The Extras - Previewing Woody Woodpecker Golden Age Collection Blu-ray with Jerry Beck

Episode Date: January 6, 2026

Send us a textAnimation historian Jerry Beck joins the podcast for a preview of the upcoming Woody Woodpecker and Friends Golden Age Collection Blu-ray. Our wide-ranging and entertaining discussion reveals his involvement with the Woody Woodpecker releases from Universal over the years. We trace how Woody Woodpecker and the Walter Lantz library moved from dormancy to restored Blu-rays, powered by curation, overseas masters, and the rise of MeTV Toons. Along the way, you'll hear insights and stories on Woody Woodpecker history as only Jerry can provide.Pre-order Woody Woodpecker And Friends: The Golden Age Collection Blu-ray Purchase links:Woody Woodpecker And Friends: Screwball Collection Blu-ray Woody Woodpecker And Friends: Classic Collection DVDWoody Woodpecker And Friends: Classic Collection Vol. 2 DVDPaul Whiteman King of Jazz - The Criterion Collection Blu-rayThe Extras Facebook page The Extras TV YouTube ChannelThe Extras Twitter Warner Archive & Warner Bros Catalog Group Join 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, collector's 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. Thank you. Tim Millard here, and recently there's been a lot of classic animation announced and Universal announced that coming in January, there will be another Woody Woodpecker release, this time called Woody Woodpecker and Friends, the Golden Age Collection,

and that has 25 theatrical shorts now remastered in HD, plus quite a few extras on there as well. Well, that has led to a lot of questions about how is this different from the screwball collection released in 2021, and then going all the way back to the DVDs that were released, how is that different as well? Is there any tie into the Me TV tunes? So I went to somebody who would know all this, and that's animation is doing Jerry Beck. So he's joining me today. And I think you'll enjoy hearing what he has to say about all the various DVD, Blu-ray, Me TV tunes, and then the showing of all the Walter Lance cartoons there. So a lot of great information there. And then we have submitted questions for Jerry that we're going to dive

into a little later on. So I think you'll enjoy that. Stick around for that as well. Jerry provides such great stories, background, and history on Woody Woodpecker and all this classic animation. He also delves into a little bit about how do these kind of all come together in terms of from the studio, what's his involvement? And I think you'll find that fascinating. So here's my conversation with Jerry. Hello and welcome to The Extras. I'm Tim Malar, your host, and joining me is animation historian Jerry back. Jerry, we're going to talk some Woody Woodpecker.

Oh, yeah. How you doing? Okay. I'm doing fine. It's a great new year coming up for the world of classic animation. I mean, it's unbelievable. If the world outside gets too crazy, classic cartoons is your escape. And I think I have lots of answers for that. Well, it's been a great year for the classic animation.

And then now we're talking about the upcoming release of the Woody Woodpecker, this will be the Golden Age Collection Blu-ray with 25 new theatrical cartoons remastered in HD. But before we kind of get into that, I did want to go backwards just a little bit and ask you just like, I mean, I know you are an expert in Woody Woodpecker, but how far back does that go? And when did you start doing that? Do you mean my relationship with the universal, or do you mean just my own personal love of cartoon? What do you mean? No, I mean. Obviously, childhood goes.

But I mean, like, we talk a lot of Looney Tunes, but when have you always been also a Woody Woodpecker? Well, my quick answer, although it may not be the quick answer to that, would be that I love all the classic Golden Age Hollywood cartoons. And Woody Woodpecker was a major character of the 1940s, mainly in 1950s and so on. You know, he was sort of the Mickey Mouse mascot, you know, for the universe. theme parks for a long, long time. By the way, I digress because I actually took a day off yesterday and went to the Universal theme park here in Los Angeles, Universal Hollywood. And I went on a mission hunting for any reference to Woody Woodpecker.

And I found two, actually. But that's it. I found a mug. Wow, they actually still make a mug with Woody Woodpecker on it. And there was a poster that was in one of the back rooms of one of the places. But that was about it. Woody Woodpecker's been replaced. by the minions and Dr. Seuss and the Grinch and things like that.

Anyway, but I, no, as many of us did, many of us of a certain age, in the late 50s and 60s, there was a Woody Woodpecker TV show sponsored by Kellogg's, and Walter Lance actually hosted it in live action, and he told us how to draw and how to make animated cartoons. It was very cool. Yeah. I really explained the whole method and the system, and they showed a lot of the classic cartoons on that show. And, you know, there you go. It's like he's just part of the mix,

the same mix with Huckleberry Hound and the classic Looney Tunes and Popeye. So just Woody, Woody has been there. Woody has been there, but unlike some of those others, Woody's belonged to one of the other conglomerates, you know, universal pictures. So, you know, they've done things with the character throughout the years. In recent years, recent years being the last 25 or so, the characters sort of slowly disappearing off the face of the earth. So I feel like, you know, it's my duty to keep all my friends, all my cartoons from that period alive and make them available one way or another. If you want to hear a little story, I'll tell you another story about how they got on

the DVD first. In fact, I don't remember, but do you, we put out two, a DVD. collections, here they are actually, back, and I don't remember what years these were, but I think 2007, okay, 2007, it looks like 2008. And the story there is, that was a few years after the Golden Collections, George and I worked on the Looney Tunes Golden Collections, and they were selling really well, this was the Golden Age of DVD. And I really felt then, I, I, I, I had been doing this, as George says many times, with George and others, at other companies. I'd worked in the VHS era. I helped get the Betty Boop cartoons out on Republic, you know, on Laserdisc and VHS.

