The Extras - Details on HBOMax's Looney Tunes Cartoons Blu-ray PLUS an EXCLUSIVE Update on Looney Tune Collector's Vault

Episode Date: April 8, 2026

Send us Fan MailAnimation historian Jerry Beck and George Feltenstein of the Warner Archive provide details on the recently announced Blu-ray release of the HBOMax series, "Looney Tunes Cartoons." Jerry breaks down why the HBOMax-era Looney Tunes Cartoons feel true to the originals while still evolving the characters for a modern audience. And George explains how a DVD-only plan turned into a Warner Archive Blu-ray release. PLUS George shares an EXCLUSIVE update on Collector’s Vault Volume 3. Pre-order Looney Tunes Cartoons: The Complete Series BLU-RAY on MoviezyngAmazon pre-order links:Looney Tunes Cartoons: The Complete Series BLU-RAYLooney Tunes Cartoons: The Complete Series DVDThe Extras Facebook pageThe Extras TV YouTube ChannelThe Extras Twitter Warner Archive & Warner Bros Catalog GroupJoin our new public Facebook Group for Warner Archive Animation Fans and get the latest update on all the releases.As an Amazon Affiliate, The Extras may receive a commission for purchases through our purchase links.  There is no additional cost to you, and every little bit helps us in the production of the podcast.  Thanks in advance.Otaku Media produces podcasts, behind-the-scenes extras, and media that connect creatives with their fans and businesses with their consumers.  Contact us today to see how we can work together to achieve your goals.  [e-mail]

Hey, are you a fan of the Warner Archive animation releases? Do you want to get the latest updates and news right away? If you're on Facebook, we have just created a brand new Facebook group called the Warner Archive Animation Fans Group. And we celebrate past releases, but really, we created this group because of all of the great releases that have come in this year and are anticipated in the coming years. So there have been a lot of great releases from the Looney Tunes Colleen. Selectors Vault series. There's the Tom and Jerry releases. There's all of the Hanna-Barbera releases.

I mean, there's just a wealth of animation coming from the Warner Archive. So we celebrate all of it. It's a community with other people who enjoy these releases and want to talk about them and share the latest news, reviews, and updates from the Warner Archive. So if that sounds interesting to you, check out the link here in the podcast show notes. and we hope to see you soon. Hello and welcome to The Extras. I'm Tim Larger host, and joining me is George Feltenstein of the Warner Archive

and animation historian Jerry Beck, and they're going to provide some more details about the recently announced Blu-ray version of the HBO Mac series Looney Tunes cartoons that's releasing on May 19. And stick around as George also has an update for us on the classic Looney Tunes Collectors Vault series. So you don't want to miss that.

Hi, gentlemen. Hello. Hello, Tim. Well, this is exciting. We recently talked about the collector's vault. It seems like it was just a few weeks ago. And here we are back, and it's fun to talk more Looney Tunes. But before we dive into the Blu-ray and the story of that, I think there are some people in our audience, Jerry,

who could benefit from understanding a little bit what this new HBO Max series is, because it has the same name and everything, but it's from 2020 through, what, 2023 or something like that. So it's a modern version, of course. Yeah. Warner Brothers has a lot of classic characters,

that they love to do in animation, and the audience loves them in animation. They're characters from the Hanna-Barbera Library like the Flintstones and Scooby-Doo. There are characters from the DC Comics Library like Batman. And of course, Looney Tunes. I mean, there's no way around it. Looney Tunes has to be continued.

It has to be. And throughout the years, under different regimes, they've done different versions of the Looney Tunes. After that great era when Greg Ford and Chuck Jones later made a few shorts at the beginning of this century, there was a feeling of we can't touch what they did. What they did was so great that we're not sure how to proceed with that. You'd have to find the right people. And, you know, I don't know what the thinking was.

I think there was at the beginning decades ago, like a cowardice, to try anything with the characters. Sam registers, the guy's been running Warner Brothers animation for, I think, a couple of decades, I think, right now. He's been pretty bold about this. And he took some lessons from the Scooby-Doo franchises and the DC Comics franchises. They do a Batman. Batman in the animated series, classic. classic cartoon. But when they bring it back the next year, you know, they put it, they finish it. They're going to bring it back maybe in a year or so. They'll do a different take on it.

