Bros. Senior VP George Feltenstein announced at a Comic Con panel today that the studio will release the Looney Tunes Platinum Collection: Volume One on Blu-ray this November. The panel was moderated by animation historian Jerry Beck, who also broke the news via a blog post on Cartoon Brew. The much anticipated release will bring 50 classic Looney Tunes cartoons to high definition.
The Looney Tunes Platinum Collection: Volume One will arrive in two variations, each containing 3 Blu-ray discs. A standard digibook version will retail for $59.96 while an Ultimate Collector's Edition will be available for $79.98. The Ultimate Collector's Edition will include a 52-page color book with rare images and sketches, a character shot glass, souvenier tin magnet and a framed Litho Cel with a certificate of authenticity. These will all be housed in a plastic box with a slipcover. Each Ultimate Collector's Edition box will be numbered for exclusivity.
Update: Warner Bros. has officially detailed the contents of each disc. The listing of episodes, all of which have been remastered, include:
Disc 1:
"Hare Tonic"
"Baseball Bugs"
"Buccaneer Bunny"
"The Old Grey Hare"
"Rabbit Hood"
"8 Ball Bunny"
"Rabbit of Seville"
"What's Opera Doc?"
"The Great Piggy Bank Robbery"
"A Pest in the House"
"The Scarlet Pumpernickle"
"Duck Amuck"
"Robin Hood Daffy"
"Baby Bottleneck"
"Kitty Kornered"
"Scaredy Cat"
"Porky Chops"
"Old Glory"
"A Tale of Two Kitties"
"Tweetie Pie"
"Fast and Furry-ous"
"Beep, Beep"
"Lovelorn Leghorn"
"For Scent-I-Mental Reasons"
"Speedy Gonzales"
6 Behind the Tunes Featurettes
Wagnerian Wabbit: The Making of What's Opera, Doc?
Twilight in Tunes: The Music of Raymond Scott
Powerhouse in Pictures
Putty Problems and Canary Rows
A Chuck Jones Tutorial: Tricks of the Cartoon Trade
The Charm of Stink: On the Scent of Pepé le Pew
Disc 2:
"One Froggy Evening"
"The Three Little Bops"
"I Love to Singa"
"Katnip Kollege"
"The Dover Boys at Pimento University"
"Chow Hound"
"Haredevil Hare"
"The Hasty Hare"
"Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2 Century"
"Hare-way to the Stars"
"Mad as a Mars Hare"
"Devil May Hare"
"Bedevilled Rabbit"
"Ducking the Devil"
"Bill of Hare"
"Dr. Devil and Mr. Hare"
"Bewitched Bunny"
"Broom-stick Bunny"
"A Witch's Tangled Hare"
"A-Haunting We Will Go"
"Feed the Kitty"
"Kiss Me Kat"
"Feline Frame-Up"
"From A to ZZZZ"
"Boyhood Daze"
5 Behind the Tunes Featurettes
It Hopped One Night: The Story Behind One Froggy Evening
Wacky Warner One-Shots
Mars Attacks! Life on the Red Planet with My Favorite Martian
The Ralph Phillips Story: Living the American Daydream
Razzma-Taz: Giving the Tasmanian Devil His Due
A third disc will consist entirely of bonus features. These include:
A Greeting from Chuck Jones
Chuck Amuck: The Movie
Chuck Jones: Extremes & In-Betweens: A Life in Animation
Chuck Jones: Memories of Childhood
Ken Mundie's expressionist anti-war short, The Door (1967)
How the Grinch Stole Christmas Pencil Test
The Animated World of Chuck Jones (9 Cartoons):
Point Rationing of Foods
Hell-Bent for Election
So Much for So Little
Orange Blossoms for Violet
A Hitch in Time
90 Day Wondering
Drafty, Isn't It?
