There has been a minor furor over the presentation of twenty Warner Bros. cartoons that were released this week on DVD for the first time, on the Looney Tunes Super Stars discs Bugs Bunny: Hare Extraordinaire and Daffy Duck: Frustrated Fowl. The ten cartoons released before 1954 that are included look absolutely gorgeous; among them are Frank Tashlin’s Nasty Quacks, easily one of the top ten cartoons ever made, and Hare Trimmed, which features some of the most beautiful Virgil Ross animation of Bugs Bunny ever done.
What’s soured people on the 1954 and onward cartoons is that they have been presented in “widescreen”. Warner Home Video has peddled the line: “they were matted in theaters, so this is how they were originally seen”. Others have said, “they were making them with widescreen in mind.” These statements are disingenuous at best, ignoring the fact that not all theaters that ran these cartoons matted them.
Matting was also used to cover up gaffs in the production in live-action. When you watch North By Northwest, an expensive MGM thriller, open-matte, you will often see boom-mikes and set-lights. It would have worked the same way for these cartoons; in the full-frame versions we’ve been seeing for years, we would be seeing codes at the bottom of the cels, held feet wouldn’t have been shot, etc. If Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, and Bob McKimson were making these cartoons with widescreen in mind, they weren’t aware of it themselves.
Below are some screenshots, comparing the new releases with older ones.
If that didn’t convince you that these presentations are an abomination, you’re hopeless. Let me add too that a great number of 1946-1953 Warner cartoons were reissued to theaters well into the late 1960s. And those were definitely matted at one time or another too. There was no art or method to this whatsoever. They only formatted the titles to work in widescreen because they needed to have all the copyright and credit information in the picture by law. Why does nobody seem to understand this?
It’s probably not worth getting riled up about. The cartoons were restored full-frame and will likely be presented as such in a future Looney Tunes box set. Most of the affected cartoons are those you probably won’t be watching again even if they were presented correctly. (How many times can you do the same dynamite jokes?) What is bothersome is the distortion of history that’s being done by people defending a move made by a bloated corporation to cater to Blu-Ray/plasma screen whores who stretch the picture on anything horizontally, whether it’s Citizen Kane or All in the Family.
In good conscience, I cannot recommend these DVDs to anyone, unless you’re desperate enough to immediately get the properly restored cartoons, which do look outstanding.
Did you notice any DVNR ? Also are there really people who believe old television shows such as All in The Family should be released in widescreen ? ARE they releasing them in that format ? God forbid but then again nothing surprises me anymore.
I undestood,we LOST animation!
It is time to begin a replacement disc program!
Please WB, correct this for Nov.30: “Foghorn Leghorn & Friends” DVD!
Even if WB won’t issue replacement discs, I hope they at least hear complaints like this and make sure this never happens again… at least a great many of the later picks are weaker entries as you said (From Hare to Heir is one of my favorites though, it’s too bad that one got affected).
Pathetic. Simply pathetic. Thanks for pointing out this idiotic injustice on WHV’s part, Thad. If they’re going to release these cartoons, present the films in the way that the directors would have intended them to be seen, and that definitely means without the arbitrary matting. I can’t believe Citizen Kane, one of the ultimate classics produced during Hollywood’s Golden Age arguably, has had this crap done to it too.
Also, is it me, or did they mess up the lines on that Charlie Dog cartoon at the top with the DNVNR? It looks kind of odd looking at it that way. Maybe it’s just me…
Thank you for pointing this out to us Thad. It’s a sad state of affairs when things like this happens. I’m on the fence of whether or not to get these. I want to see the restored Nasty Quacks, but I don’t want to send the wrong message to the company. Damn it.
The only times when good restorations occur is when someone with a heart had to claw his, or her, way up to hound these people; These philistines who unfairly control the fate of these films and rarely are interested in their prosperity.
“I can’t believe Citizen Kane, one of the ultimate classics produced during Hollywood’s Golden Age arguably, has had this crap done to it too.”
Roberto, Citizen Kane has not had this done to it. Thad only mentioned Kane to illustrate the kind of consumers who he feels WB is catering to with this release. I sincerely doubt Warners would ever dream of butchering Citizen Kane’s compositions in this manner (although the DVD does suffer from some noticeable DVNR — hopefully this will be corrected on the upcoming Blu Ray). Messing with the OAR just doesn’t fly anymore, and Warner has a pretty impeccable track record in their treatment of catalogue titles (or they did until the last couple of years, anyway). Which is why the decision to crop these shorts is even more baffling, and leads me to believe that it was an honest mistake on their part rather than the calculated attempt to appease consumers that Thad has suggested above.