Like they did one called Batman Brave and Bold, which was kind of like a 1966 Batman. They do it differently every time they give it a different little tweak. They've done that with Scooby-Doo as well, whether people have noticed or not. But there's a great series they did called Mystery Incorporated, which is the best version of Scooby-Doo, in my opinion. They've done other variants of that. And of course, with Looney Tunes, they started doing that. You know, they did the Looney Tunes show and, you know, other ways of how can we approach these characters in some way that's modern, new, hip, whatever. Okay.

I don't know the origins. I wasn't there in the initial meetings, but I remember being let on and was able to speak to Peter Brownguard, who was the person brought in. who run this show, this new Looney Tunes Cartoons initiative. And I didn't know him. I didn't know what they were up to, but I soon saw. And what I saw was they were using the old model sheets. They were in love with Bob Clampett, Tex Avery, and Chuck Jones, and Fris-Reeling and all of them. And we're trying to do something in that direction, trying to go. They even knew we kind of can't, we can't do that. We can't

We can't be the Beatles. We're not the Beatles. You know, we got to be whatever we are. They started and they didn't look at Space Jam or any of the other things. They just did their own modern day take. I don't think there's anyone. I could be wrong about this. I don't know. They might have hired an old timer or two, perhaps. But basically everybody on this particular project was kind of the hippest people from the people who were making Nickelodeon shows and the Cartoon Network shows and what I call the new artists. And they were dying. They were chomping at the bit to do Looney Tunes. And I've met these people. Some of them I met before they were hired. In fact, I even said to Sam, if you had asked me who to bring on to this,

I definitely would have named this guy, this guy, this guy, and this guy, all those people are on this. I didn't say hire them. They did it on their own. They found the right people. And these are good. These are funny. The animation is wild. The art direction is fantastic. And they're modern. They're not swipes of old Robert McKimson cartoons from 1952.

They're not, you know, they're not trying to do something else. They're just doing what the Looney Tunes might have been. And, you know, I get a lot of people who ask me when the first, when the series first went on, don't you think this is too different? And I go, no. In fact, look at Bugs Bunny. Look at Daffy Duck. He started out one way, screwball crazy duck.

Later on, the staff and Chuck Jones in particular turned them into almost a different character. They always evolve these characters. So in a way, this is sort of the evolvement, in my opinion. I bless it. That's fine with me. I think they did a really, really great job. It's a lot of fun. The music is original.

The voice Eric Bouser. in particular, Bob Bergen are fantastic as the trying to do Mel Blank, but they're not trying. They embody the voices. So I'm a fan. I'm a fan. And I couldn't be happier that they're coming out on Blu-ray because that's the way you should see them. Right. Well, that's a great segue because George initially this was coming out only on DVD when it was announced, I think, about four or five months ago.

and people were both excited and a little disappointed. And confused. Yeah. Because it's like, well, it would be one thing if this series was older. But this is a very new series. Why wouldn't they, you know, why wouldn't the studio put it out in HD? And, you know, obviously there are many reasons for that. But all we really care about is the fact that now there is going to be a Blu-ray from the Warner Archive.

Why don't you tell us a little bit of how that came about? Well, it's not a complicated story. The series has its own set of complications, but basically this is going to be a DVD-only release to traditional retail, whatever that looks like. And I made a last-ditch effort to make sure that these should be seen with really great quality. And we've learned the appeal on Blu-ray of animation and Looney Tunes.

And I knew that these works were of a reverential yet modern and individual attitude because the people working on them put their own physical footprint or hand print or whatever print you want to use. It's their work as an homage to all the great animators that came before them. So their work walking into a legacy, you should be in awe of if you're an animator. And people have been really, really receptive to that. So when this DVD got announced, everyone was asking me, well, aren't you guys going to do a Blu-ray? Because frequently what we've done with the Warner Archive is when something was going to come out as a DVD only, this goes back to things like Young Justice or Young Sheldon or Lucifer or Longmire or all these

different live action and animated shows that weren't going to get a Blu-ray treatment when they were produced in high definition. So I made my last ditch pitch effort to do this. and the powers that be said, go ahead. And where the complications come in is there were certain cartoons made by these folks that were not completed. Some of them were not ever on HBO Max. And they were not given the blessing to be part of this release. we were given the ability to take what was greenlit to be this release covering six discs.