The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics
The Bear That Wasn't
9 Bonus Cartoons:
Fright Before Christmas
Spaced-Out- Bunny
Duck Dodgers and the Return of the 24 1/2th Century
Another Froggy Evening
Marvin the Martian in the Third Dimension
Superior Duck
From Hare to Eternity
Father of the Bird
Museum Scream
Audio commentary will also be included on 35 of the 50 cartoons on Disc 1 and 2. Amazon already has the pre-orders up for both versions with a release date of November 15th. These sport a discounted price of $38.99 for the digibook and $51.99 for the Ultimate Collector's Edition.
This looks very cool and will def get...BUT I wish they were more like Disney in their DVD collections that simply put ALL the cartoons from their various characters in chronological order. Part of me hates it when companies tell me what should be my favorites
So given the time period of the source and therefore the rather archaic simplicity of the animation, how much of an improvement could this possibly be over the DVD? I'm seriously asking. I skipped out on the DVD collections but I love these toons. This looks like a golden opportunity to sweep up the future DVD trade ins at low cost.
I think this set and the tom and jerry are BS. I agree with you VANS. I think all these companys' that do "best of" should go out of business. These sets should be in chronological order.. like the stooges, popeye, TV shows and what not before this. Look at the golden collection, you think they would have learned.
So, does the Digibook have 3 disks too? I'm confused!
@ van: A) I ain't sitting through 4 disks of Bosko, you?, and
B) the Regular fans gave them HECK for not putting Opera and Froggy on the first Golden box. Warner's much too inferiority/paranoid to make that same mistake twice.
EricJ, yes, both the boxset and digibook will have 3 discs.
On one hand, I'm excited for this--these should look gorgous. Looks like a quality product, etc. Yet at the same time, $60/$80 has me annoyed. For how impressive that boxset looks, you'd think it would be more than 33% more expensive than the digibook. And $60 feels like an astronomical price for a digibook.
Love the packaging but let's hope there's an homage to the late great Mel Blanc somewhere. There wouldn't be any Looney Tunes if it wasn't for this vocal genius!! A-bee-dee-a-bee-dee-a-bee-dee that's all folks!!
I don't understand why I should buy this. I already have all these shorts on DVD... and they look fine to me. Will the upgrade to Blu-ray be really worth it. I highly doubt it.
I have the entire dvd series and will definately upgrade if the soundtracks are HD also. Do we know if these will be the original cartoons and not the censored versions?
Looks very nice, but... Like others, I have the DVD sets. I'm just not sure that this will represent enough of an upgrade in image quality to justify a purchase. So I'm undecided. Now if the "Censored 11" ever make it to Blu...
Must admit this is disappointing - I had hopes after the Tom & Jerry Golden Collection announcement that Warner had finally learned their lesson. But this simply looks like a rehash of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVD format, which will all but guarantee declining sales on each successive Volume released - once the more well-known shorts are released on the first 2-3 volumes, the casual fan won't bother with successive volumes, leading to Warner ceasing production on new volumes.
I believe that Warner should have done the format chronologically by decade - the first set could have been "The 1950s, Vol.1," and had every short released theatrically in 1950 and 1951 in chronological order. The following set could then be "The 1950s, Vol. 2, " followed by "The 1940s, Vol. 1," "The 1950s, Vol. 3," "The 1940s, Vol. 2," "The 1960s, Vol. 1," "The 1930s, Vol. 1," "The 1940s, Vol. 3," etc. Interest from both collectors and casual fans should be maintained throughout the series' run, as it's not a random collection of shorts, and every set will have classics as well as new-to-DVD/BD shorts.
Plus, Warner would win as well - it would not need to start at the very beginning in 1930 with the Bosko/Buddy shorts and early Merrie Melodies, which would only appeal to collectors and would have the highest restoration costs.
Sigh. I guess I should just resign myself to the fact that I'll never have a complete Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies collection, which would be my Holy Grail of DVD/BD.
like several others, I too am disappointed that WB's toons are not being presented chronologically. My biggest hope is that this is only the beginning...a taste of things to come, and that they will mirror the Popeye releases like "spargs" has suggested. And for many of you who are wondering, if these shorts have been restored, many color correction errors from the standard def DVD releases can now be addressed as well as the MANY MISSING ORIGINAL OPENING TITLE SEQUENCES.
