Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume Two
December 2004 Reviewed by: Marc Mickelson Format: DVD	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

My youth was misspent seven minutes at a time. As a result, I'm sure I've seen every Looney Tunes cartoon multiple times. I have my favorites, a number of which appear on Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume Two, the second four-DVD set of classic Warner Brothers 'toons. There are the justifiably revered "One Froggy Evening" and "What's Opera, Doc?" -- both of which will have you marveling at the creativity and story-telling abilities of the animation crew. I was happy to see that part of one DVD was devoted to the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, whose perpetual tale of carefree prey and unlucky predator never bores me. Missing are Pepé Le Pew (thankfully) and Foghorn Leghorn (sadly). Only so many cartoons will fit on four DVDs, but there are 60 in total here that were released between the late 1930s and mid-1960s.

Looney Tunes are still shown on free TV, and this underscores one of the greatest reasons to own them on DVD: they look terrific -- sharp, bright, and free of video noise and scratches. They are also not sliced and diced to fit in between commercials. While the animation doesn't have the 3D quality of today's computer-generated images, there is a sense of inventiveness and style that many contemporary cartoons lack. There’s also the development of the stories and characters as well as acute comic timing -- the sorts of things that critics lament when they are missing from full-length movies. Only The Simpsons and the SpongeBob SquarePants cartoons offer as much, and they succeed because they copy what Looney Tunes perfected: toying with the audience's idea of reality, while creating a completely new world in the process. Looney Tunes certainly break rules, but they do so with consistency, and the results are hilarious on many levels.

Extra features are numerous. There are the standard commentaries along with music-only tracks and a pair of behind-the-scenes featurettes on the work of director Bob Clampett and sound-effects engineer Treg Brown. The inclusion of a few obscure shorts and the pilot episode of The Adventures of the Road Runner show that the people behind this set did some digging to bulk it out. The features on Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume One include two very informative documentary features, The Boys from Termite Terrace Parts 1 and 2, which profile the men behind the cartoons and reveal their collective creative process. The extras on Volume Two don't quite reach this plateau, but they are worthy nonetheless.

If you own Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume One, the question becomes not if you will buy Volume Two but when. If you don't own either, I strongly suggest starting with Volume One, which offers a broader overview of the Looney Tunes character lineup and milieu. If you're not a completist, there are a pair of two-DVD Looney Tunes Spotlight Collections that contain a number of the cartoons included on the corresponding Golden Collection, minus the extra features.

Looney Tunes hold up to repeated viewing like few movies or TV shows. Even the most recent cartoons are nearing their 50th birthdays, and still they remain seven minutes of laugh-out-loud magic.

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