TVSquad

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]

This is awesome news. The fourth installment of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection will be out on DVD on November 14. I know some animation purists have complained that the transfers haven't been the best, but I personally try not to be too picky about such things. My only minor complaint is the introductions from Whoopi Goldberg. I still haven't been able to figure out why the hell I should care how she feels about Bugs Bunny. She was also interviewed for the latest Peanuts book. I haven't been able to figure that out, either, but I digress. As usual, TVShowsOnDVD has all the latest information. The set will heavily focus on Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny (including the Academy-award winning "Knighty Knight Bugs") and Speedy Gonzales. Sixty shorts will be included on the release. In addition, the Spotlight Collection Volume Four will also be released at the same time, a 2-disc set that includes a handful of shorts also available on the Golden Collection set.

Okay, we've looked at both Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck individually, and now it's time to focus on some of the best cartoons in which the two cartoon heavyweights shared the screen (much to Daffy's consternation, I'm sure). Bugs Bunny didn't necessarily meet his match with Daffy, but the two characters played off one another in a manner that seemed more substantive than Bugs' usual battles with the likes of Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam. While someone like Elmer would simple come at Bugs with guns blazing, Daffy would often try to match Bugs on an intellectual level, and usually wind up having his bill shot clean off his face. These are my favorite Bugs and Daffy cartoons:

Rabbit Seasoning (1952):  An ever-malleable Elmer Fudd finds himself repeatedly shooting Daffy, despite Daffy trying to convince him it isn't duck season. Actually, it is duck season, but Bugs uses reverse psychology and clever pronoun usage to trick Daffy into somehow begging Elmer to shoot him. There's also an important lesson for all of us in this cartoon, which is that a crazy man with a gun can always be thwarted by a rabbit dressed as a woman.

While each of the Looney Tunes characters had their own personality, even those personalities would differ depending on which era the cartoon was made, and who was directing. Porky Pig, for example, was often portrayed as the neurotic foil, but in later cartoons with Daffy Duck he was often the calm voice of reason. Daffy also differed greatly in personality from his early days under the supervision of Bob Clampett when he truly lived up to the name "daffy" to his eventual evolution into the selfish but lovable duck most people know him as today. Trying to keep these two sides of Daffy's psyche in mind, I've come up with five of what I think are his best shorts:

Duck Amuck (1953): "And on this farm he had an igloo...." This was one of my favorite cartoons growing up, and still is today. Daffy finds himself at the mercy of an unseen director who erases and paints in new scenery, erases Daffy himself, and even messes with the music soundtrack and Daffy's own voice. Al the while Daffy tries to reason with him, but to no avail. In the end it's revealed that the man with the magic pencil and paintbrush is actually Bugs Bunny.