Why do some Warner Brothers cartoons begin with the A. A. P. title card, along with a bit of the musical theme, and then cut to the regular WB title card and (repeated) musical intro? I’ve seen it this way since the late fifties and have never figured it out.
The Warner Brothers cartoons, from 1960 to the late 1990s, were distributed for U.S. television in four packages. The primary package, consisting usually of the most popular post-1948 cartoon shorts, was allocated to one or some of the traditional three American television networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, for weekly, Saturday broadcast, hence The Road Runner Show, The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour, The Bugs Bunny & Tweety Show, etc… A secondary package of highly regarded post-1948 cartoons, often assembled into series of half-hour compilations (e.g. Merrie Melodies: Starring Bugs Bunny and Friends, That’s Warner Bros.!), was syndicated, released for weekday transmission on individual television stations. The remainder of the post-1948 cartoons were randomly circulated to television stations to air in whatever order that those stations chose. Finally, the pre-1948 cartoon shorts, having been sold by Warner Brothers to Associated Artists Productions in the 1950s, were also syndicated and often shown with Universal’s Woody Woodpecker cartoons and introduced by local television personalities, and in the 1980s, they were purchased by media mogul Ted Turner for broadcast on Turner’s cable television stations, TNT, TBS, and Cartoon Network.
From a web site about Warner Bros. cartoons.
