What a long, strange journey it’s been for Looney Tunes on home video. Obviously it started on VHS and later Laserdisc, but it was DVD where the series really started to shine, thanks to the prestigious Golden Collection line. Besides the cartoons themselves (roughly sixty per set!), we got a plethora of extra content that made these not just releases, but a yearly EVENT. Unfortunately, after a nice six year run, the Golden Collections came to a close, and what’s occurred since then has been hit-or-miss. Even its reboot series, the Platinum Collections on Blu-ray, was hampered by many repeats from DVD and dropping most of the special material. A few years ago, Warner Bros. thankfully decided to try again with the Collector’s Choice series. Unlike the Platinum Collections, these would be new-to-home-video cartoons, so collectors didn’t feel like they were double dipping. While each volume only contained 20-25 cartoons, they came out at frequent enough intervals that it felt like the true spiritual successor to the Golden Collections. After four volumes of that, we now have ANOTHER successor, the Collector’s Vault. What makes this set different than the Collector’s Choice? I mean, the names are almost identical. Let’s take a look.

Disc 1 contains 25 cartoons, new to home video in general, for the most part. I say “for the most part” because, if you really want to get technical, a few of these were bonus cartoons on live action Warner Bros. DVDs, such as Terrier Stricken, Bars and Stripes Forever, Two’s a Crowd, Robin Hood Makes Good, Each Dawn I Crow, Let it Be Me, and The Squawin’ Hawk. And Zin ’n Snort was previously released as part of The Road Runner Show on the second Saturday Morning Cartoons set. However, unless you’re a hardcore WB filmography collector, you probably don’t have those discs. At any rate, this is the first time these have been restored, so they look magnificent compared to when they were thrown in as quickie bonuses, where they were riddled with interlaced video, faded colors, and other imperfections.

The selection is quirky. Notably, this might be the first Looney Tunes set where none of the new-to-home-video cartoons star Bugs Bunny. This was inevitable after so many releases as they’ve already used up most of his filmography, but it is jarring. Daffy is only featured in one cartoon, and it’s sadly not one of his better ones, either; the mediocre Quackodile Tears from 1962, “directed” by Art Davis, where Daffy and a gator battle over an egg, is a much weaker swan song of his than when he was first let go in 1949. Foghorn gets two cartoons, Feather Dusted (another Egghead Jr. outing) and The Dixie Fryer (Foghorn versus two hillbilly chickenhawks in the Deep South); both are moderately entertaining but I wouldn’t claim that either are top tier. Sylvester stars solo in one outing: A Kiddies Kitty, an unpleasant story where he’s adopted by a clueless girl who keeps putting him in situations that are tantamount to animal abuse; it was remade as the far superior A Waggily Tale. He also stars with Tweety in Tweety’s Circus and Tweet and Lovely. Of the two, Circus is by far more fun, partially due to the manic Art Davis animation throughout much of it. Ralph and Sam, those unsung punch clock rivals, finally get more representation with Ready, Woolen and Able (the one that ends with tons of Sams) and… Double or Mutton– wait a minute, wasn’t that released already? Yes, on Collector’s Choice Vol. 4. To WB’s credit, they plan to include an extra cartoon on the second Collector’s Vault to make up for this oversight, but it’s perplexing that they weren’t keeping track. You’d think somebody at some step in the process would’ve said “Um… this one looks familiar?” The Goofy Gophers make their debut in a cartoon of the same name, and it’s a perfect showcase for how Art Davis’s cartoons picked up the torch from Bob Clampett’s unit after he left the studio, so expect plenty of wacky animation. Claude and Frisky Puppy are featured in the aforementioned Terrier Stricken and Two’s a Crowd, both are largely the same in structure, just with different gags. Finally, Elmer Fudd gets two shorts without his usual co-stars: Each Dawn I Crow (about a rooster paranoid Fudd is going to axe him, with one of the few Looney Tunes shorts to prominently feature a Hammond organ in the score) and Good Night Elmer (one of the slowest and most repetitive cartoons to come out of the studio, with Fudd versus a rogue flame) for Elmer, and Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote are represented by Wild About Hurry and the aforementioned Zip ’n Snort.

