TVSquad

Everyone, I need your attention! I am about to do something that rarely pops up in my life and, I'm guessing, in yours as well. It might be a little shocking, so I want to make sure that you're near a chair. Deep breath, here it goes...

I want to thank my cable provider. I'll wait until you can sit down. Need a drink of water? Breath of fresh air?

I'm being serious here! I know that it's rare that someone publicly thanks the utility that sucks their money away and provides little if any variety, but I think this time it's merited. You see, for years now the networks have been lacking a very important series of programs that are important to the proper education of our youth. I speak about Looney Tunes cartoons.

Here's what's on TV tomorrow. Lots of marathons, movies, and bowl games.

• Sci-Fi's Twilight Zone marathon continues from last night.
• AMC is showing classic westerns all day.
• Cartoon Network has Looney Tunes all day.
• Hallmark has Christmas movies all day.
• At 6am, USA has a Monk marathon.
• At 7, NBC's Today, ABC's Good Morning, America, and CBS' The Early Show will all have New Year's tips, predictions, advice, and recipes.
• At 8, TNT has a Bones marathon.
• History Channel has Ice Road Truckers episodes all day starting at 8.

Here are the new TV DVDs, in stores tomorrow.

The complete series sets seem to be coming fast and furious these days, though there really isn't anything here that I want to spend the cash on (already have The Outer Limits). I have the first Man From U.N.C.L.E. complete series set that Time-Life did several months ago (this one is from Warner). The Starlost? Maybe as a curiosity, but I doubt it. The Incredible Hulk? Eh. Knight Rider? God no.

• According To Jim - Season 1
• Ben 10: Alien Force - Season 1, Vol. 1
• Dynasty - Season 3, Vol. 2
• Family Guy - Vol. 6, Freakin' Sweet Party Pack, and Total World Domination Collection sets
• The Incredible Hulk - Complete Series and Season 5
• Knight Rider - Complete Series
• The L Word - Season 5
• Looney Tunes - Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Vol. 6 and Spotlight Collection, Vol. 6
• The Man From U.N.C.L.E. - Complete Series
• The Naked Brothers Band - Season 2
• The Outer Limits (Original Series) - Complete Series
• Route 66 - Season 2
• The Starlost - Complete Series
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - Season 2, Vol. 2

It's that festive time of year when children put tinsel on the television antennas and hang mistletoe over their favorite DVDs. Where celebrities check into rehab to spend the holidays with all their celebrity friends. And where the rest of America is invited to corporate non-specific, non-religious, non-alcoholic generic winter holiday luncheons where they can mingle with their co-workers and say things like "Remember when this company used to have real Christmas parties?"

But while political correctness may have ruined most holiday functions, nothing can ruin Festivus! That magical season in which TV Squadders hope and pray for televisions dreams come true. And I know just what I want...

Here are the new TV DVDs, in stores tomorrow.

• Angel - Collector's Set
• Arrest and Trial - Best Of
• Avatar: The Last Airbender - Book 3
• The Benny Hill Show - Thames Years 1969-89 Megaset
• Bugs Bunny/Looney Tunes - Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Vol. 5
• CSI: Miami - Season 5
• Checkmate - Best Of Season 1
• Cimarron City - Best Of
• Dark Shadows - The Beginning, Vol. 2
• Everybody Loves Raymond - Complete Series
• Family Affair - Season 4
• Family Guy - Freakin' Party Pack
• Hardcastle and McCormick - Season 3 (Canada)
• Laredo - Best Of Season 1
• Magnum, P.I. - Season 7
• The Mickey Rooney Show - Hey Mulligan
• My So-Called Life - Complete Series
• Mystery Science Theater 3000 - Vol. 12
• October Road - Season 1
• The Outer Limits - Vol. 3
• The Real McCoys - Season 2
• Riptide - Season 2
• Riverboat - Best Of
• Scrubs - Season 6
• Sgt. Preston of the Yukon - Complete Collection
• Tate - The Complete Series
• Twin Peaks - Definitive Gold Box

Here's some cool animation stuff I found over the past week or so:

Cartoon Brew has a lot of cool stuff, so I'll start there first. First of all, Jerry Beck has a new book, The Hanna Barbera Treasury. The book will focus mostly on the Hanna Barbera series created in the '50s and '60s. It comes out in October.

