If you came to my blog thinking this will be the last blog post from me, it's not. I just really wanted to talk about Old Looney Tunes cartoons, and a little bit about Disney cartoons from the Golden Age of Cartoons between 1930 and 1950. I was brought up on mostly Looney Tunes cartoons over Disney. We didn't have the Disney Channel, until I was ten or so, and even then they didn't show a lot of the original Disney Character cartoons. They would show one or two on a holiday, like Christmas or Valentines Day, but for the most part, they just had TV shows and cartoons that really weren't worth mentioning too much.
However, now that Disney+ has been going on for almost two years, I've been able to go back and watch the Disney Golden Age cartoons. I really really like quite a few of them. I love Goofy ones the most, but Donald Duck and Micky Mouse do have some pretty great cartoons. I especially love the Goofy "How To" cartoons, like one where he is an Olympic athlete, and it shows Goofy participating in the summer events, but always screws up, like tripping or getting stuck, and they are pretty dang funny. Another has him on a Ski trip, and him tripping and getting stuck. And then one about Road Rage, where he gets angry, and then trips and gets stuck. Pretty much every Goofy cartoon has him tripping and getting stuck, and it's all funny. The shtick might be the same, but it doesn't matter. I'll talk about this again in a minute, but I wanted to say something first.
After going through tons of these animated shorts on Disney +, I went back and watched my Looney Tunes Golden Collection DVD sets, and other Looney Tunes DVDs I have. I have the whole Looney Tunes collection, and watching them after watching all of the Disney cartoons on Disney +, and although I LOVE Disneyland, I still prefer Looney Tunes cartoons over Disney. I still think that Disney is great, and if you have a Disney + subscription, look them all up, because they are great. If you don't have any Looney Tunes cartoons from back in the day, I think HBO Max has them, and if you don't have HBO Max, the Salt Lake County Library System has the DVDs, or you can buy the DVD Best of Warner Bros. 50 Cartoon Collection under this paragraph.
Best of Warner Bros. 50 Cartoon Collection: Looney Tunes
That DVD set is great. It's only $23.00, and it has the best of the best. The Looney Tunes Golden Collection has six box sets, and they are about $40.00 each. There are a few great ones that aren't on the 50 Cartoon Collection in the Golden Collections, also, when the Golden Collections DVD Sets started coming out, they were $20.00, and I collected all six over a long period of time. But to be honest, both The Looney Tunes and the Disney cartoons have cartoons that are either really not that great, or they might have been great back in the 1930s through the 1950s, and contain a lot of pop-culture jokes and even political jokes that would be lost on anyone under the age of 60, lol. While I was watching both brands, I kept my phone on me, and pause a cartoon to look up the characters or jokes so that I could understand them. Looney Tunes has more pop-culture references and political jokes, but Disney had a few.
If you are wondering, Disney also has a collection series called Classic Cartoon Favorites. However, they are all $40.00, and they have over ten box sets. Each set contains classics for each character. Volume 1 is for Mickey, Volume 2 is for Donald, and Volume 3 is Goofy, and while I am sure they are great, honestly, you can get a one month subscription to Disney + for $10.00 and just watch them all on Disney + over and over again. That's what I did, but if you are a huge Disney fan, the box sets do offer some great cartoons, and the quality of the cartoons are pretty great. However, the box sets offer a little over one hour total, so there may only be six or seven cartoons tops, whereas the Looney Tunes Golden Collections have four times more cartoons than the Disney sets offer. Even the $23.00 Warner Bros. 50 Cartoons set has five hours and fifty-five minutes worth of cartoons, plus special features. The Looney Tunes Golden Collections have three discs in each set, whereas the Disney Classic Cartoon Favorites sets only have one disc.
I also love the Looney Tunes Line-Up of characters over the Disney characters. I love Goofy and Donald Duck and Micky Mouse, but I love all of the Looney Tunes characters, for the most part. There are a few I don't care for. I mentioned above that I love the Goofy shorts, but that the shtick was the same thing. I still love them. It's like Wiley Coyote and the Road Runner, but that's always the same. Wiley Coyote is always chasing the Road Runner, and tries a bunch of traps, only to have every single one malfunctioning and causing the poor coyote intense pain. It's like Goofy getting mixed up and hurt, but there are a lot more Road Runner cartoons over Goofy. The Looney Tunes have a lot of fun, sarcastic characters, where as most of the Disney characters are sweet, and they produce a different feeling. When Bugs Bunny enters his cartoons, he is usually being hunted, or tunnels up into a situation where there are some dumb characters that are trying to get the better of Bugs, but Bugs Bunny always outwits the opposition, and though Disney has their moments in this type of story, Looney Tunes is better at it.
