TVSquad

Starting this spring, Warner Bros. will only release DVDs high definition DVDs on Blu-ray. That's a lot of DVDs only on Blu-ray for you HD DVD people (although Warner Bros. will continue to release DVDs in both formats until the end of May). Kevin Tsujihara, the President of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group, says that the choice to go exclusively Blu-Rray is for the consumers: "Consumers have clearly chosen Blu-ray, and we believe that recognizing this preference is the right step in making this great home entertainment experience accessible to the widest possible audience."

Oh yeah, it's happening.

Following the soon-to-be -released Transformers and the recently-announced He-Man comes yet another afternoon 'toon from my childhood making its way to the silver screen.

This time, it's ThunderCats, an animated series that aired in the 1980s and focused on a group of warriors that looked like a meld of both human and feline. Warner Bros. has optioned a script from Paul Sopocy for the live-action CGI feature-length adaptation.

Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi is not happy with YouTube. The Spumco founder has been using his blog as a kind of "online classroom" to discuss the history of animation, as well as techniques and craft that were a major part of the "Golden Age" of animation. As a visual aid, he's been posting a lot of clips from YouTube of old Warner Bros. cartoons, but recently received an e-mail from YouTube telling him many of those clips have been taken down due to copyright infringement.

Now, I don't know enough about copyright law to take any definite stance on this, but Kricfalusi's assessment is that he's actually helping to promote these cartoons, and that people who see the crappy versions on YouTube will want to go out and actually purchase the higher quality DVDs. He writes: "While Warner Bros. stops promoting their own great properties by taking the cartoons off of the TV networks, the only way left for young fans to discover these classic films is through YouTube and our fan blogs."