Also via the Brew comes this documentary about the life and work of animator Tex Avery, the man who was arguably the one most responsible for putting the "looney" in "Looney Tunes," and later brought that same magic to MGM. The doc is from 1988 and is split into several parts.

When people talk about the greatest voice actors in cartoons, Mel Blanc is always at the top of the list, and for good reason: he solely provided the voice of the majority of the Looney Tunes characters, save for Elmer Fudd, who was voiced by Arthur Q. Bryan. His first real contribution was providing the voice of Porky Pig, a gig originally given to an actor named Joe Dougherty whose genuine stutter made it impossible for him to control the character's voice.

Blanc also worked in radio before and during his time at Warner Bros., working with such legends as Jack Benny, Abbot and Costello, and Burns and Allen. It was radio that helped him to create solid but unseen characters, a talent that carried over beautifully into animation.

After the jump is a clip from the Tonight Show featuring the man himself being interviewed by Johnny Carson. It's rather bittersweet to see these two great comedic minds on screen together, and to think of what the world of entertainment lost when they each passed away.

[via Frederator]

All day today, Boomerang is broadcasting cartoons about love and romance. You didn't forget it was Valentine's Day, did you? This is the day lovers exchange socks, shave their heads and carve a menagerie of mythical creatures out of frozen mayonnaise. Okay, that's not true, I'm just trying to start a new trend beyond all this boring "flowers and chocolate" nonsense.

At any rate, if you love yourself some cartoons, keep checking into Boomerang today for love-laced cartoons featuring the Looney Tunes characters, the Smurfs, Popeye, Top Cat, Speed Buggy, the Flintstones, 2 Stupid Dogs, Droopy, Tom and Jerry, and others. You can see the schedule here.

If you don't have Boomerang, you can always watch some of those same shorts over on the In2TV site.

In2TV recently added a Looney Tunes channel to its ever-growing collection of TV shows. My first thought was, "hey, that's pretty awesome." I mean, it is awesome. There's a whole bunch of great shorts to pick from, including the very first appearances of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. This is another chance for people to see these cartoons, and that's a good thing.

However, as someone who adores these old classics, I have to say there are better ways to view these cartoons. Refrederator is an excellent video podcast that features a ton of old cartoons from Warner Bros. and other studios that you can download, and it's always worth digging through Archive.org for public domain cartoons that can also be downloaded to your computer.

My generation grew up with GI Joe, Voltron, Thundercats and He-Man, so we're not exactly strangers to action-based cartoons, but we also had reruns of Looney Tunes shorts and early Hanna-Barbera (Tom and Jerry, The Jetsons, The Flintstones, etc). These days, it seems cartoons are all about action, and those old cartoons have either disappeared completely, or have become more difficult to find (Boomerang excluded). It's quite a shame, because my own nieces and nephew, regardless of being generations removed from the likes of Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry, absolutely love those old cartoons. Sure, they still love Avatar: The Last Airbender and Shaolin Showdown, but they also know what funny is.

Nevertheless, someone, somewhere felt that Bugs and his pals needed to cash in on the popularity of anime and anime-inspired action cartoons, and the result was Loonatics Unleashed, a cartoon set in the future, featuring descendants of the classic Looney Tunes characters with super powers and crazy gadgets and weapons. The first season will be out on DVD this March, and if you see your kids walking towards it in the store, I suggest you kick them towards the classic Golden Collection DVD sets instead.