I do have to say, Looney Tunes has their share of cartoons that I really dislike. There was a Golden Collections set, I believe it was the third set, and they didn't have very many cartoons with the popular characters. They had cartoons making fun of Hollywood actors and films from the 1930s to 1950, and though I'm a film critic and have studied tons of films from that time period, there were still things I needed to look up, and most of the time, the punchlines weren't worth the time looking up the actor or character. I think that the only reason I like Looney Tunes over Disney cartoons is there are more core characters that are loveable, and though Disney may have better animated cartoons, and I really do love all of the Disney core characters, Looney Tunes just hits the right spot for me.
I also wanted to mention that both brands, and the characters really haven't changed much, but animation is so much easier to produce in these days, that the quality of stories and animated shorts aren't really as great as they used to be. I love old school cartoons, but there are only a hand full of animated shows that I enjoy to watch. Disney has Gravity Falls, and though it only had two seasons, I have rewatched that series with my son, Elliot, and my nephew and nieces, and love it every single time. That's how I feel about The Simpsons, my favorite animated sitcom. No matter how many times I watch those episodes, I love it and laugh just as hard as I did the first time.
However, Warner Bros, has created newer animated cartoons just as good as the original Looney Tunes. I'm talking about Tiny Toon Adventures, Freakazoid, and of course, the best, The Animaniacs. Steven Spielberg produced all three series, and The Animaniacs have even been rebooted, and they are just as fantastic now as they were back in the early 1990s when they were first introduced. They all capture the comedy and the characters just as well now as they did then. Also, while mentioning The Animaniacs, their original cartoon shorts in the early 1990s make fun of classic films, just like Warner Bros. did in the 1930s, as well as making fun of musicals, and parodies of anything pop-culture. Tiny Toon Adventures had a similar setup, but was more in tune........see what I did there?, with the older Looney Tunes characters, but updated a little bit, but they also had a lot of great pop-culture references, though not as old as the original cartoons, but the cartoons from Tiny Toon Adventures still carried the same format and spirit as the original Looney Tunes cartoons. Also, I believe Disney + has the made for TV movie, Tiny Toon Adventures: How I Spent My Summer Vacation, and it is so awesome. My parents actually bought the VHS version for my sisters and me when it came out. We recorded the show, but it was on an older tape, so it was really crummy. We still have the VHS, and even though we have the DVD now, We still keep the VHS on the shelf.
There were some Disney cartoons I didn't care for, but like Looney Tunes, the good stuff is amazing. I just think that Looney Tunes cartoons have more bang for your buck on top of being extremely funny and irreverant, where as Disney's animation is better quality as to how they look, but me, personally, I would rather watch Baseball Bugs from the early 1940s over Goofy messing up his performance at the Summer Olympics. However, that being said, I am so glad we don't really have to chose one or the other, I just thought I would share my opinion. If you have kids, or are a kid at heart, like me, both franchises have great cartoons, and a lot of them are just waiting to be discovered by kids, and rediscovered by adults.
I also wanted to share this photo of a T-shirt I just ordered off Amazon...
I wish I could have had this shirt on my mission in Detroit. I love it though.
I hope you are all doing well. I feel bad that I haven't posted anything in a couple of weeks, and I have a blog that is half written that I haven't posted. It's about a crazy WWII operation the British did that ended the war two years earlier than what they were expecting. The British were known for being pranksters during WWII, like using itching powder, or laxatives to drive the Nazis crazy, on top of being prisoners. This one is amazing, and the source they got the idea is so freaking cool. I am excited to share it, but YouTube has a couple of videos about it. I came across it when I was listening to a podcast before bed last week, and though my sleeping pills were in effect, I couldn't fall asleep until I looked into it some more, which led me to YouTube. There was a documentary video the BBC put out a few years ago, and it's about an hour long, but they go into detail. There's another one that is animated that is only 12 minutes long, and it's pretty good, but they don't talk about certain things in detail like the BBC documentary. Anyway, I have written a lot of it already, but I'm trying to decide if it would be better to read my blog post about it over the two videos I just mentioned. It's probably my new all-time favorite WWII story. It's funny, it's crazy, and it worked so well, it brought the end of WWII to an end two years earlier than planned, so look for that coming in the next couple of days.
The The The The The The, That's All Folks!
This has been a blog post written by Nathan Unck.
My name is Nathan Unck, and I approve this blog post!
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