The rest of the cartoons feature one-off or seldom-used characters. The spot gag cartoon Bars and Stripes Forever, about a bunch of inmates and their eccentric guards, has some amusing bits but just as many headscratchers for how they’re, if you’ll pardon the pun, executed. Beauty and the Beast, I’d Love to Take Orders From You, and Let It Be Me are mostly musical cartoons without many gags, and felt more like they were trying to imitate Disney. Interestingly, two of them were directed by Friz Freleng who, once he returned to the studio in 1940, would shed this type of cartoon and be almost entirely comedy from then on. Robin Hood Makes Good, similarly, is Chuck Jones during his cutesy phase before he embraced the zany of his peers. The Squawkin’ Hawk is an innocuous debut from Henery, the chickenhawk who would have better success as a co-star in some of the earlier Foghorn Leghorn cartoons. Of Fox and Hounds by Tex Avery is beautifully animated (and its new restoration shines) but the fox character isn’t nearly as entertaining as Bugs, who debuted the same year from the same director. A Fox in a Fix features an underrated minor character of mine, a seemingly polite, soft-spoken bulldog with a juxtaposing bodybuilder body, who gives the business to a fox posing as a dog; it’s not an amazing cartoon but it’s entertaining. Curiously, Easy Peckin’s, another Robert McKimson cartoon about a fox trying to access a chicken coop, has a very similar premise, just without the “posing as a dog” gimmick. A Day at the Zoo is one of the many spot gag cartoons by Tex Avery during this period, and while it has some funny bits, I prefer its spiritual successor Who’s Who in the Zoo? by Norm McCabe (which can be found on Porky Pig 101 DVD set).

The second disc consists of re-releases from DVD, with different transfers. I have mixed thoughts on the contents chosen here. Obviously Blu-ray is a new format so we shouldn’t treat these in the same vein as those quickie double dip budget DVD re-releases that were released during the same era as when the Golden Collections were in issue. The new restorations allow some things to be fixed from earlier versions, so we get the film dust back after many older restorations scrubbed images clean but made them look too sterile and detail-less in the process. My main issue is that none of the cartoons here were the ones that needed to have their aspect ratios fixed. To explain: The first two Looney Tunes Super-Stars DVDs (the ones with Bugs and Daffy) cropped all post-1953 cartoons to a widescreen ratio, cutting off vital information on the top and bottom of the image. I was hoping this first release would feature some of those cartoons corrected to 4:3/Academy ratio (see Stork Naked and Lighter Than Hare on the fourth Collector’s Choice set), but all of the cartoons on this second disc were previously presented in their correct ratios anyway, so really the only upgrade from DVD is the better resolution and the new transfers. I can’t really complain too much, since this set is about the same price as previous Collector’s Choice volumes, and with the DVD disc rot controversy, it’s nice to have cartoons re-issued in what will hopefully be a more durable format. I just hope that a future volume gives us more corrected versions of those Super-Stars titles. Some cartoons with corrected pitch would be nice too (Early to Bet, High Diving Hare, Bully For Bugs, etc.).