It's over 17 hours of entertainment for a 3499 list price for the Blu-ray at six discs. It's, I think, a very hearty deal. So we were very grateful that we could step in and make sure that the consumers who were bummed out, that all they would be able to own and have on their shelves that couldn't be taken away from them was not just a DVD, but a Blu-ray, so they could watch them in quality better than what they would see if they were seeing it, you know, via the Internet. And we're happy to be coming out the same day that the DVD is out. There is a customer base, a very large customer base, DVD.

as a medium still outsells Blu-ray and 4K combined. Really? So there's a lot of people out there that are very happy with DVD and still buying it. But the aficionado consumer, the informed, enlightened and passionate collector, they want the best possible quality. And if these programs were made in high definition, I think they should be seen that way and owned by people putting them on their shelves and putting it next to the collector's choice and the collector's vault and the platinum collection and all the other Blu-ray things

that Mouse Chronicles that was Jerry's little special production. But I'm delighted we're able to fill in that gap and make these shows available. I also want to clarify that our releasing this didn't take away a release slot for another title. It was additive. It was not corrosive. So yes, there's still a lot of animation coming this year, as I said there would be, and we're working on all sorts of projects. And this is actually a good opportunity for me to thank everyone who is watching or listening right now to the extras. If they supported Collectors Vault volume 2, that support was strong enough to put us into profit, which got us the green light to start working on volume 3.

So it's a definite. It's happening. We're working on it now. And there will be some very, very happy consumers and animation enthusiasts having something to look forward to. and when the time is right, we will announce the 50 cartoons that will be included. So it would be 25 cartoons on Disc 1 that have never been on DVD or Blu-ray before as part of a Warner Brothers Animation Collection. And Disc 2 will be cartoons that have been on DVD but have not been on Blu-ray as part of a Warner Brothers Animation collection. and we hope everything is going to look and sound great.

My colleagues are putting a lot of extra work into making sure that that's happening. And we have original negatives on the way to the studio coming from the Library of Congress so that we can do our nitrate scanning from the original negatives for certain things that have not been seen in decades. So a lot to look forward to. I wanted people to understand why we were releasing this, why we didn't announce it when the DVD came out as an announcement, because we were not part of the equation at that time. But the collaboration interdepartmentally between my colleagues and myself is, of course, a very fortuitous one. and it's one that provides ultimately more profit for our group and our division,

which is what our job is here, is to bring profit into the company. And when you can do so with wonderful classic films, or what I would say, the new classics, because at some point, decades from now, people will look at the Looney Tunes cartoons that were made for HBO Max, they might consider them classics, just the way people now that grew up with the early cartoon network shows and now have kids of their own, think of those cartoons from 1999 as

classic. So what defines a classic is an ongoing discussion and differs between who you talk to. But I thought this was something worthy of doing. I'm grateful that we were given the green light to do it. And I hope people enjoy it. Well, as you can tell, this all kind of came together very quickly here with this Blu-ray of the Looney Tunes cartoons from the HBO Max series. So just wanted to get a little bit more detail out to everybody.

And for those of you who were a little uncertain of what this series is, because you don't have HBO Max, and you hadn't heard of it. I think Jerry clarified for all of us where it kind of sits in the history of Looney Tunes, that this is a more modern telling, but in the style of the classic Looney Tunes. So I have watched it. I enjoy it. It's fantastic to me that something that was put out on streaming comes full circle back to physical media and those of us who collect the physical media and love the classic

Looney Tunes can now enjoy these, access these. but there is a lot of content on this release. So it is really packed and as George said, it's a great value. So if you're interested in it, I do have links to purchase or pre-order both the Blu-ray. And of course, if you are still on DVD, you can get the DVD as well. It's the exact same content. There are some extras on this release. There are 12 sports-related episodes that are on here that are the extras.

So you can look for that again, the same on the Blu-ray and the DVD. And I'm excited. I'm sure you are as well. If you have been collecting all of the Looney Tunes Collectors' Choice and Collectors Vault series, that there will be a Collectors Vault, Volume 3, screen lit. They're working on it. And we'll have more information as that comes in the future here. I hope you find value on the extras.

And if you do, please subscribe. We'll also be sure to get you the information you want about the next. next release of the Collective Vault, Volume 3, and anything else that jumps up and comes up like this Looney Tunes Cartoons Collection. Thanks for listening, thanks for watching, and until next time, stay slightly obsessed about Looney Tunes.