Right fuckin’ on, Thad! I’m boycotting these abortions, even though I’d love to have a restored version of NASTY QUACKS.
DVDs are falling apart. Warner Home Video has canceled commentaries on all its vintage releases, and have stripped them back to bare-bones.
There’s this growing sense, to me, that anything pre-STAR WARS is considered too old to be of interest to the 21st century. This is part of the ideology that OKS the cropping of Academy-ratio films to that ugly, ugly “modern” widescreen format.
Well, fuck ’em! I’m not buying this stuff. DVD is a dying format, which I’m not happy with. I don’t want to fuss with Blu-Ray. I’ve been through enough god-damned format changes in my adult life. Feh!
I’m of the feeling that Warner Brothers clearly doesn’t care. I’ve been told by a reliable source that we have collectively now been dubbed by those decision-makers at Warner Brothers as “nutty fans”. Does that really feel as if they are dedicated to making us happy? I still hold out hope that, perhaps, there will be restored cartoons soon found at the Warner Archives, but really, folks, do you want your fully restored cartoons on DVD-R’s instead of professionally recorded DVD’s that will play on any piece of DVD-playing equipment? And I’m certainly not going out tomorrow and buying a blueray player. I would probably change my mind if all such desired titles were showing up *ONLY* in that format, but they’re already whining that the economy is the reason why great old cartoons aren’t being restored; so do you think that they’ll restore the cartoons for blueray? I only hope that they’ll pay better attention on the FOGHORN LEGHORN & FRIENDS proposed disk. I’m privately hoping that, if the SYLVESTER & TWEETIE disk is an exact copy of the program of same included in LOONEY TUNES GOLDEN COLLECTION, VOL. 2, they correct the wrong Warners fanfare on “CANNED FEUD” and they correct the slightly off speed on “KIT FOR KAT”. If those two mistakes are corrected, hell, I’ll rebuy the TWEETIE & SYLVESTER collection as well. In the interim, I plead with some smaller neutral video company dedicated to bringing back our favorites as we remember them, please, somebody save the earliest LOONEY TUNES and MERRY MELODIES from teh 1930’s, because we can only expect avid collectors to strive real hard to make this right, people like Steve Stanchfield who, himself, cannot afford to buy the video rights to any big studio’s product, but I’ll bet that, if you hired him to work on the classic toons at Warner Brothers, there would be none of the stupid mistakes that we constantly read about online here and elsewhere, and hey, folks, we’re not just talking about mistakes done with old cartoons. I have classic rock box sets that have glaringly stupid mistakes in which the disks in question sound like they’re skipping, and Warners just refuses to right these horrible wrongs. This is a company falling hard under its own bumbling weight. If anyone in the working world out there in offices around the world made such lackwit mistakes, they’d be out on their ass with a shout after them like “you’ll never work in this town again!!”
I only bought for “Bushy Hare” & “Nasty Quacks”
Please WB, no more cropped cartoons!
Great info and illos, Thad!
I’d like to link to this when I review the Bugs set on my Blog! It says exactly what I suspected!
TyG: I get what you’re trying to say, but there’s no such thing as an honest mistake when it comes to aspect ratios, at least not by people who work on this stuff all day, every day. They know what a 4×3 and 16×9 are. This was almost definitely a last-minute decision made by somebody higher up who wanted to ride the HDTV wave and crop cartoons to fit the widescreen ratio, lost picture info be damned. The DVD engineers/restoration team likely either had to comply with this order or lose their jobs.
That’s why I say, tell WB how you feel about this. It’s a long shot, but if enough people complain, we may see cartoons with all the visuals intact on the upcoming Foghorn DVD and onward. Heck, I’d even accept a choice between how it aired in theaters and how it aired on TV (so long as both versions are restored, of course).
One of the things about both sets is as bad as the crops on the 1957-65 cartoons are, it’s the crops on the 1954-56 releases that are the worst — some of those are cut so close that even the already-squeezed titles either touch the edges or in 1-2 cases actually have some lettering cropped. That means the image was blown up over what widescreen theater audiences saw in the 1950s, where there was supposed to be some airspace at the top and bottom of the screen.
