I'm always afraid of sounding like a grumpy old man when I say they just don't make cartoons like when I was a kid. Actually, the cartoons made when I was a kid were pretty lousy. The ones I enjoyed were already twenty or more years old even in my elementary school years; I would be exposed to them only through repeats, primarily in the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show. While there are certainly plenty of decent cartoons nowadays, there is something special about the Looney Tunes that have made them last through the ages. The four disc Volume 2 of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection provides sixty or so examples of this immortal animation.
The first disc features Bugs Bunny in various adventures and misadventures. Bugs is the singlemost iconic figure in the Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies pantheon, and these are all good to great cartoons. Bugs contends with his usual adversaries of Elmer Fudd and Yosemite Sam as well as witches, Dr. Jekyll, French chefs and a number of other one-time adversaries. Although entertaining, to me, I still think the best discs in the set are still to follow.
Disc two features the Road Runner. Actually, the principal character is that hard-luck scavenger, Wile E. Coyote. Because the story is pretty much the same in all these cartoons, they tend to blend together, so it's hard to remember if a certain gag occurred in Beep Beep or in Ready Set Zoom, but that's okay. This is fun stuff. The commentary tracks advise us of some of the "rules" of these films, especially that the Road Runner should never leave the road and Wile E. Coyote should always be done in by his own actions (the Road Runner doesn't do anything more than occasionally startle his adversary). And on this disc, the Road Runner cartoons are only the start; we also get some wonderful films featuring less frequently used characters: Cheese Chasers and Mouse Wreckers invert some of the usual cat and mouse gags by featuring the persecuted Claude the Cat, who would rather be left alone than deal with a pair of mice out to drive him crazy. The Dover Boys is also a gem that features some one-shot characters in a story that has its own unique look and feel; in fact, it was "too" unique and not very well-received by some of the Warner Brothers higher-ups.
Disc three features Sylvester and Tweety. I've never been much of a fan of the Sylvester and Tweety cartoon, and while these cartoons aren't bad, the best ones on this disc actually feature other characters and are primarily directed by the wacky Bob Clampett. The Great Piggy Bank Robbery has Daffy Duck dreaming of being Duck Twacy; Baby Bottleneck has Daffy and Porky Pig contending with distributing babies during a stork shortage; Duck Soup to Nuts spotlights the "classic" Daffy who is borderline insane as opposed to the angry, ambitious later version; and Porky in Wackyland is utterly bizarre and delightful. This disc also has the unusual Old Glory, a serious Porky Pig cartoon that provides a patriotic six minute history of the United States.
The final disc features celebrity parodies and music. While some of these cartoons are merely decent with a greater emphasis on music than humor, there are also some real great ones here: Rhapsody Rabbit, Show Biz Bugs and Stage Door Cartoon are all standouts, and You Ought To Be In Pictures is a great mix of live action and animation. The two all-time classics, however are One Froggy Evening and What's Opera, Doc? One Froggy Evening is a little morality play about a greedy man who finds a frog that performs elaborate song-and-dance numbers, but only when no one (besides the man) is watching. It's doubtful that any other character other than that frog has been able to achieve such fame based on so little screen time (only seven or so minutes). What's Opera, Doc? is considered by some to be the best cartoon EVER. It is the perfect blend of a so-called high art (opera) and low art (cartoons).
All these cartoons, plus a lot of special features such as commentaries and rare footage, make this an exceptional package. It would be hyperbole to say every one of these cartoons is great, but most of them are: on individual merit, I'd say they are roughly 50% five-star, 40% four-star and 10% three-star material. Overall, this is easily a five-star package. There may be good and great cartoons nowadays, but these cartoons (generally fifty to seventy years old) still need to be seen.