Please oh please oh please, don't let them annihilate the grain with DNR the way Disney does. I don't buy the "animator's intent" garbage, the stuff was printed on film and ought to retain the look of a good print.
The DVDs contained 56 to 60 cartoons per set and the Blu-ray set contains only 50 with all the capacity BD has? I realize that HD takes more real-estate, but still. I was hoping the BD sets would have 100 cartoons each.
But I disagree with those who think these should have been released chronologically. There were over 1000 Looney Tunes cartoons. Except for a few completists, no one buys the whole thing. The 6 DVD sets comprised 377 cartoons + some extras. Each released set sold fewer copies than the one previous which is why WB stopped releasing more sets. They had only released about 37% of the library.
If they did this chronologically, it would take years before anyone's personal favorites would appear and the first set would probably be all early black & white and little to no Bugs Bunny. That makes no commercial sense.
For me this is a "wait and see". If the quality is substantially better than the DVDs, maybe I'll dip, although I don't own all the DVDs. But somehow I doubt it. And in the DVDs, you can actually see dirt on the cells. If that's cleaned up, people will complain. If that's not cleaned up, it will probably be even more obvious on HD and people will complain. And I'm sure the special features and documentaries will still be in SD and while the image quality on some was quite good, many had a "cheap feel" to them.
>>I don't understand why I should buy this. I already have all these shorts on DVD... and they look fine to me. Will the upgrade to Blu-ray be really worth it. I highly doubt it. <<
I don't understand why people like you even bother buying Blu Ray at all if DVD is good enough.
Agreed that it should be in chronological order, but am gonna pre order anyways as I think Warner was the master at the cartoon shorts. The digibook for me though as I don't need all the extra bells and whistles.
I never said that all the Lonney Tunes should be released chronologically, I referenced the dDisney DVD sets, in those the individual chgaracters have their own chronological sets, i.e. Goofy vol 1, Donald Duck, vol 2. Warner's could have done the same. I think chronological Bugs, Porky, Daffy, would be better...and yes as someone remarked, no Bosko
Well, at least they are including some of the really old stuff, although a true historical document would have been chronological. This reminds me of the bizarre mash-ups of the 007 sets. Can't wait to see these toons on blu.
I hope they frame them correctly. All of the DVD and Laser Disc releases were not framed correctly and important parts of the images were missing. If they are going to hit us again for another purchase, I hope they put some time and effort into producing a quality product.
A double-dip naturally, but only if the BD reviews warrant a purchase. No room in my budget for cut-corners or muffs -- only accepting definitive editions at this stage.
Now..... what type of "carrot juice" in the glass would be best for watching Looney Tunes? Hmm?
AVPig...absolutely, I could not agree more. Between rotten framing and missing original title sequences (some supposedly lost forever we are told, but I seriously doubt it), I am ever hopeful that WB does this collection correctly!
Is the 52-page color book in The Ultimate Collector's Edition the same as the Digibook, or is that an additional booklet? If they're one and the same, I think I'd favor the less expensive package.
If anybody's interested, here's a fan-curated list of all the Looney Tunes & Merrie Melodies shorts that have been released on home video. It's a pretty handy visual way of seeing which cartoons are double (or triple or quadruple) dips and which haven't been seen in awhile (or ever) on home video.
@ Kent2000: They're likely different books. Stand-alone digibooks don't tend to have that many pages.
I'd be interested in obtaining the UCE down the line with price drop of some sort. What I would really love to see is a massive collection of all the WB toons (both Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies) in hi-def. But this is a nice starting point, I'm sure.
I agree, some kind of organized method to what is included in each set would have been preferred. Since they're releasing the "favorites" right off the bat, the subsequent releases will be the "not so favorites, but almost" and so on? Chronological year by year, and/or character by character woudl have been nice instead of a mish-mash. What are the odds of even half of the cracks ever being filled in, let alone all of them? I don't already own the DVDs, these will be my 1st plunge into looney toons on disc.
THIS IS A DAY ONE PURCHASE FOR ME!!! and if this one sells well they will release more volumes.
So all you FANS make sure you pick up your copy in NOVEMBER.
