GeekNights 20101117 - Looney Tunes

MrPeriod

Tonight on GeekNights, we consider Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. We also reconsider Eden of the East, now that Rym has finished it, consider reconsidering Trigun, speculate on the likely nomination of Summer Wars for the Oscar, and look forward to seeing Studio 4C's Japan/France anti smoking interactive short.

• Rym's Thing - The Dog Door
• Scott's Thing - Minecraft Magnets

Download MP3

Sail

likely nomination ofSummer Warsfor the Oscar,

I predict Summer Wars, How To Train Your Dragon, and Toy Story 3. Toy Story 3 will win, deservedly, but also because Pixar always wins.

I'll have to go see Summer Wars on the big screen when it runs in theaters here.

lackofcheese

The first two minutes were highly entertaining for me.

Victor Frost

likely nomination ofSummer Warsfor the Oscar,

I predict Summer Wars, How To Train Your Dragon, and Toy Story 3. Toy Story 3 will win, deservedly, but also because Pixar always wins.

I'll have to go see Summer Wars on the big screen when it runs in theaters here.

That movie is so awesome in so many ways. It made me want to watch .hack//sign again.

Coldguy

I still vote for keeping the year into the podcast!

Geo

likely nomination ofSummer Warsfor the Oscar,

I predict Summer Wars, How To Train Your Dragon, and Toy Story 3. Toy Story 3 will win, deservedly, but also because Pixar always wins.

I'll have to go see Summer Wars on the big screen when it runs in theaters here.

That movie is so awesome in so many ways. It made me want to watch .hack//sign again.

You didn't watch it again, did you?

Victor Frost

likely nomination ofSummer Warsfor the Oscar,

I predict Summer Wars, How To Train Your Dragon, and Toy Story 3. Toy Story 3 will win, deservedly, but also because Pixar always wins.

I'll have to go see Summer Wars on the big screen when it runs in theaters here.

That movie is so awesome in so many ways. It made me want to watch .hack//sign again.

You didn't watch it again, did you?

I'm about to.

Li_Akahi

Scott, the movie you are thinking about with the dog wearing sunglasses is Oliver and Company.

EDIT: The Looney Tunes are not on TV anymore. Changing standards for violence on children's programming made channels pull Looney Tunes off of TV. It's bullshit.

Also, Song of the South is not that racist (don't get me wrong, it is racist, but it's not as racist as you would think). It just sugar-coats slavery.

Apreche

Scott, the movie you are thinking about with the dog wearing sunglasses isOliver and Company.

That's the one.

Rochelle

• Scott's Thing -Minecraft Magnets

You can make those magnets easily by buying magnet sheets and attaching whatever image you want on them.

Edit: Oh, I just listened to rest of it, but you pretty much said the same thing.

Cornucopia Challenge: Fuck, I need more FREE TIME.

Edit Edit: You can get The Looney, Looney, Looney Bugs Bunny Movie, 1001 Rabbit Tales, The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie, Daffy's Quackbusters, and Daffy's Fantastic Island all on Instant Netflix if you want to get a quick fix on some Looney Toons.

Jason

dit Edit: You can getThe Looney, Looney, Looney Bugs Bunny Movie, 1001 Rabbit Tales, The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie, Daffy's Quackbusters, and Daffy's Fantastic Islandall on Instant Netflix if you want to get a quick fix on some Looney Toons.

This post brought to you by Netflix.

I agree about love for Captain Hareblower and Mutiny on the Bunny. Good times! (But I couldn't embed them for some reason.)

Rym

Those movie compilations are awful: I just want to see the shorts.

Also, aren't they all DVD-only? Streaming is all that matters to be on Netflix anymore. None of the Disney stuff I wanted was available to stream last I checked.

chaosof99

Great show, and very appropriate since I've been running a torrent for the last couple of weeks, downloading all the Looney Tunes cartoons. Great timefiller. I must say though that I absolutely love the Wolf and Sheepdog cartoons. Oh yeah, and "the opera one" which name Scott couldn't remember is entitled "What's Opera, Doc?"