And I worked with Disney on a lot of their collections. I worked with George at MGMUA. I worked with Warner Brothers separately when they weren't together until they finally came together. I've done a lot of that stuff. I'm forgetting everything that I did with that. I worked with Columbia House. Remember that? Columbia House, I had the first VHS, then they went DVD.

And when I was with Columbia House, I worked on the, there was like a 20 or so volume Looney Tunes set that came out every month, like a subscription. And then they wanted to do Walter Lance. They made a deal with Universal. That was tricky because they didn't have all the cartoons, what I call loose. They had them all part of the Walter Lance, you know,

the TV show that I grew up on. But they didn't, and trying to explain to them these were actually theatrical shorts that are separate was pretty crazy. I kind of couldn't do it back then. I did what I could. But we did that. And so all of this was in my DNA. And then when the DVD and then later Blu-ray came about, you know, I wanted to make sure

these characters were on whatever that medium was at the time. And so when we were doing well with Looney Tunes, and I remember the movie Happy Feet, a CG animated movie that won the Oscar, I believe, for Best Animated Film that year, I think Robin Williams had a voice, I think. And that was like popular at the time. What happened was I decided, I did a cold call. I did something I rarely do. I mean, I didn't know anybody. I didn't know anybody who knew anybody who worked for Universal Home Entertainment. So I did a quick internet search. I somehow found the name of the president of it. I wrote the guy a nice little letter that said I'm working, I'm freelance, but I'm working with Warner Brothers. We just did this. And I made it very concise.

I figured he could look up things, see how we're doing. And I said, you know, I'd love to talk to you about doing the same thing with what you have. You have this Walter Lance Library. and I mentioned in particular Chili Willie because Happy Feet was a movie about penguins and I figured maybe that would help. And the next thing you know, within a day or so,

literally within 24 hours, I got an email back from the guy and he said, hey, let's make a meeting come in next week. Okay. So I went into Universal. I brought, you know, odds and ends, show and tell. And they said they were, this is what they told me in that meeting.

They said, we were contemplating, putting out on all Woody Woodpecker's set. And on the one hand, I understand that, and I understand why collectors would want that. And maybe, I'm not saying it's going to happen, but maybe someday that could actually happen on Blu-ray. But it's not planned. So nobody spread rumors. But I went in there and they said they were going to do that. And I said, well, I got a better idea.

I would suggest you do it the way we do it with the Golden Collection, where we mix up the characters. It's a bigger library than that. And honestly, the first collection is pretty much my dream. It's exactly what I wanted to do. In fact, I picked everything that's on here. The idea was, and I'll have to remind myself, but the idea was we would have mainly the Woody Woodpecker cartoons on the first disc that would be most of the ones from the 40s, which is the best ones.

This was still a period where they were spent money to put things like this together and to remaster the cartoons and things like that. I'm looking to remind myself what was this giant set. We had Woody Woodpecker. Oh, yeah, we had Woody spread out over three discs, and it was all the 1940s going into the 1950s. And then I said, and then we'll have these little subunits on each disc.

The first one on the first disc was Oswald the Rabbit. We had five Oswald the Rabbits. And cartoon classics were miscellaneous cartoons from the history of Lance. And then Andy Panda, on the second disc, the swing symphonies, which is a great series. Then on the third one, Chilly Willie, and then Cartoon Classic, I made sure to get in all the, of the four tech savories that were done at Lance on here, I made sure to get any oddities,

especially ones I hadn't seen because there were a few. And I put on ones that might have been politically incorrect. I'll be honest about it. Because what the hell? They're like at Warner's, if there's a problem, they'll tell me this. We can't do that one. You can pick another title. So imagine my surprise when they told me they were going to put every title I said, oh my God, Okay, kept my mouth closed, didn't say anything about that. Oh, we also had bonus materials of which are most proudest of, and some of those were, you know, some of those little interstitials from the Woody Woodpecker show that show Walter Lance giving behind-the-scenes information. My most proudest was there was this 1936 black and white short subject that Universal made back in 1936 showing the behind the scenes of making an Oswald a rabbit cartoon.

and that's really rare and there were bootleg dupy prints that were around and if I could get that on here that would be the killer and it was at the last second they said okay we found it and found the nag and they restored it and put it on here and I'm like

oh my God this is this is if they do no more this is okay but then it did so well that they said you want to do a second I said yeah count me in and we did a second and we took the Woody Woodie Woodpecker cartoon I think throughout up through the 1950s.

And we had enough to do a third set. And I put on more bonus material and pilots and all sorts of things that I knew they had. I loved it because I was telling them what they had. They had to look for it and they found it. But, you know, I love that. I love that because the studios don't have a George Feltonstein. George is unique.

Let's praise George on this. George is a unique person. I don't know how many people beyond me and how many times I say this in my travels. I wish this company had a George Feltonstein. I think he's become a trademark, a brand name now for the type of person that these companies need who know they have the institutional knowledge of the library. They know George is way beyond that. He knows the films.