The point of this edition of The Five, besides giving me yet another chance to talk about cartoons, is to examine those weird quirks that set certain cartoon characters apart from their constituents. That is to say, something beyond the usual bulging eyes, springing hair, unraveling tongues, mallet-induced head lumps and stars and birdies that twirl about the head whenever they crash through a wall. I'm interested in quirks and traits a character possesses that no other character does. Some of these are easy: Fred Flintstone's "Yabba Dabba Doo!," Bugs Bunny's various catchphrases like "What's up, doc?" and "Of course you know, this means war!," so I tried to delve a little deeper and come up with some oddities only incredible nerds like myself would notice.

Maybe this will make more sense if I just jump right into it:

Are you bored? Do you have nothing much to do today? Does the thought of leaving your home and being around other human beings just leave you unfulfilled? Don't worry, that's why I'm here. Instead of stepping outside where you might risk being hit by a car or strangled by a squirrel, why not sit in front of the warm glow of your computer screen and watch some clips from old TV shows like You Bet Your Life, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Lucy Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show? There's also some old Popeye and Looney Tunes shorts, plus movie serials and trailers.

A friend of mine sent me this link to Public Domain Comedy, knowing I'm a sucker for all things cartoony. You can also find a lot of similar clips and full-length videos by poking around the Archive.org site. It's like YouTube, but without the guilt of viewing copyrighted material.

Years before Porky Pig would become the first breakout character of Warner Bros. Animation, there was a little humanoid by the name of Bosko, the star of the very first Looney Tune, "Sinkin' in the Bathtub," a sugary-sweet animated short that debuted in 1930 at the Warner Bros. Theater on Broadway as a lead-in to the feature film The Song of the Flame.



This cartoon, and many that followed it, were created under the omnipresent shadow of Disney during a time when Walt ruled animation and the only way to get a cartoon produced was to stick to a Disneyesque formula (even the name "Looney Tunes" is a play on Disney's "Silly Symphonies" cartoons). It wouldn't be until many years later that Warner Bros. would develop a style separate from Disney and take animation to wonderfully ludicrous heights that would never be allowed within the confines of the Walt Disney Studio. While Disney focused on narrative and making images realistic, Warner Bros. chose to make cartoons with characters and worlds that that would twist, contort, and defy our laws of physics. This change in style was thanks in large part to Tex Avery, who joined the studio in 1935. "Sinkin' in the Bathtub" pales in comparison to what the studio would eventually create, but it's a great piece of animation history, nonetheless.

Watch the cartoon here.

Before he passed away in 2002, one of the last cartoons iconic animation director Chuck Jones helped to create was a Flash-animated series called Thomas J. Timberwolf. You can watch every episode here, and if the animation seems a tad primitive, keep in mind this was created in the early days of Flash, but even with that stipulation the cartoons still look pretty damn good. The smooth talking but accident prone Thomas J. Timberwolf was voiced by Joe Alaskey, one of the voice actors to take over the voices of many of the Looney Tunes after the death of Mel Blanc, and the voice of Plucky Duck on Tiny Toons, among many, many other characters on numerous animated programs. Nancy "Bart Simpson" Cartwright, also did voices for the internet series.

[via Cartoon Brew]

Good news for animation fans who are into that whole "high definition" thing. The September 26th HD-DVD release of The Adventures of Robin Hood, the 1938 classic featuring Errol Flynn in the titular role, will also include three Warner Bros. shorts in high def: "Robin Hood Daffy," "Katnip College," and "Rabbit Hood." It would be nice if they actually released HD-DVDs of these and other cartoons, but I guess we'll have to take what we can get for now. At least you'll be able to see Bugs' make-up and all of Daffy's plastic surgery scars. Apparently a Blu-Ray disc will hit stores sometime next year. To be honest, I'm rather indifferent to seeing these cartoons in high def. To me, seeing them in high def is like listening to an old jazz song on a CD. There's nothing wrong with it, per se, but that's not really how it was meant to be experienced. Of course, these cartoons were originally created for movie screens, so I guess anything other than that would be "incorrect" so to speak.

[via Cartoon Brew]