Wile E. Coyote…Super Genius
Rented the Looney Tunes – Golden Collection, Volume Two a few days ago. If you’re a cartoon fan, you’ll know you want to see it. Cartoons like “The Great Piggy Bank Robbery” and “The Dover Boys” (starring Dan Backslide–coward, bully, cad and thief) can be seen in a whole new light using the slo-mo function on your DVD player.
Besides the obvious pleasures of restored versions of some of the best cartoons ever made with DVD picture quality, I especially appreciated a special 50th anniversary show from 1986, included as an extra.
I liked the show back when it first aired, and it holds up for me. Its conceit is that a bunch of celebrities are interviewed about the Looney Tunes characters as if they were real performers, in what we would now recognize as “Behind The Music” style.
We also get some real information about the shorts and the men who made them, all packaged in a way that still feels appealing and fresh. My all time favorite: Love man Billy Dee Williams insisting that when he’s with a woman and he wants just the right mood, he listens to…(Looney Tunes music supervisor) Carl Stalling.
A recent quasi-“educational” short included, Daffy Duck for President, has the unfortunate distinction of being the most depressing Bugs & Daffy cartoon ever made. It’s not wholly the toon’s fault, though it’s not particuarly inspired. It’s just that it makes much hay about the way the goverment is supposed to work (equal branches, no one party in control, courts on the side of the people, etc, all the stuff we learn in school that’s turning out to be dangerously outdated in the New World Order). And these days, that’s depressing.
You can actually see the new short for yourself here, if you’ve a stronger heart than I have. Notice how in the opening moments it sets up a Daffy=Republicans, Bugs=gays metaphor. Yes, really.
And then there’s a cartoon made for public health agencies in 1949 that starts with the bizarre premise that anyone watching it would have said “So X number of babies die every year. Who cares? We got a million of em!” And then proceeds to demonstrate at length why that’s a bad thing. Gee, I thought my generation was supposed to be more callous, but I’m pretty sure not many people ever thought dead babies were a good thing…