He knows what happens in all the films and the shorts and the TV shows. And he knows all the contracts and who owns what and what the problem would be. You know, nobody, there's nobody like, there's nobody at, you know, as part of their business affairs or there's nobody at any company like that. And George is extremely important at Warner Brothers. Yeah. I wish there were people like him at Paramount Universal, at Disney, 20th century Fox, that library, and others. There are good people and there are some really, really good people at these companies. But, you know, George has sort of always been in the position where he can, you know, act upon a good idea. You know, let's put out this, you know,

that kind of thing. And just, just to clarify for the answer the question. I don't think I did, but God. No, I just want to clarify for those folks who don't listen to the extras or watch us on YouTube that often that George Feltenstein is from the Warner Brothers and specifically the Warner Archive now, but he's been there since, I guess, since he was at MGM and Turner bought them and then Turner was purchased by... I always look at his history, but he's always been attached to that library one way or another, starting with him being a 16-millimeter film salesman in New York, and then working for MGM UA, and then one point when laser discs were hot, he was in charge of that whole

home video department and uh and then and then went to when i guess when turner and warner merged i guess he came over to warner so he's been there the whole yeah time you know and uh well going back you mentioned that third DVD was that ever released no no no no no it wasn't what happened was this and this is the finish completing finishing up with the story that i was saying was i went in there and we talked about that. We did the first one major success. Second one was the beginning of the decline of DVD in the later 2000s. People don't remember that.

I mean, I worked on a lot of DVD projects with companies, which I remember in 2009 even companies that had high hopes about certain projects on DVD were telling me it didn't sell well. It didn't work. You know, oh, well, it was ending. And I was telling people at the time, it's decline. it's a problem. We're not going to get the libraries out. That's why when I do these sets like

the Golden Collections in the beginning and this and others, look, I try my best to put out what I believe. I admit I'm a one-man show, at least back in those days, I put out what I believe are the ones that as a historian and a teacher of animation history and a writer of books on it, that these are ones that you need to see that you should have. You know what I mean? It's not, it's really,

really curated. It's not blind, as I say. It's not blindly like you pick any title. So they're important titles. In some ways, in later years, I've actually picked titles that I think I need to show this in my class, so I need to have it on Blu-ray.

So I'll purposely do that. But you are getting kind of the best, the cream of the crop. Now, the goal, for George and me, and the goal for me, for sure, is to get everything out. We want it all. I'm like the fans. I'm like the people watching this podcast. I want it all. I want every classic Hollywood cartoon. I have a horrible beat-up copy of a book I'm very proud of that I didn't write, but Leonard Malton did. I was his associate. Sorry, it's a beat-up copy of

myself from 1980. And I hate, I don't normally promote myself, but I was, is the research person on this. I worked with Leonard on the book. And it's still in print and it's a classic. And in the back of the book, one of the things we did was a filmography of all the classic Hollywood cartoon, just a giant list that takes up many, many pages. And honestly, I've been saying to people for a long time, my goal is to get everything in that filmography available. One way or another, that you can see it. And by the way, The work to do that is not complete. We do not live in a world where you can see every film that's on it.

I mean, in a way, maybe if you go on YouTube or you look for, you know, you look for bootleg discs or something. But for the most part, legally and restored and this and that, I want all that stuff back out there if I can help make that happen. I think I've done a lot and there's much more to do. There is much more to do. Yeah, yeah. So let's get back to Woody Woodpecker here because to the point of the DVD, do we jump then all the way to 2021 with that release of the screwball collection before there was any more Woody released?

You're talking about Blu-ray. Yeah, now on Blu-ray, of course. But, I mean, was there basically a 10-year span where how much was released, if anything? Yeah. And here's the thing. Here's, again, to continue that story, once I was now in touch with the key people I needed to be in touch. with at Universal. We did that first one. It was successful. We did that second one. That was okay. It was certainly successful in terms of the content of it. I stayed in touch with them. I never

kind of let go. I would have periodic emails or phone calls. What about number three? Could we do this? How about that? I did work for Universal on a variety of projects in between, and you'll know what they are. They are the Rankin' Bass Christmas specials and that sort of thing. In fact, I don't know if this was mentioned on your show, but about a year or two, two years ago, tell me if this is a highly unusual thing, but I had a little bit to do with, they released a set on Blu-ray. It was a multi-disc set of all the Rankin-Bass Christmas specials. And if you look at the side of it, it was a co-production of Warner Brothers and Universal. As that ever happened before on disc, on physical media, they cooperated with each other

to do a complete collection of, you know, they've Rudolph Red Nose Reindeer, but in the case of the Rankin' Bass specials, it turns out that the first group, the first half are owned by Universal, the second half are owned by Warner Brothers. So they came together and they did that. And so things like that, I've been involved with some of the Rankin Bass stuff that Universal released throughout the years. That was my intermediary period. So I've been in touch. I've even gone to the TCM festival and hung out and sat next to the Universal guys. And I'm always, I'm a bit aggressive. I'm like, you know, the cartoons, you know, we got to get them. And so what happened? And this may be the question you were going towards. Like, well, how did it get on DVD at all? Now, the