The best of all of them is the hunting trilogy though, "Rabbit Fire", "Rabbit Seasoning" and "Duck Rabbit, Duck!"

Rochelle

Those movie compilations are awful: I just want to see the shorts.

Also, aren't they all DVD-only? Streaming is all that matters to be on Netflix anymore. None of the Disney stuff I wanted was available to stream last I checked.

Nope they are on my istant queue. You can just fast forward through the movie bits to get to the shorts.

Other than the favorite Looney Toons moments you guys mentioned, I always enjoyed the ones with Marvin The Martian and Bugs Bunny. Especially when the alien minions when after Bugs Bunny in a hovercraft scooter type machine. There was one instance where Bugs had the minion copy cat him and he drove the hovercraft off the platform. It always makes me laugh.

Another instance are the meta episodes where you have Daffy Duck being pranked by Bugs or Bugs being pranked by Elmer.

Apreche

I also forgot to mention all the weird ones with psychedelic stuff like Porky in Wackyland and The Great Piggy Bank Robbery.

Jason

"What's Opera, Doc?"

There is also The Rabbit of Seville.

Apreche

"What's Opera, Doc?"

There is alsoThe Rabbit of Seville.

Oh yeah, I always imagine those both being the same, but they're separate.

zombie a gogo

I have been watching a lot of the old Disney stuff lately with my daughter and it blows me away just how beautiful the animation was back then. The Whinney the Pooh stuff is just amazing. Every time I watch one of the those shows I think to myself how great it would be to play a modern Whinney the Pooh video game that uses the old animation style. Even if it had no purpose, just exploring the forest would be fun.

I'm still holding out hope that Epic Mickey will be something along those lines.

Sail

I'm still holding out hope that Epic Mickey will be something along those lines.

It won't.

Viga

On the Looney Tunes Golden Collection the Speedy cartoons are prefaced by a disclaimer that states:

The cartoons you are about to see are products of their time. They may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that were commonplace in American society. These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. While the following does not represent the WB view of society, these cartoons are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as to claim these prejudices never existed.

Yeah, WB did it right.

Greg

I would like to address one comment Scott made. He said that you can't get the racist Disney anymore, and while that is true for Song of the South which you shouldn't watch anyway because it is a terrible movie, many of their old racist cartoons have been re-released in the "Disney Treasures" series. While it is true that many of the tins are nothing but segments from "Wonderful World of Color," the "Disney Rarities" and any character named tin will have plenty of offensive material for your enjoyment. I need to especially mention the "On the Front Lines" tin, which collected cartoons from WWII, and has Donald Duck in a Nazi Uniform for most of "Der Fuehrer's Face" (winner of the 1943 Oscar for best animated short.) You won't find any of this online, because Disney has a crack team of soulless lawyers scourging the web for anything with Mickey's face on it to delete, but if you don't have $40 to burn (I think that's the price, the Disney store has a rather lousy interface) these are also available on Netflix.

I also need to mention animator Ub Iwerks, a man who started out as the most important animator in all of Disney, got his own company where he made the most racist, sexual, and surreal cartoons this side of the Prime Meridian, only for the Hayes Code to destroy everything that made him unique, and send him back to Disney as the best engineer outside of eastern Europe. Ub (also spelled Ubbe, I don't know why) has an entire documentary about him in the Oswald collection, that I highly recommend, although his independent cartoons have only been collected in a somewhat difficult to get collection called "Cartoons that Time Forgot: Ub Iwerks" volumes 1 and 2, and with such promising titles as "Insultin' the Sultan" how can you resist?

Ruffas

Most, if not all of the Disney WWII cartoons are on youtube, I watched a bunch of them for my History of Animation. Ub was born Ubbe, probably changed it sound quite so strange. Neither Disney or Ub made cartoons that were any more or less racist than everything else that was produced back then. The Hayes Code didn't really have much to do with him going back to Disney. His company, Celebrity Productions, never achieved any real critical acclaim and just wasn't that successful. What really made him go back to Walt was losing MGM as a distributer for his Willie Whopper cartoons. For about two years more he putzed around before finally going back to Disney and doing amazing things with effects.

Matt

Those movie compilations are awful: I just want to see the shorts.

