After months of anticipation, the fourth volume of the new Looney Tunes Blu-Ray series is finally here. Featuring 25 shorts that are new to home media alongside two bonus cartoons. It’s been a bit of a wait since the last one. While a gap between releases is understandable, the circumstances during said wait were a bit worrying. After Volume 3 was released back in March, there was radio silence regarding the future of the series for a while. When there was confirmation of this release, the people at Warner Archive, the prestige label that handles these Blu-Rays, stated that the third volume sold slower than the first two and the green light for the next one was concurrently slower. The reasoning I have for this is that it was released only 3 months after Volume 2 so not too many customers would be willing to put down more money that quickly. However, with the release of Volume 4, not only was it released close to the holidays to help with potential sales, but Warner Archive has also released a set of all four of the current volumes of the series for hesitant buyers. They have both been selling consistently and Warner Archive has stated that they have big plans for Looney Tunes and animation in general in the coming year. So yeah, the concern that the series wouldn’t continue has been washed away.
With all of this said, let’s go through some of the highlights. Unlike the past volumes which had two new restorations each, this one has three. The first is Holiday for Drumsticks which is a fitting short to release here given that it’s an explicit Thanksgiving one and the volume released right around then. The short entails Daffy, living on a farm owned by hillbillies, convincing the newly arrived turkey to work out as much as possible to avoid being eaten only because he wants to take the food they have given him to fatten him up. Come Thanksgiving, the turkey is as thin as a rail and Daffy is nice and big. So naturally, the hillbillies go after him for dinner. It’s sort of a remake of an earlier Daffy short, Tom Turk and Daffy, where he tries to hide a turkey from a pilgrim Porky before selling him out for Thanksgiving yams with the turkey then tricking Porky into hunting Daffy. Here, the setup is a bit quicker and more over the top given the Appalachian setting and the slow-moving residents contrasting with the rapid animation. Plus, the setup and escalation of the conflict are more comedically dark and ends in such a dumb but hilarious way. Arthur Davis has become one of my favorite directors in comparison to his recognition since his shorts combine rapid jokes with lively and rubbery animation and this might be one of his best. It’s an underrated short for sure and one that I’m glad is here.
The other two new restorations are Sylvester-related shorts. The first is Muzzle Tough, a Tweety short that had a lower resolution restoration years ago, but now is in HD. There isn’t as much to say about this one though since it’s a funny but typical Sylvester and Tweety cartoon. However, the last of the newly restored shorts is an interesting one. The short, Peck Up Your Troubles, was the second appearance of the cat and one of the more historically important. The cartoon has always had a poor and murky look to it on unrestored prints so seeing it in full clear color now is great. The setup here is simple since it’s Sylvester chasing after a woodpecker and the ensuing gags and shenanigans that follow. All of them are great and land well even with the lack of dialogue. One of the funniest running gags is when Sylvester tries to chop down the tree the woodpecker lives in, only to be confronted by a dog that has likely marked it as its territory resulting in panicked backtracking. However, the reason this short is important is that the director, Friz Freleng, felt that the aggressive woodpecker was not as good of a comedic foil because he constantly fought back. This led to him reviving the dormant Tweety, who was a creation of another director who had departed from the studio, Bob Clampett, and made the short Tweetie Pie which not only solidified one of the most iconic cartoon duos but won the animation studio its first Oscar.
As for the rest of the shorts, a common focus is on character-centric shorts similar to Volume 1 mostly released in the 1940s. There are only seven shorts not featuring a recognizable character and only three of them are from the 30s. There are also five shorts for both Daffy and Sylvester. While I understand why this was done since a character-focused set would likely get more attention and sales than one full of more obscure work, I do slightly prefer the last two volumes in terms of the broad variety they presented. 4 is not a bad selection whatsoever and the Volume still covers a wide range of the studio’s history, but I suppose that I get more intrigue from a focus on more obscure shorts and characters.