The other annoyance is that (at least in the non-Blue Ray format and on an HDTV) the blown up images really show their grain and some digital color speckling/blotching on certain parts of the image as well as losing some sharpness. So aside from cutting off the top and bottom, the close-up images in the post-54 look worse that the pre-54 ones, even though it’s the cartoons that can be widescreened that WHV is focusing on restoring.
Ouch. Designed to be seen that way my ass!
“Matting was also used to cover up gaffs in the production in live-action. When you watch North By Northwest, an expensive MGM thriller, open-matte, you will often see boom-mikes and set-lights.”
That’s about half correct (and incidentally, it’s ‘gaffe’). The reason that lights and booms are sometimes visible in improperly projected (i.e. unmasked/unmatted) films is that those frames were composed with the foreknowledge that they would be projected matted. Films like NbNW were never intended to be seen open matte at all, ever, so such gaffes are on the part of the projectionist, *not* the cinematographer.
Yes, and that was my point. Those sort of things being present were indications that they were meant to be matted to cover up the gaffes. The cartoons don’t have anything like that.
Well then, as long as WHV wants to release cartoons on home collections to be seen “just as they were in the theatres”, why aren’t they superimposing the silouhette of someone’s head blocking all action the bottom left-corner of the screen, and adding in sound effects of kids talking and babies crying while the cartoon plays?
Yeah, that would authentically make it “more like it was seen in the theatres.”
This was an intentional move on someone’s part to deliberately ruin the enjoyment of watching these cartoons. Am I sorry I pre-ordered and received these things….
Okay, while I’m not pleased so much is getting cut off by the widescreen, I really do doubt this was done intentionally to ruin the enjoyment of watching the cartoons. Why would Warner Home Video do that? Why would they go to the expense of producing, and marketing, these DVDs if they didn’t want anybody to actually enjoy watching them?
No, what this was was a misguided decision that what the public wants these days is widescreen and widescreen only. You see it too often on HD channels that show programming that was made in standard definition format. Look at Friends on TBS, or Frasier on Lifetime. The screen is stretched, and the image quality ranges from rather bad (on filmed shows) to horrible (on videotaped shows).
At least the image doesn’t seem too distorted on these DVDs (if the frame grabs above are any indication). You lose stuff at the top and the bottom but you gain stuff on the sides (with the caveat being the stuff you gain can’t be a whole lot because the cartoons weren’t really designed for a wide screen). From a curiosity factor, I’d be interested in seeing them. What WHV should have done was put two versions of the cartoons on DVD; one in fullscreen and one in widescreen. If Fox could do it with the MASH DVDs, WHV could’ve done it.
Mike
Yeah that’s exactly what I said though, Mike. I never said it was done intentionally to ruin the cartoons’ enjoyment. Just a big studio fuck-up. Regardless, I’m never buying a Looney Tunes DVD again unless they choose to correct this problem.
Oh, no, I wasn’t responding to what you said, Thad. I was responding to Larry T, who did say it was done intentionally. It was a gross miscalculation on the studio’s part, not them deliberately sabotaging their own product.
WB are just unbelievable. So the Golden Collections weren’t selling enough to warrant more, and their solution is to alienate the very people who were actually buying their product?!
I would have snapped these up right away…but won’t touch another one until they stop this madness. I’d rather not own them at all than have copies missing one third of the image.
I can accept the first 2 Peanuts movies in matted-widescreen, I was dissapointed that the Chuck Jones Tom and Jerry Shorts, the 40th AE of The Jungle Book, the SEs of Aristocats and Robin Hood were all presented in a matted-widescreen, but this takes the cake! Granted, the post ’53 shorts were matted for widescreen and what I’ve said we’re matted for theaters at that time, but thanks to TV, we’ve come to know and love our Golden Age cartoons in full screen as they were made (except the cinemascope shorts since they deserve to be in widescreen). I know in my gut that the new shorts on the Foghorn disc will still be in matted widescreen while only A Broken Leghorn will be in full screen, but one can hope that this time WB will give us the option of watching the cartoons in which aspect ratio. If anyone is going to matte a cartoon or animated film from the Golden Age, then at least present them in 1.66:1 widescreen since it’s basically a win-win.