thing is, as the fortunes for physical media, and I hope I'm not telling tales out of school, I don't know the fortunes internally at Universal, but the fortunes for physical media in general were declining throughout the years. And the, but yet these companies still have these departments putting out new movies and old movies, you know, on physical media. So I still stayed in touch. They basically told me at a certain point, maybe a few years ago, maybe during COVID, they were like, there's no money. We have not a penny. And they literally, they didn't say it, but they were kind of indicating if you could figure

out how we could do this, and it won't cost us one cent, one cent, we'd probably do it. I have a lot of colleagues now, a lot of good friends and fans who write to me about this or that and why don't we do this. I need people suggest things to me because they know I'm involved. And one of my friends, I was telling him about the, I love to get Woody Woodpeckers on, but they won't, they won't lift a finger. Now this was a year before this came out, they won't list a finger to really, to restore anything, they won't do anything, they won't spend any money, I don't see how we're going to do it,

or how I can talk them into it. And this friend wrote me back a few days ago or something after that and said, I found a channel on YouTube that's in Arabic. Honestly, I don't remember the line. It was like Egyptian or something. And it's got Woody Woodpecker cartoons, and they're dubbed an Egyptian or something. But look, you said, look at them. They look really good. They look like really high quality. And I looked at it. I'm like, oh, this is restored. But it was only a handful

of the cartoons. So I contacted my friend with a link to one of them. And I said, you know, in Europe. And I knew this already throughout the years, as you may or may not know, Woody Woodpecker is very popular around the world, more so than the United States. And so I've been involved with slightly, with Woody Woodpecker things that were done for Europe. And there was a documentary that was made. There's all sorts of things that were done for foreign countries. So I was aware of this foreign love for Woody. So I wrote to my friend there, he didn't know about this. He said, I said, could you look into it?

And he did. He looked at it. This took months. I mean, I called him, this was typical with my universal relationship. It's not like George and I talk every week. You know, universal maybe, you know, lucky if I talked to him once a month or every two or three months. He called me back a while later, a while later, months and said, we researched it and there's 25 cartoons that have been restored in Europe, you know, blah, blah, blah, and we can get

them. And they sent me the list. And he said, are these good? Are these, can we do a disc with this? And I said, yeah, we could. In fact, I actually said, there's a couple in here. I would just stick with these 1940s Woody Woodpeckers, which I forgot the number of that was like 20 or something or something like that. And I said, I would maybe cut out the other five because they're like later, you know. Not that they were bad. They were just, I just thought, let's keep it pure to, you know, and maybe there'd be hope. My hope is always when we put out a DVD or something that it sells well enough that they'll come back and say, we want to do another. Sure. That was always my hope. Right. So they ended up saying, you know, we want to go with

25. 25 sounds like a better number. All right. You know, it's the sales. I'm not in the, I said, listen, there's some great Woody Woodpecker original art that the heritage auctions, you know, you don't even have to hire an artist to paint the cover. We could actually use a real still from one of the opening titles or something. And they were like, we don't have any... Again, I got the speech. I get the speech often. We don't have any money.

I go, but these are done, so we'd be happy to put them out because it won't cost us anything to do it. And except, what are we going to do about the packaging? And they said, well, finally, they came back and told me later that they were just going to use the same... This is the DVD,

and this is the artwork. Right, sure. So we're just going to reuse it and change the name, and that's it. and I think they asked me and it was said do you want to give us a quote or something for the and I said yeah because that would be my only acknowledgement that I had anything to do with this thing but I wanted that acknowledgement sure so but I wrote the copy on the back and I do things like I do things like that's right well similarly the new one that's coming out has volume two

from the DVD's artwork is it they don't want to spend any money people are always saying well why don't they do this? Why don't they do that? This is the only way they would do anything, and I thought it's worth the shot. Sure. Because, hey, it's great to have these restored, beautiful Blu-R-Rae, on Blu-ray, anything. Let's get them out there. Yeah. Well, I think you bring up some really good points.

And for our audience who are obviously animation fans, I'm going to drop a little bomb. Jerry, you're going to probably agree with this. But when you're an animation fan and you're on Facebook or in your forum and it's all animation people that you're talking to all the time, you think there's a big audience for these. And then when you're working for the studio and you look at the number of sales, you say it's a pretty small niche audience for these. It's a very intense audience. That made me very fanatical and they will buy it. But when it comes to pure numbers and it's the fact that, okay, do we have the budget to take? Well, see, I could, I could dispute that.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know the numbers, but I don't, what I do know is if it works and it's successful, like, okay, that brings me to the second, the continuation of the same story. So they put this out, and no kidding, this was like two years ago or something, they called me up at the end of the year. I forgot when it came out, but they called me up at the end of the year, and they said, this is the year. universal home video or whatever they call themselves these days and um because they always changed their names is universal home entertainment they said whether he was just pulling my leg or something he said he goes oh that wouldy that that was one of our biggest sellers of the year now i don't know what that means compared to their maybe they had you know the mom pa kettle i don't know what else they're putting out but and they of course they have their movies you know there i don't know about

that's even counted as part of you know i'm sure that the mainstream you know you know, Fast and Furious films they're putting out are selling more than Woody Woodland. Yeah, right. But they were very impressed with the sales. Sure. And so they did say, if I heard of any more Woody Woodpecker cartoons that were being restored, you'd think they'd want to do that.