The only Bugs Bunny short on this volume is Devil’s Feud Cake. It’s a bizarre one since it reuses animation from older shorts and the plot of the Tweety short Satan’s Waitin where the focus is on a character dying and having to postpone going to hell. It makes sense that a short like this is on here since almost all of the Bugs cartoons have received a home media release at this point, but it just isn’t a highlight. It’s a short made out of cost efficiency near the end of the studio’s life and even has the distinction of being made during the period when Mel Blanc had to record his lines while he was recovering from a really bad car accident which resulted in very flat deliveries.
The short, The Cagey Canary, is another one of note since it’s a short that was started by famous director Tex Avery before being finished by Bob Clampett. Tex left the studio in 1941 to work at MGM after too many arguments with studio head Leon Schlesinger. It’s also a short that seems to be a progenitor to the Sylvester and Tweety shorts since it revolves around a cat trying to eat a canary while trying to avoid the ire of his old lady owner. Given that Clampett would create Tweety not long after, it’s not an unfounded assumption.
There is the short D’Fightin’ Ones which is a direct parody of the film The Defiant Ones. Looney Tunes shorts with major characters that are direct parodies of films rather than television or broad Hollywood caricatures are rare and it’s interesting to see one that directly takes cues from then prevalent new film. Dangerous Dan McFoo features the first appearance of Arthur Q. Bryan, the voice of Elmer Fudd, in a Warner short. Hopalong Casualty is the designated Road Runner short of the volume with its most iconic element being the earthquake pills gag that takes up most of the short and is considered one of the best sequences in the series. There is also Hyde and Go Tweet which, in my opinion, is one of the shorts that I’m shocked hasn’t been released on home media restored in the 20 years or so WB has been releasing Looney Tunes DVDs and Blu-Rays. It’s one of the more iconic Tweety shorts with it going the Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde route and letting Sylvester contend with having to chase after the bird while it constantly transforms into a giant monster. Another Jekyll and Hyde-inspired short is The Impatient Patient. It’s a Daffy short and the only black and white one on the disc. It was directed by Norm McCabe who briefly took over Clampett’s unit after he was promoted and did have an interesting style of design and direction right from the start. However, he was drafted in 1943 and was unable to get his job back after the war resulting in him only directing 11 shorts. Interestingly, he managed to outlive most of his contemporaries since he passed in 2006 and continually worked in the industry for the rest of his life including directorial work on Tiny Toons.
Another short with Sylvester, Road to Andalay, features Speedy Gonzales and is odd in that it’s the first short made during the De-Patie Freleng era on these Blu-rays. After the main studio closed down, its last producer, David H. De-Patie, and Friz Freleng established their own new animation studio which is most famous for the Pink Panther shorts. However, they were also asked by Warner to be an outsourcing studio for new Looney Tunes shorts. They were not given much money or creative freedom and could only make shorts with Speedy Gonzales or Road Runner. To give a picture of how cheaper the operations were during this period, the Road Runner shorts were outsourced further to another animation studio. Road to Andalay is one of the better shorts if only because it was released during the start of this period before the crew was mandated to pair Speedy with Daffy for some reason. However, it does show how the changes in the industry affected these shorts since the once lively animation and pacing are now slow and lack fluidity. I was unsure if the series would even dip its toes into the post-closure shorts since they are uniformly considered the some of worst, but I suppose that a couple being here for posterity wouldn’t hurt.
Overall, another great volume in this series. I feel that the focus on larger characters here is going to make future volumes more interesting since I assumed they would have been rationed across each. At this point, there are only so many shorts with characters like Daffy and Road Runner that some future volumes might mostly feature one-off shorts or older shorts from the 30s. I am personally interested in terms of how Warner Archive will approach the curation of the next few volumes. Given the timing of this release, the accompanying 4 volume set, and the assurance from the team at Warner Archive that more Looney Tunes will be coming, I am very content with the future of these releases going forward and am very happy that more shorts are being made accessible in a more concrete way than just streaming or television.
