Looney Tunes Golden Collection

The Looney Tunes Golden Collection is a yearly series of four-disc DVD box sets from Warner Bros.' home video unit Warner Home Video, each containing about 60 Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies animated shorts. The series began in October 2003, with Warners following the lead established by Disney's Walt Disney Treasures DVD box sets by releasing their own animation for the collector's market.

The cartoons included on the set are uncut, unedited, and digitally restored and remastered from the original successive Technicolor film negatives (or, in the case of the black and white shorts, the original black and white negatives). However, some of the cartoons in these collections are derived from the "blue ribbon" reissues (altered from their original versions with their revised front-and-end credit sequences), as the original titles for these cartoons are presumably lost.

A handful of cartoons in the first two collections have also had digital video noise reduction (or DVNR) applied to them, which unintentionally erases or blurs some of the picture on certain scenes of the cartoons, which has caused controversy among some Looney Tunes fans. The most recent collections, however, has largely abandoned such noise reduction.

Beginning with Volume 3, a warning was printed on the packaging explaining that the collection is intended for adults and the content may not be suitable for children. That presumably goes along with Whoopi Goldberg's filmed introduction that explains the history of ethnic imagery that frequently appears in cartoons of the 1930s and 1940s.

The DVDs also feature several special features including interviews/documentaries of the people behind the cartoons such as Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, Ben Hardaway, Cal Dalton, Bob Clampett, Tex Avery, Carl Stalling, and Mel Blanc, pencil tests, and audio commentaries by animation historians Jerry Beck, Michael Barrier, Greg Ford.


 * Volume 1 (released on October 28, 2003) contains a broader selection of cartoons from the 1936 to 1979 including Rabbit of Seville. It also contains the cartoon where Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd are introduced which is Elmer's Candid Camera, A Wild Hare, and Elmer's Pet Rabbit. Volume 1 contains 56 cartoons:  36 color and 20 black & white.


 * Volume 2 (released on November 2, 2004) contains a broader selection of cartoons from the 1934 to 1958 including What's Opera, Doc? and I Love to Singa. Volume 2 contains 60 cartoons:  56 color and 4 black & white.


 * Volume 3 (released on October 25, 2005) contains an even broader selection of cartoons, mostly from the 1935 to 1963 including such popular shorts as Robin Hood Daffy, Hillbilly Hare, and the Academy Award winner Birds Anonymous. Additional features include three Private Snafu cartoons, a 1963 television show pilot entitled Philbert, and two Harman-Ising era shorts: Sinkin' in the Bathtub (the first Looney Tunes short ever) and It's Got Me Again, the first WB cartoon nominated for an Academy Award (originally going to be Lady, Play Your Mandolin!, the first Merrie Melodie).  Volume 3 contains 60 cartoons:  45 color and 15 black & white.


 * Volume 4 (released on November 14, 2006) continues the broad range of cartoons, with selections ranging from 1936 to 1966 (the latest Looney Tunes cartoon yet). The set focuses not only on Bugs Bunny, but also on Speedy Gonzales and on obscure cats. There is also an entire disc dedicated to director Frank Tashlin. Volume 4 contains 60 cartoons: 52 color and 8 black & white.


 * Volume 5 (To be released on October 30, 2007) disc one will feature Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, Disc two will feature fairy tale stories, Disc three will feature the work of director Bob Clampett, and disc four will feature Porky Pig and other classics. special features will include the 2000 PBS documentary "Chuck Jones: Extremes and In-Bbetweens, a Life in Animation." Volume 5 will contain 60 cartoons.

While each Golden Collection provides a healthy dose of Bugs Bunny cartoons, additional focal points have varied in each year's release. Volume 1 primarily focused on cartoons by directors Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng from the 1950s. Volume 2 paid tribute with Bob Clampett and Tex Avery shorts from the 1940s. Volume 3 paid a small tribute to often-overlooked animation director Frank Tashlin and cartoons featuring Hollywood caricatures. Volume 4 continues to honour to Frank Tashlin and Friz Freleng and features several Speedy Gonzales cartoons.

A Looney Tunes Golden Collection will be released once a year into the foreseeable future. Given the Warner cartoon studio output, at the rate of 60 cartoons per set the series could run ten years or more. If the collections continue as is, there could be 17 releases total, at the most.

Along with the release of the Golden Collections, WB also released Looney Tunes Spotlight Collections which packaged only half of the cartoons of the Golden Collection on two DVDs. The exception to this practice was in 2005, with Warners Home Video instead releasing the somewhat-misnomered Looney Tunes Movie Collection, which featured DVDs of The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie and Bugs Bunny's 3rd Movie: 1001 Rabbit Tales.