You know, if I knew of any other way to put a collection together with Restored, just like we did that one, let them know. Right. That's, by the way, leads us to the new one that's about to come out. Yeah, is that what led to this one that in this new golden, I mean, it's called the Golden Age Collection, so it's not like Screwball Collection 2, volume 2. It's a whole new name. Yeah, I don't know. I think the word collection is the thing that binds everything. Yeah, what happened was this. And here's where I can plug Me TV Tunes. In the interim between this set and the new one, Me TV Tunes. started. Right. And I'm part of that too. I won't go into the whole story. We did a podcast about it. There's a lot to say about the origins and the mindset of what the philosophy of the channel is.

You know, is it aimed at kids? Is it aimed at adults? It's aimed at adults. But all right, the thing is, me TV tunes, Neil Saban, if you're listening, he's the greatest. He's the George Feltonstein of broadcast television. He really is. He really, is he knows his stuff he's a movie tv and cartoon buff and that's exactly the kind of person that should be doing these sort of things you know he told me at one point i don't i get too much into the story but he told me at one point but way before me tv tunes that uh that the their tune-in-with-me cartoon show was very highly rated on the on the channel and that's when the the birth of the idea for me tv tunes and i was in on that and i said that you know we basically made a list of all the

cartoons that we grew up with. He's about my same age as me, maybe a little younger. And we grew up with the same stuff. And we went after all of it, as much of it as we could get. Some of it you can't get. Some of it you can. Some of it you can. And then they take it back from you. But we're putting on lots of great stuff and much more to come in the new year. And I'll talk more about, I'll do another plug for Me TV tunes shortly. But Me TV the tunes came on. And Neil had already been dealing with Universal. He was already dealing with every studio. But let's say take Universal, they have Adam 12 and Dragnet, many, many other big classic TV series from the past, Leave It to Beaver. Many, many, I get, if I stopped and think

about it for a second, it's a lot. Yeah. And I said, you know, and well, he knew. They said, if you talk to the same people who you're getting Leave It to Beaver from, they have Woody Woodpecker, And they have Casper and they have all these other things. And then he went after it and he got it. And here's the thing, to Universal's credit. Oh, my God, it gives me chills when I think of this. When asked for it for sale to me TV, they went ahead and restored all the cartoons. I mean, they weren't going to.

There was no reason to, not for home video. Again, there was no George Felenstein-like champion there. So they restored them for the sale to me TV? So does that mean they're just more than 25 that have been restored? Yeah. Okay. But the thing is, you got to understand, it's not my decision. It's my decision.

I think you guys would know what I would do. You know, you've got to deal with the situation as it is. I went to them and said, there's more cartoons available. and so again a month or two comes they call call me back and go well what would be what would 25 what would you pick for 25 of that okay and since we used most of the 1940s uh cartoons on the first one um yeah i had two the screwball collection you mean yeah right yeah um i i decided in my mind that what we would do is we would it would be a woody collection in that woody would have a an amount in there but honestly out of 25 he's got the least amount no it's it's it's is like

eight woodies i think it is and i'm looking at the list over here and uh there's uh whatever else the whatever the remainder of that is like you know 17 or whatever uh other things that walter lance did that are from the golden age really from the golden age the woodies are mainly from the 50s and 60s. I guess that's why they're calling it the Woody Woodpecker and Friends. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, you're right.

Yeah, that's right. Absolutely. That's smart, but it's smart because, okay, by the way, I've heard that the Woody Woodpecker's hour that's on every day on Me TV tunes is doing very well. I don't, even I don't understand its popularity. But that said, I love it. I love that those cartoons are on. They're really cool in their way.

There's something that there's a charm about the Walter Lance Library in general. And I have to tell you, I was not a fan of the, and this is reflected in these releases in a way. I'm not really a fan of the 1960s and, dare I say, 70s. They kept going into the 1970s cartoons. They're pretty poor. But now I find them fascinating. But you are talking to a guy who does a show for the Comic Con called The Worst Cartoons Ever. So I'm looking at them from a different point of view here.

Right. But the thing is, it's a great little library. And to see them restored, like they're brand new, that's the beauty. I say this when we're on with George, when you see these things completely restored from the Cameron eggs brand new, they look like they were just made by modern-day animators. They look like as crisp and visual as a bad example, let's say SpongeBob or any contemporary cartoon that's on. They're just as vivid, you know, they're evergreen and they,

yes, there's some dated references in many things, part of the charm, but they're understandable by most, by everybody, really. Everybody old and young can love these cartoons. So we have a great, this collection is great, but I guess if I were being honest, it would be for the non-woodies that are on here and they're the majority. And I do want to mention, I do want to mention at this point in my time, I am a consulting with fans. I can't take everybody's suggestions off the internet, but I do read them. But essentially, I want to mention Thad Komorowski and Devin Baxter are two of my colleagues on choosing cartoons.

And I run it past them. Is this something you'd want to see? They'll say they'll make a change. They'll do this. They'll do that. And it comes out to a little consensus of what really is the best to put out. Again, I'm hoping that the sales, especially since the last time the Bluroy was put out, there are more people right now more aware of Woody Woodpecker than then.

