Looney Tunes: Reality Check (2003) + Looney Tunes: Stranger Than Fiction (2003) – DVDs

LOONEY TUNES: REALITY CHECK
½*/**** Image A Sound B Extras B-

LOONEY TUNES: STRANGER THAN FICTION
½*/**** Image A Sound B Extras B-

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover So it's come to this: after decades of revelling in the hair-trigger-timed, artfully-drawn, beautifully lush fruits of the old Warner Brothers animation stable, we are now reduced to badly animated web broadcasts slapped haphazardly onto DVD. This cynical cash-grab has nothing to do with the craft of classic-Hollywood Looney Tunes and everything with trying to muscle in on an animation market largely dominated by Disney. But the iron that forged the greatness of the old shorts has largely run cold, replaced by the pathetic brandishing of the only other big cartoon trademarks in town–making for something from which only the very young or the very easily amused could derive any pleasure.

But it didn't have to be this way. Just as the original animators used the social and pop-cultural grist from the mill of the '30s to the '50s, so do the new shorts riff on 21^st-century fads: they wreak havoc on the updated idioms of television, computers, and bad expensive movies. Thus Reality Check spoofs the eminently spoofable world of reality TV, while Stranger than Fiction veers from original material to the odd film parody. Had the production team been firing on all cylinders, this could potentially have been funny. But the writers fail to use these themes as anything other than an excuse to bring out the cartoon warhorses, and the design is so shabby that it can only induce nostalgia for the good old days of I. Freleng and Chuck Jones.

That last problem is the fatal consideration: the shorts were designed for webcast, and thus aren't as nuanced as those we all grew up on. Some of the lines in the old cartoons aren't much better than they are here–it was all about timing and detail, with the fullest articulation that cel animation could provide. Here the figures are designed to move as little as possible, lest they crash someone's computer, and while it saves some effort, it takes most of the point out of watching. Though there has been good net animation in this vein (doodie.com comes to mind, as do Mark Fiore's toons for THE VILLAGE VOICE), the results here are as vivid as a stick figure and as personal as an ATM.

What we are left with are jokes so old or so feeble that they insult the intelligence. One tires of the cartoon catchphrases ("You're dethpickable," "This means war," etc.) repeated ad nauseam in lieu of actual new material: it's the only and a misguided link to a past to which the creative team seems oblivious. And once they've run out of the staples, the new material is incredibly lame–it's either characters getting hit over the head with anvils/vehicles/bolts of lightning and the like, or whipping off one-liners that would shame the Three Stooges. Is there anyone on earth convulsed by the sight of an ice-cream truck marked "Good Rumour"? Or the Tasmanian Devil enlisted to recite Shakespeare, badly? Or a toaster disappearing into the spiral opening of a show called "Mysterious Phenomena of the Unexplained"?

Even the satire is at a ragged, sub-MAD MAGAZINE level of altered names and slight variations, most painfully apparent in the most sustained series of the two discs: "Toon Marooned", a lengthy series based on "Survivor". These toons are all too enamoured with the idea of hijacking a popular TV show, using it mostly as pop-cult credentials without scoring any satirical points. The backdrop is therefore merely an excuse for the tired shenanigans described earlier, and it wears out its welcome almost immediately. If you love your children, you'll buy them the genuine article (the best-of volume The Looney Tunes Premiere Collection, for instance) instead of these pallid imitations, which are too rough and lackadaisical for all but the most determined completist.

THE DVDs
Both Reality Check and Stranger than Fiction are presented in their original ratio of 1.33:1. For web-originated material, they look surprisingly good: colours are bright and saturated and fine detail is remarkably sustained. The Dolby 5.1 Sound for both is merely passable, reliant as it is on the centre speaker; the rear channels are poorly utilized and very faint even when they have something to do.

Extras are predominantly needless garbage, though two cute if simpleminded Flash games up their rating somewhat. Reality Check features a making-of for the new Looney Tunes: Back in Action videogame that's so brief it registers more as a commercial. The chapters menu provides bonus commercials that advertise toon-related services. (Not brilliant, but the funniest stuff on the disc.) "Toon Marooned" outtakes feature five bits left out of that series, all of them as funny as the cartoons from which they were excised–which is to say, not very. Even less funny are the two "Toon Marooned" interviews, which feature a) Porky Pig stuttering about his ejection from the island and being asked why he doesn't wear pants, and b) the Tasmanian Devil growling incoherently and not asking questions. Trailers are included for Mucha Lucha, Tom and Jerry Favourites, and Scooby-Doo and the Monster from Mexico, but the one redeeming feature here is the game "Bugs Bunny's Tower Trouble", featuring our man Bugs climbing the Eiffel Tower for points; it's nothing special but reasonably amusing when considered next to the material it supports.

Stranger than Fiction isn't much better. The Back in Action making-of is the same, as are the trailers; there are also similar commercials on the chapters menu. Additionally find "all-new Toon Spots," which assemble needless trailers for the disc's four major threads ("Mysterious Phenomenon etc.," "Twick or Tweety," "Royal Mallard," and "Planet of the Taz") and which practically define the word "superfluous." Again the so-so Flash mini-game upstages everything–though it's a typical click-and-shoot game called "Whack-an-Alien" in which Martians appear in the hopes that you might shoot them. Perhaps a way to work out your frustrations with the rest of the disc?

56/67 minutes; NR; 1.33:1; English DD 5.1; CC; English, French subtitles; DVD-5; Region One; Warner