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."

My friend Wild Bill sent me news that Jonny Quest, the Hanna-Barbera series about the titular lad who accompanies his scientist father on wild adventures, is being made into a live-action movie. The series, much like The Flintstones, The Jetsons and Top Cat, aired during primetime when it first aired in the '60s. New versions of Jonny Quest also popped up in the '80s and '90s.

Like the upcoming Speed Racer flick from the Wachowski brothers, reports so far say the movie will be "family friendly." The movie will serve as an origin story explaining how Jonny's bodyguard Roger "Race" Bannon and Dr. Benton Quest's adopted son Hadji join the family.

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.

If you've been having trouble sleeping at night because you're concerned about what might become of Notes from the Underbelly creator Stacy Traub if her show doesn't make it, you can stop worrying. Traub has signed a two-year deal with Warner Bros. Television that will allow her to develop new series should Notes from the Underbelly not get picked up for another season. Otherwise, Traub will remain with the show as a show runner and executive producer. As far as what new shows she would develop, Traub says she likes shows with "flawed characters." She's also written for Kitchen Confidential and Spin City.

Notes from the Underbelly is about a young couple who become pregnant and must settle into a more mature lifestyle while simultaneously hearing advice from meddlesome family and friends. It will air on ABC.

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]

In 1963, shortly before the Warner Bros. Animation Studio closed down, Friz Freleng created a pilot for ABC called Philbert. The series, a mix of animation and live-action, featured actor William Schallert (The Patty Duke Show, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, Gunsmoke, Get Smart) as a newspaper cartoonist who lives with Philbert, the character from his comic. ABC never picked up the pilot, so it was repackaged as a theatrical short instead. If you own the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 3, then you own the theatrical version of Philbert, which is included with the set.

Animation historian Jerry Beck provided audio commentary for the short, and has posted a rough clip of the original television pilot on Cartoon Brew. The pilot was directed by Richard Donner (Superman, The Goonies). Freleng directed the animation. I've also placed it here for your enjoyment. It definitely has a very "'60s sitcom" feel to it, and it's neat to see the cartoon character holding and interacting with objects in the real world.

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.

What's New Scooby-Doo? was an updated version of the classic Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? that stuck with the basic premise of the gang solving spooky mysteries, but with new gadgets and contemporary music to give everything a more modern feel. The only voice actors who remained from the original series were Casey Kasem as Shaggy and Frank Welker as Fred (who also took over the voice of Scooby-Doo after Don Messick passed away in 1997). All other characters were voiced by different people. The animation was done by Warner Bros, giving it a more fluid look than the Hanna-Barbera original. The first season of the cartoon, which ran for just under three years on the WB, will be released on DVD on February 20, 2007. Fans of the original series probably don't care too much about this modern version, but younger kids seem to like it. Besides, it's not like people my age aren't more familiar with the Ralph Bakshi version of Mighty Mouse than the original Terrytoons version. Things get updated for new generations, that's how this nutty industry works sometimes.

[via Toon Zone]

For over thirty years, Dina Babbitt, once a teenage girl imprisoned in Auschwitz, has been trying to reclaim paintings she made while in the concentration camp. Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi doctor, took a liking to Babbitt's artwork and asked her to paint portraits of the gypsies on which he was performing his horrific experiments. It was, in fact, these paintings that kept Babbitt alive. After the war, Babbitt came to California and worked as an animator for both Warner Bros. and Jay Ward Productions. When it was revealed that seven of her Auschwitz paintings were on display at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland, she tried to get them back, but the museum has consistently refused, claiming the paintings are not personal works of art, but rather documentation of the events that occurred at Auschwitz created under the orders of Dr. Mengele. The artistic community, including former DC Comics artist Joe Kubert, have rallied around Babbitt's cause, as have congresswoman Shelley Berkley, and a former director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Efforts to help the 83 year old Babbitt reclaim her artwork were stepped up recently due to a heart condition that is threatening her health, though I would assume that if she were to pass away before the issue is resolved her family would continue the fight.

[via Toon Zone]

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.

I alluded to the fact that YouTube was throwing the baby out with the bathwater in this recent post, but the information I had was coming from unknown commenters on John K's blog, so I decided to do the unthinkable and not take their word as gospel. However, a lot of people who actually work in the industry, such as Amid Amidi, have also echoed those same sentiments, and it seems that, yes, YouTube, in its quest to protect copyright holders, has also been deleting cartoons that entered the public domain many years ago and should be freely distributed to the masses by any means people see fit. I first began to suspect many of those old Warner Bros. shorts were public domain when someone mentioned "Yankee Doodle Daffy" had been taken off the site, a cartoon I bought as a "public domain" video almost a decade ago. Amid has a great post about this over on Cartoon Brew, with links to other great articles on the subject. I think whether or not YouTube should be showing copyrighted material is up for debate, but to also deny fans access to perfectly legitimate classic cartoons is not going to bode well for the site. People are angry, and rightfully so.

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."

Well, perhaps "forgotten" isn't the right word, but for every Bugs Bunny, Sylvester, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam, Porky Pig, and Elmer Fudd there's a plethora of one-shot or secondary characters from Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies who still had their own unique personalities, even if they weren't quite as popular as their iconic counterparts. So today, we pay tribute to those we haven't forgotten, but should think about more often anyway. Here we go:

The Goofy Gophers: These two gophers, named Mac and Tosh, appeared in eight shorts between 1947 and 1965. The characters were created by Bob Clampett, based on designs from an earlier cartoon. They were, essentially, a sarcastic reply to Disney's cutesy Chip and Dale, speaking to one another in fawning tones, always injecting lines like "please" and "no, you must go first" into the conversation. Their voices were provided by Mel Blanc and Stan Freberg, and based, apparently, on actors Edward Everett Horton and Franklin Pangborn.