If you think about it. Yeah. So I'm hoping the sales will be as good or better. And then we can go further. In fact, I have some ideas for them that I'll keep in check right now. But because we don't want to get too far ahead. But I have some ideas on what to follow up on. So if I could summarize this, Jerry, because of the success on the Me TV tunes block,

that has, you know, obviously the first Blu-ray has. had to sell well enough as well. But really, this, this MeTV is really helping maybe just in terms of a whole revival in the whole classic animation genre, but specific to this new upcoming release, now it's kind of testing orders again to see if that translates to the physical media area. If so, if people come out and support and buy this, there is a chance that it could lead to more, but people need to say, instead of asking the question, why aren't there more than 25 or why aren't they releasing 50 or 100 like they did for the DVD? They need to realize this is a different climate. You got to support these. Right. I will say there's, there are

two, this little extra research this morning amongst my colleagues. There are two cartoons on this disc that as far as we know right now have not run on me TV. Now, I don't know why that is, but they haven't run two of them yet. They may. They have the whole library there, but my friends who, you know, keep track of everything that's on, you know, said there's two of them on here that have not aired. And, well, for the moment, you'd have two that no one else can see anywhere else if you, when this comes out. All right. Well, we'll leave that for the fans to see if they can figure out which those are. Yes, a little game they can play if they want. And I think that somebody had asked, like, maybe, did you have any favorites on here where you're, like, excited, especially excited to see them on this Blu-ray release?

A lot of them. I would say most of the non-Woodies. Even some of the Woody's are ones that I'm happy to have on here. The ones that aren't the Woody's. I hate to do it like that, to separate them out. A really classic Hollywood cartoons from the Lance Library, I'm looking at the list is why I'm not looking straight at you. you've got some cartoons. There's a period after Avery.

Okay, Avery was let go, I believe, at MGM. He immediately went to his old boss, Walter Lance. This is where he started in the 1930s on the Oswald's. And Walter Lance, by now, Avery was a superstar in short cartoons. He hired him immediately. I think Avery didn't want to do Woody Woodpecker for a variety of reasons I can speculate on, but he took Chili Willie and developed that. character made two hilarious. All four cartoons he made for Lance are great. He was only there

about a year. And then he left and he entered the world of television commercials, which was a loss for those of us who love classic cartoons, but it was good for him. And he made these cartoons, but he influenced the studio. I believe, a lot of us speculate that a lot of the cartoons that came out in the year following Avery, even Woody Woodpecker ones, have an Avery feel to them. Right. He may have boarded them. He may have suggested things. He may have given them notes. There's a real Avery feel at the entire Lance studio. We have a few of those on here. Some of the directors really, really followed up on that feeling. It was, that begins to dissipate

as the 50s go on. And unfortunately, that's, and then the cartoons really kind of lose it. There are some great directors that joined the studio like Jack Hanna and, oh, Sid Marcus. And They do great, great stuff, and we have a representation of theirs. There's very, very good stuff. We have some early stuff from the 30s, like The Adventures of Tom Thumb and the Sleeping Princess, which are like fairy tale, like silly symphonies. There's a few more than that. I mean, there's just some great oddball material on here, including the characters like

Chili Willie, Andy Panda, Ma and Paw. That was a little Ma and Paw, Kettle Series they did. And others. I'll leave it at that. And it's really a beautiful little package. And I'm proud of it. I'm happy about it. It'll be great. No one will be disappointed. Yeah. First off, I'm going to say, I thought our conversation would go to about 10 minutes. Oh, I didn't know that. Here we are at 40 minutes. And we're finally going to get two questions that have been submitted for you. And I'll just make a plug for our Warner Archive Animation Facebook group, where these questions came from. This group, I'll have a link in the show notes here for anybody who's interested, but this is to celebrate all of these releases from the Warner Archive.

And of course, now this is a universal release. And a lot of the stuff that is showing up on me TV tunes, to be clear, and stuff that you're very involved in. So people who want to maybe check out that group can do so, look for that link. But we ask for some questions. We're going to run through them. You may or may not be able to answer them. That's fine. Let's just see what some of the interest in.

These are a little bit more of a deep dive sometimes than the general stuff we have just addressed. But let's start with this first one from Justin. One, will spook a nanny get an HD upgrade on the bonus features? And two, if this succeeds, will lead to other things in the Universal Classic Cartoon Vault coming to Blu-ray. Well, the second part we've already addressed. Of course, if it succeeds, there'll be more one way or another.

Here's the thing I must mention. People are always asking me about some of the bonus materials, which, of course, I suggest most of them from these first two Blu-rays are, you know, we potted them over from the DVDs. Again, let me repeat, and I'm not trying to put anything down here. I'm not trying to, they really won't spend any extra money. So unless on their own, they have upgraded it because, on their own. And I don't know in the case of Spookin Annie.

I'm under the impression it's going to be SD. But I might be as surprised as you when it comes out and it's upgraded. I honestly do not know on the upper map. All right. Well, let's go the next one from Gregory. For those not as in tune with Woody's catalog, how much of his golden age does this and the previous Blu-ray, that would be the screwball collection? How much does it encompass?

Well, the previous one, I believe it doesn't have every 40s, but it has most of them. And I would totally, if you're interested in the real golden age, Woody, you've got to get the screwball collection. That has the classics in there, for sure. The new one, mostly, it depends on what your definition of golden age is. Because to some people, the early 50s is still golden age. I don't think so, but you get a couple of things from the mid-50s and even the 60s. It's a smorgasbord.

