I’d like to find these classic cartoons, but don’t know either the episode titles or in what DVD collections they might be found:
Bugs Bunny is in the way of a new highway project, and becomes locked in a battle of wills with the construction foreman. The foreman uses dynamite to blast away all the ground around Bugs’s hole. When he pours concrete over the hole, Bugs uses an umbrella to divert it around and down the hole.
Bugs finds himself on a pirate ship commanded by Yosemite Sam. Sam keeps ending up overboard, or his ship sinks, or both. Once when Sam launches his just-repaired ship, Bugs ties the outer hull to the dock, so that the skeletonized ship glides gently into the water and promptly sinks again.
Sylvester the cat is sleeping in a building where an inventor has his office. The inventor has a Jekyll-and-Hyde potion and keeps transforming into a monster, then abruptly changing back again. I think Tweety Bird may take the potion too, at some point.
Tweety is given a jet-propelled cage by his (her?) little-old-lady owner, and zooms around outdoors. Sylvester hides himself inside and is dropped by Tweety out of the cage’s bomb-bay doors.
Yosemite Sam and Bugs are in a race to climb to the top of the Schmatterhorn, for a prize of “50,000 Cronkites”!
I’ll give you one:
“Hyde and Go Tweet” (1960), wherein Tweety is able to reacquire the power of flight when he is reverted by Hyde formula into a prehistoric bird of prey, his evolved characteristics ungracefully removed.
There are two cartoons involving Bugs Bunny in a construction site. The one you are thinking of must be “No Parking Hare,” directed by Bob McKimson, 1954 (not yet available on DVD), since “Homeless Hare,” directed by Chuck Jones, 1950 (available on the DVD Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 3) does not have the gag you mention.
Either “Buccaneer Bunny” (Freling, 1948) or "Captain Hareblower (Freling, 1954). Neither is available on DVD, and Jerry Beck’s Looney Tunes guide doesn’t mention the gag you mention in either cartoon (although it is true the book glances over many portions or themes of the cartoons).
“Hyde and Go Tweet,” directed by Friz Freling, 1960. Not yet available on DVD.
“The Jet Cage,” directed by Friz Freling, 1962. Not yet available on DVD.
“Piker’s Peak,” directed by Friz Freling, 1957. Not yet available on DVD.
Since you beat me to the punch on the ids, I just want to comment on how sad it is that so few of these great cartoons are readily available on DVD. I would also like to take this opportunity to grumble about what a piss poor job I think Warner Brothers is doing with the Golden collection DVD boxset.
Grumble
Anyone know the one where Elmer is hunting Bugs and a load of hats falls off the back of a truck? Bugs and Elmer keep changing their personalities as different hats fall on them.
And what was the name of the primetime TV special about the Looney Tunes back in the mid eighties? They used clips from various cartoons to show the “real life” of the Looney Tunes and had celebrities being interviewed about their encounters with them. I remember it had Candice Bergen, David Bowie, and Bill Murray in it.
Has anyone seen that one where Elmer is hunting Bugs, and he says “Be vewwy vewwy qwiet!” and then Bugs does something funny, and then Daffy does something funny, and at one point something explodes? Ha, hilarious!
**NAF1138{/b], I’m interested in how you think WB could be making better cartoon sets. I think they’re doing a pretty good job given the understanding that this is a long project with much more material to get through and if you blow your wad early, you’ll never get Volume 8 published.
I believe that’s Bugs Bunny’s Looney Tunes All-Star 50th Anniversary, which appears as one of the bonus features on the Golden Collection Vol. Two DVD. And I think WB is doing a terrific job with the Golden Collection sets. Sure, they haven’t released everything yet, but the three volumes released to date have been packed with classics–which cartoons could you possibly ditch to make room for the ones mentioned here without someone then complaining that those ones were missing?
Hillbilly Hare, available on the Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume Three.
Just what exactly do you think they’re doing wrong? Restoring the cartoons is painstaking work, and they can only release a bunch each time. If Warner is dropping the ball on anything, it’s their other cartoons- the Tom and Jerry sets are entertaining, but not all of the cartoons have been restored. No other MGM cartoons have been released on DVD. And unless they come to some sort of agreement with King Features Syndicate, it’s unlikely we’ll see any old Popeyes on DVD outside of public domain cartoon collections.
What about Crusader Rabbit? Rhino had planned on releasing the whole series on video (and would probably have done so on DVD) but after the first two volumes were released they discovered they had bought the rights from somebody who no longer owned them. And now apparently nobody knows who owns the rights. So nobody can release any Crusader Rabbit cartoons until they eventually end up in public domain in 2047.
What is so painstaking about it?
Really, I don’t know.
Don’t all local stations have copies of the originals? What are those copies on, tape? How hard is it to convert a high quality tape to digital format then to DVD?
I could do it on my computer in a matter of hours.