Also, aren't they all DVD-only? Streaming is all that matters to be on Netflix anymore. None of the Disney stuff I wanted was available to stream last I checked.

I would like it if streaming where the only thing that mattered on Netflix but I don't think we're quite there yet. You can reliably get 2 discs per week by immediately ripping then and putting them back out in the mailbox, and quickly build up a backlog of movies you want to see.

Hitman Hart

I remember watching the Bugs Bunny and Tweety show when I was very young on ABC, it was the end of Saturday morning cartoons because after that was Candlepin Bowling. Be warned abou those compilation movies, they're ok but they sometimes edit or change the story of the short for no apparent reason. If you need to get your Looney Tunes fix and don't have the DVDs, there are some on archive.org, or there were. Here are some links:
Falling Hare
A Day at the Zoo if anyone understands the "bread 'n butter" thing with the panthers, please explain it to me
Fresh Hare
A Tale Of Two Kitties
The Early Worm Gets the Bird
they also have Max Fleischer Supermaan, Woody Woodpecker, and others, archive.org is win. I remember seeing most of these on cheap VHS tapes my family would find at department stores and buy because apparently no one bothered to claim copyright on these things, even today.

progSHELL

Are those "shitty compilation movies" just VHS tapes with about 6 to 9 shorts on them? I own two of those. One is called Carrotblanca, which is a surprisingly high quality parody of Casablanca. Also there was a pretty cool one called My Bunny Lies over the Sea, in which Bugs Bunny gets lost (as he is want to do) and ends up in Scotland and is challenged by Yosemite Sam to a game of golf. "Don't you get a little tye-ad runnin' tem eighteen bases?"

Neito

Does anyone else remember Tiny Toons?

Coldguy

Does anyone else remember Tiny Toons?

Yes

Matt

Does anyone else remember Tiny Toons?

Fondly. It aired from 1992 to 1995, so from age 7-11 for me, which was sort of a sweet spot of after school cartoon viewing, since it was before middle school and high school after school activities kicked in. I was wondering whether Rym and Scott would bring Tiny Toons up but I think they're a year or even two older than me, so maybe it wasn't as popular? Elementary school is funny like that, how something can be huge with say, 3rd graders, while the 4th graders are not interested.

Neito

It aired from 1992 to 1995, so from age 7-11 for me,

We're like exactly the same age.

I fear that it doesn't pass the nostalgia filter though. I haven't checked, I just fear that.

Matt

Yeah I fondly look back on Tiny Toons but I know better than to go watch it again. I also predict it won't hold up well over time.

Speaking of nostalgia, there was a great video the other day about how to talk to your kids about Star Wars to make sure they like the original trilogy better than the shiny new stuff. Now that I have a kid on the way, I sometimes start daydreaming about what kids will like that I also liked. They were discussing this on The Nerdist podcast last week and apparently Spaceballs and Monty Python are great for fresh eyes, while a lot of other 80s live action comedy isn't (see: Caddyshack).

The guest even mentioned that his kids had a problem with Ghostbusters because of special effects, which were revolutionary at the time and I have always thought held up great! I think the most important lesson they did not discuss here is that people will reject something if you shove it in their face. If you strap someone to a chair and make them watch Ghostbusters they will hate it. You just have to create an environment where these sorts of things are easily accessible and instill a desire to discover new things.

Hitman Hart

I have watched most of the first set of Tiny Toons on DVD, and the pilot episode and some of the early episodes hold a ton of promise for a real revival of the Looney Tunes style. Unfortunately,it quickly devolves into not especially well done shorts or Buster vs Max episodes. The characters don't keep a consistent tone all of the time, and while it seems like the Toons should be in high school or so, they act like very young children a lot of the time. I can, however, say that Animaniacs and Freakzaoid are more enjoyable to me now as an adult who loves the Looney Tunes style than as a kid who thought they were all right, but didn't blow my mind. The first season of Freakazoid is really strong, and while there are weak points in the second season, it's still worth a watch. One weird thing about the DVDs WB put out is that the episode with the guy whose name rhymes with Applejacks is on the first season set twice.