It's a lot of a lot of variety. But I think if you want the 1940s on Woody, go to the first collection. On this set, we've got a lot of nice stuff from the 40s, 30s, 40s and 50s, you know, filling it out. And I do say that if you're interested in just the golden age, you will want this. You'll want this. You'll kick yourself if it somehow sells out and you missed your shot. you know you want this all right next question from angel will we get to see woody cartoons from 1960 to 1972 on blu ray well as i said there's one or two on here but on the new one but

the um all right you guys are forcing me to say it right you guys all know you know what i'm going to say i'm not a fan i'm not a fan of uh the director paul smith you know of that period i'm not a fan of those Barry family cartoons. I can't stand those chilly willies with that opening where all the characters are waving to us. It's, oh my God, it's, I can't stand those. That's me. You guys might love that stuff.

Will we? I never say no. And I never say never. And I am dedicated to getting all the theatrical cartoons out if I can, someplace. But, you know, will it? it's not happening now, but are we still chipping at it, you know, getting it out? You know, I have to say for me, it's a priority list, it's low, but for the 60s, I'm talking 60s and 70s, Lance cartoons.

Right. By the way, I will say it, I do want to praise them. We do have a few here, you know, if it was directed by Sid Marcus or Jack Hanna or anybody else that isn't Paul Smith during that period, I'm shocked how good those cartoons are. And it makes me sad that Lance was in production through 1972, and he could have had these other directors directing those cartoons. They could have been good, but we'll never know. Yeah.

All right. Next question from Aaron. What new cartoons are on this Blu-ray, which are not on the previous DVDs, the 75 and 150 cartoon DVDs? I don't, I didn't prepare it. I don't have a list of what that would be exactly. except that, I don't know.

I'll say that many. I would say many. I just don't know the number exactly. Okay. Oh, you would say many? Okay. Yeah, but somebody will, somebody in the comments on those pages will correct me or tell me what, you know. This is a few.

Okay, next from Nicholas. Will any of the black and white Oswald's, i.e. hell's heels, get onto a future Woody Woodpecker blue ray set. I tried to put a, to get an Oswald on. here, to be honest, or two. In fact, I even, they even said, well, you know, again, we're not going to restore them. I said, but you know, and you guys may know this, there was two Oswalds from 1930 on the Criterion King of Jazz set. And if you have that, there's two beautifully restored Oswalds on there that are fantastic. And I said, just put those on here for the collectors. A lot of cartoon collectors don't know about that.

And by the way, that King of Jazz has, of course, the first opening two minutes or so, a three minutes is a Walter Lance Color Oswald at the beginning of the film. With Bing Crosby is the voice of Oswald. Wow. I can go on and on. King of Jazz from Criterion. But I tried to do that. I tried to get that on here.

And the only way I can get it on would be to pull something that was free. And here we go. But they just didn't want to do that at this. point. Fine. That's what happens. The black and white Oswald's is a major goal for me because we're aware that they've got the negatives or they've got superior something or other prints.

I don't know what they've got, but they've got something that they can make great restorations from because they've been doing it occasionally. As they did on the original sets, we put a bunch of black and whites from the, from the 1930s on here. So we know they have them. It's just a matter of it, it's, you know,

it's money and time consuming, but we know it can be done. And it's a goal for me. It's a goal for me, TV tunes, but it's not happening. But don't nobody go away with a thinking that's going to happen. It ain't happening.

Yeah. But it's a goal. You know, you got to have like little goals. What else can we do in mind? Next question from West. Hugh Harmon of harmonizing productions responsible for the first WB and MGM Cartoon Studios has a story credit on Convict Concerto, which I believe is his only credit with Walter Lance productions. What was his involvement and how did this come to be? And why did his

involvement not continue? You're going to have to ask Mark Kassler or Thad or somebody else about that. The reason I say it that way is I don't know that that part. of the story. Obviously, he was, I mean, Hugh Harmon and Rudolph Ising after World War II, you know, their story is very, very all over the place. They really wanted to be independent animators. I think they wanted to be Walt Disney. I don't know anything, but I just get the feeling when you look at their career that they were trying to be Walt Disney as best they could throughout their entire career. They believed in themselves a lot, and they, they had their own companies.

And Harmon in particular was doing a lot of industrial films. They did a lot of, when TV came in in the 50s, he did the TV pilots. None of them sold. It's sort of sad from what I gather, you know. And obviously, an opportunity came for him to sell a story to Lance and he didn't. By the way, that's a great cartoon. It's a really good one. But sorry, I don't have the full answer on that.

Yeah. And then one last question from Michael. Are there Woody Woodpecker cartoons with stereotypical undertones that will be considered for release? I think that's kind of referencing, like, censored material. Yeah, the good news is that Universal doesn't seem to, it doesn't seem to bother Universalism as much as it does other studios. You know, Disney is a family brand. You know, Warner Brothers is aware that kids and families, enjoy the cartoons.

