(Warner Bros. Home Entertainment provided me with a free copy of the Blu-ray I reviewed in this Blog post. The opinions I share are my own.)
The Flintstones and Tom and Jerry are fine for a dose of nostalgia, but there’s a reason that Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies are timeless: they are still really, really funny. No other cartoons of their era packed such a wallop of anarchy, imagination, and wild one liners.
The most memorable lines spewed from the buck-toothed grin of Bugs Bunny. Bugs could be sarcastic, salacious, or just plain screwy, but he was always hilarious. There was tremendous variety in the situations and the ways Tex Avery, Robert McKimson, Friz Freling, Bob Clampett, or Chuck Jones depicted him, but the wabbit was invariably puncturing pomposity and annihilating authority. I started showing Bugs Bunny cartoons to my son when he was still in diapers to help him develop a healthy spirit of rebellion and an unhealthy sense of humor. His hankering for carrots was an unintended side effect.
It’s amazing that a character whose been bouncing off the walls for 80 years can still delight new audiences. A new collection of 60 classic Bugs Bunny cartoons proves this. It’s also amazing that after six volumes of the 4-disc Golden Collection DVD sets, three volumes of the 2-disc Platinum Collection Blu-ray sets, and a bunch of other stand-alone “Best of” collections, there are still so many shorts that had yet to make it to disc. Of the 60 toons on the triple-disc Bugs Bunny 80th Anniversary Collection, half have never been released on DVD, and all but a dozen are making their Blu-ray debut. This includes such essentials as “Jack Wabbit and the Beanstalk”, “Hare Lift”, “Racketeer Rabbit”, “Hare Brush”, “Now Hare This”, and “Yankee Doodle Bugs”. There are a few weak choices. “What’s Cookin’, Doc?”, “His Hare-Raising Tale”, “Hare-Abian Nights”, and “This Is a Life?” (the one rough-looking toon in the set) are basically clip shows. The set could have used more Daffy Duck and less Yosemite Sam. But the selections still give a solid overview of Bugs’ eclectic history, and there’s a good balance between familiar favorites and forgotten classics.
The presentation is generally gorgeous with lushly saturated colors, painterly details, and no significant dirt or blemishes. Light flickering and unstable grain are evident in some of the earlier shorts, but such issues are never pronounced enough to be distracting. It’s hard to imagine these old cartoons looking any better than they do here.
Bonus material is abundant, though most of it has been ported over from previous sets: the majority of the commentaries; the silly Bugs Bunny Looney Tunes All Star 50th Anniversary mockumentary featuring a truly odd assortment of celebrity fans; featurettes focused on Bugs’ encounters with Yosemite Sam, Marvin the Martian, and Daffy Duck; etc.
The major exclusives are a glitter-encrusted funko pop figurine that takes up the majority of space in the package, a selection of 10 shorts from HBO Max’s recent Looney Tunes Cartoons series (which is closer in spirit to Ren and Stimpy than vintage Looney Tunes), and a neat hour-long documentary that traces Bugs’ development from a primitively rendered Daffy Duck clone to the unique though versatile icon he became.