Luckily, much of what’s on the second disc is quality. We get the classic Rhapsody Rabbit, where Bugs plays Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 while thwarting a mouse who’s upstaging him on the keys. Past Perfumance is one of Pepe Le Pew’s better entries, with the French film lot setting offering a variety of gags. Hare Trimmed is another classic for Bugs and Yosemite Sam, with Bugs keeping Granny safe from Sam’s ill intentions while trying to woo her out of her inheritance; even though we’ve all seen it a million times from reruns, it still delivers the goods. Daffy Dilly, one of those “get past the butler” plots, is similarly one of Daffy’s best; it’s so good, it was used as the springboard for the plot in Daffy Duck’s Quackbusters. Conversely, Birth of a Notion is all about Daffy trying to get out of a strange mansion owned by a Peter Lorre look-alike. Red Riding Hoodwinked is a personal favorite of mine; the parody of the famous short story is enhanced by the wolf flat out forgetting who he’s chasing (multiple times, even!), and it has one of the best mid ‘50s scores of any Looney Tunes cartoon. We also get two of Road Runner/Coyote’s best, with Gee Whiz-z-z-z-z-z-z (Look, in the sky! It’s Bat-man!) and Zoom and Bored (the Road Runner gives Wile a break for once!). Speedy Gonzales really gets around with the ladies in Gonzales’ Tamales, and features the famous gag of Sylvester eating a bunch of hot peppers. Hare Conditioned is a minor Bugs classic by Chuck Jones, where he’s one step ahead of a department store manager. Rabbit Punch has him in a boxing match with The Crusher; boxing cartoons are almost always winners, and this is no exception. Daffy Duck & Egghead is a reworking of Porky’s Duck Hunt (see below), only with a different hunter and new gags. (side note: Some have called Egghead a prototype of Elmer Fudd, but I never saw that. He has his own unique mannerisms and look; he’s nothing like Fudd other than that both are hunters.) Bye Bye Bluebeard is Art Davis’s aforementioned finale before his unit was dissolved; it’s a good one to go out on, as Porky fretting that a tiny mouse is a serial killer offers good paranoia gags and some revenge when he realizes he’s been had. Banty Raids is a later Foghorn cartoon co-starring a womanizing beatnik rooster; while the limited animation doesn’t do it any favors, the one-shot character is amusing and it ends on a similar note to Some Like it Hot, which is high praise. Even the Bill Lava music isn’t that bad. Ain’t She Tweet is another Sylvester and Tweety short, one of the two where he tries to gain access to a yard full of guard dogs. Snow Business is sort of a remake of Canned Feud, in that Sylvester is locked in somewhere without food (only in this case, he at least has easy access to Tweety, if only a meddlesome mouse wasn’t thwarting his efforts). Tom Turk and Daffy is a lesser known Porky/Daffy outing also starring a turkey; honestly, I much preferred the characters when they were equals rather than hunter vs. prey. Horton Hatches the Egg and Much Ado About Nutting are the obligatory one-shots in the batch; the former is notable for being one of the first animated adaptations of Dr. Seuss (though Theodore Geisel would collaborate with the WB crew on the Private Snafu shorts for the military) and the latter is just cute, without being cloying, as a realistic squirrel goes to increasingly desperate lengths to crack a tough nut.

A minor theme on this set seems to be the debut of certain characters. Little Boy Boo, the first Egghead Jr. short where Foghorn takes the mute bookworm under his wing, is still the best one; the ones after that were more or less doing variants of what we got the first time around. Cat-Tails For Two, despite an early version of Speedy Gonzales with an off-putting design, still gets laughs from its Lenny and George-esque antagonists and well-executed pratfalls. We also get the first Yosemite Sam cartoon Hare Trigger, which packs a lot of jokes into its short seven minutes. Daffy makes his debut in the Tex Avery short Porky’s Duck Hunt; it’s a good debut but it goes without saying that the best was still yet to come. And Odor-able Kitty is Pepe Le Pew’s intro; it’s a bit rough, Pepe doesn’t show up until 2:30 in, and the ending is decidedly non-canon (he’s faking a French accent? Puhleeze), but it has some smile-worthy bits. Finally, Two Crows From Tacos has Jose and Manuel, two stereotypical Mexican crows who would later star in Crow’s Feat. The cartoon, about the duo chasing after a grasshopper, is funnier than it has any reason to be, and part of that is due to their “dumb and dumber” chemistry.

One of the neat things about the Collector’s Choice/Vault lines is that they have true variety. The Golden Collections, as stellar as they were, made the unfortunate mistake of having “themed discs”; i.e. a whole disc of Road Runner, another disc of Speedy cartoons, a disc of nothing but one director’s work, a disc of fairy tale-themed cartoons, etc.. The Super-Stars line, for the most part, continued this trend, with each DVD featuring one character’s cartoons. As good as those cartoons can be on their own, it can get monotonous to watch a bunch of them in a row. These, by contrast, are more akin to watching them on TV, only without those annoying edits for time or content to fit in more commercials.

As with the Collector’s Choice sets, there are no special features. I understand the economy isn’t great so we’re lucky to even get the cartoons, but I miss those commentaries, music only audio tracks, featurettes and vault material. None of that is here, so the set is over fairly quickly. As I alluded to in the review title, that’s really the only reason this line isn’t quite up to the level of the Golden Collections. Hopefully in future volumes we can see at least some of this trickle back.

Despite my nitpicks, Looney Tunes Collector’s Vault comes highly recommended. For about $20, you get 50 cartoons, which is a great deal. The cartoons on disc 2 are a fine upgrade from DVD, especially if you were one of the unfortunate ones to suffer the dreaded disc rot. To paraphrase Foghorn, if you’re a Looney Tunes fan and you don’t buy this, there’s some yeeehhhhh about you.

[Note: Screenshots above are not representative of the Blu-ray transfers on this set]

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