Universal's mindset is not in that, you know, I mean, they kind of are. They have a great, you know, family unit there. They do the illumination movies and the DreamWorks movies. They have a theme park. But they really do think of their older films as old films, as classic movies. They do have that attitude. And it just doesn't, there is nobody saying you can't release this or you can't release that so the quick answer is there's a few of those well there are some of those all over the

DVDs we did and definitely a few of them on the Blu-rays and I'm going to leave it at that and are they also on Me TV tunes yes some of them are so if they're there that also some that go too far from me TV but okay some but there are others that me TV's cool with yeah well I mean if they're on me TV tunes I think that you know as you just mentioned that is an insight into what could potentially come down the line. Yeah, TV tunes is pretty liberal or open to these things because the thinking is that we know kids are watching, but it's not aimed at kids.

And as you know, the commercials are all for prescription drugs and walkers and, you know. Sure. Well, by the way, those are everywhere on everything you watch. By the way, they're not just, but still. Did you have any more information about the Me TV that you wanted to talk about or get into? Well, I just wanted to say that the, I'm looking off of a piece of paper here right now, that the important thing is when I talk to people about it, when I mention it,

either they've heard of it or they've never heard of it. And we really want to make it clear that the channel is very available. It's available in a lot of places. It's on Comcast on Channel 17. 36 nationwide. It's on direct TV, 295, and it's on DISH. It's channel 376. It is available on many, many cable systems. It's available on many, many apps like Philo and Friendly, and it's even, and even more so. It's a broadcast network. It is an affiliate subchannel, a digital subchannel to a channel where you live for the most part and there's a great page on their website you put in your zip code

it tells you exactly three four five six ten ways you can get it so it's very available we want it to be and it will be eventually available even more places as we're still in the beginning with me team it's only been on for a year right and a lot more changes a lot more a new programming that is coming to the channel i've been authorized to say that they're going to be adding a Milton the Monster and Batfink and other things to the Casper and Friends shows. Keep your eye on that one. So, you know, MeTV, please support that.

And please, of course, support the physical media releases of classic cartoons. If you want to see more of that stuff. I know I sound like a broken record. I say that a lot. It's the bottom line. Nobody can put this stuff out. It's a business. If they don't make money, if they lose money, you can say, oh, this is universal.

They have tons of money. No, each of these giant corporations treat each division like its own separate business. If that business doesn't make a profit, they close that business. You'll never see that again. So the thing is, you got it, that's your way of supporting it, is purchasing. Yeah, and I think people also don't understand that when something does very well in broadcast, when people watch it, whether it in streaming or on a broadcast network or whatever, that actually translates well to physical media.

It's not like, oh, I'm never going to watch it. I only want to buy it. No. As a matter of fact, the higher the number of people watching, the studios will say a percentage of that number is going to want to also own it. Oh, yeah. So it works in tandem. It doesn't, they're not adversaries.

They work in tandem. So if you're watching on Me TV or the more exposure that Me TV tunes gets, it's actually going to be good for physical media collectors as well. You watch something, you're reminded how much you enjoy it, and then you think, dear God, what if this were to ever go away? I better buy it and own it and have it on my shelf as well. That way I can also go back to it at any time in the future. I mean, these things work in tandem. So I think that's why you're involved with both. anything that encourages the love of classic animation and the re-airing of these things.

And also, as you mentioned earlier, when they're broadcast and they do well in broadcast, it lets the studios know, let's put some money behind restoring these. And when money is put into restoring them, that also makes physical media copies look much better and a higher percentage that it will get there as well. So it all works together. well um i'm glad i gave you a full show instead of a segment but well it's always great to have you on i appreciate it i think that's you know i did not know you it was only going to be 10 minutes so that's that's just in my mind i wasn't sure if we would have enough to talk about uh for for a full

hour here but you know what i i appreciate the way you gave the background yeah and you filled in because you answered so many questions along the way as to how and why the DVD is different from the Blu-ray and why and how many TV tunes fits into all of that as well. So really great to have you on today and talk about this. And maybe we'll talk again once the next collection comes out and we're able to actually review some of that stuff. That would be great as well. So thanks, Jerry. You're welcome. I love talking with Jerry. It's always interesting. interesting. I have one thing we're going to talk about when we go into it and we end up talking

about so much more. I love hearing those stories and just his knowledge and background on classic animation. So I hope you enjoyed that. For those of you who are interested in actually pre-ordering this new Woody Woodpecker and Friends' Golden Age collection, I do have links below. Be sure and get your pre-order in. Let's the studio know what the demand is for these. I also will have links in there to the previous release through ball collection and the DVDs and a few other things we discussed here today with Jerry. And I also want to let you know that the animation group that I mentioned, I'll have a link for that in case you're on Facebook and you want to join with other people who kind of have

more of a daily discussion on a lot of these things and their own reviews and anticipation and, of course, the pre-orders when they become available. So I'll have that in there as well. Anything else I've forgotten. Look for that in the show notes. If you enjoyed it, maybe you want to subscribe, and that way you'll get all of our animation content sent correctly to you. So lots of great stuff. And I've been speaking with Jerry and others, and there are just a lot of great animation coming in 2026.

So if you are a classic animation fan, we'll definitely want to join our Facebook group so that you can stay on top of all of that great information. So for our YouTube subscribers, thanks again for watching. And for those who are listening to our podcast, stay. Slightly obsessed about classic animation.