Looney Tunes Redrawn Colorized Cartoons

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You're better off watching the original black and white versions of the cartoons, because red is the redrawn version's favorite color.

During the Warner Bros.-Seven Arts era of Looney Tunes, Sunset Productions held the rights to black and white Looney Tunes cartoons, along with the 1933-1934 black and white Merrie Melodies cartoons. Due to the increase in demand for colorized cartoons to air for television, Warner Bros.-Seven Arts requested Sunset Productions to colorize the black and white cartoons. Produced in South Korea as a commission for Color Systems Inc. (headed by Fred Ladd), 79 black and white cartoons were redrawn to include color in 1968 and 1969. The redrawn colorized versions of these cartoons were heavily criticized for the reasons stated below.

Why They’re Un-colorful

Note: This information pertains solely to the colorized versions of the cartoons produced in the late 1960s.

  1. The main problem with the redrawn colorized cartoons from the late 1960s is that they represent a substantial decline in quality compared to their original black and white counterparts, primarily attributed to the limited financial resources available during the Warner Bros.-Seven Arts era.
    • To meet tight deadlines, the animators only redrew every other frame, reducing the frame rate from 24 to 12 frames per second and creating a noticeably choppy appearance.
    • The overall aesthetic of these redrawn cartoons is undeniably ugly and poorly executed, to the point that the already subpar animation of the late 1964-1969 period appears superior by comparison.
  2. These redrawn colorized cartoons are plagued by a staggering number of animation errors, exceeding those found in the original black and white versions, including those from the Seven Arts era. These mistakes range from general sloppiness to physical objects like a dead fly becoming unintentionally part of the animation, as seen in the colorized version of "Ali Baba Bound."
  3. Background details and animation elements are frequently removed or changed in the redrawn versions. For example, the chickens in the background of "The Timid Toreador" are static in the colorized version.
  4. Many of these colorized versions suffer from muted, lifeless colors, or conversely, excessively vibrant and unrealistic ones.
    • Each color selection for the redraws, no matter how faded, muted, or excessively vivid, is described by the prominent cartoon critic Trevor Thompson, also known as Ferris Wheelhouse, as "the boldest, brightest colors ever imaginable." This approach aims to make it unmistakably clear to even the most unsophisticated television viewers that the cartoons have transitioned from black-and-white to color, as though the young audience of that era requires nothing less than intense colors on their TV screens.
  5. The colorization process frequently involves replacing black with other colors, resulting in inconsistencies such as Beans and Daffy Duck being depicted as brown in certain redrawn cartoons.
    • The color palette used in the redrawn cartoons frequently defies logic, even by Looney Tunes standards. For example, in "Porky's Cafe," coffee and toast are inexplicably colored pink instead of their expected brown hues.
  6. Mostly, the original opening/ending titles are completely cut and replaced with the Sunset Productions titles, while some cartoons keep their originals. After the closure of the Warner Bros.-Seven Arts animation studio, most of the titles were replaced with the 1956 orange rings, or the W7 titles.
  7. The shorts "Porky's Badtime Story," "Injun Trouble," "Scalp Trouble," "Daffy's Southern Exposure," "Notes to You," and "Puss N' Booty" were given redrawn colorized versions. However, these seem redundant as there are Technicolor remakes for each ("Tick Tock Tuckered," "Wagon Heels," "Slightly Daffy," "Along Came Daffy," "Back Alley Oproar," and "I Taw a Putty Tat"), which boast significantly better animation and color quality.
    • To be fair, at the time these B&W cartoons were redrawn colorized in the late-1960s their respective Technicolor remakes were still under ownership of United Artists via sales to a.a.p. (Associated Artists Productions) in 1956 and therefore most television networks at the time did not have the rights to show most of these Technicolor remakes (along with the other early color Looney Tunes cartoons from before 1948 and the B&W Harman-Ising Merrie Melodies of the early-1930s) alongside the WB-owned black-and-white (1930-1943) and color cartoons (1948 onwards) until at least the 1996 Time Warner-Turner Entertainment merger, but following the 1996 Time Warner-Turner Entertainment merger television networks such as Cartoon Network, Boomerang and MeTV have the rights to air nearly every single cartoon from the Looney Tunes series, including the Technicolor remakes of these aforementioned shorts from the a.a.p. package, hence making these B&W originals' respective redrawn colorized versions even more pointless as the years progressed.

Colorful Qualities

The computer colorized version. Much better!
  1. In 1990, 1992, and 1995, the same set of 79 cartoons, along with another 23 that had not been colorized in 1968, underwent re-colorization using computer software, preserving the original animation quality. The outcome was so authentic that it appeared as though the cartoons were initially created in color, rather than black and white, when first released in theaters. Moreover, these computer-colorized versions often featured a superior selection of color palettes compared to their redrawn-colorized counterparts.
    • Among the three sets of computer-colorized Looney Tunes cartoons from the 1990s, the 1995 collection stands out with the most visually appealing colorizations, primarily because of the superior and more vibrant color choices applied to that series of cartoons.
  2. The redrawn cartoons still keep the original audio, and the animation is still faithful to the originals.

Reception

  • While most of the Looney Tunes cartoons themselves which were selected for this redrawn colorization were well-received by critics, fans and animation buffs alike (with a minor exception of the cartoons from the 1939-mid 1940 era and the earliest black-and-white cartoons directed by Chuck Jones between 1941-early 1942), their redrawn colorized versions are often criticized for their inferiority to the original animation.
  • These problems as mentioned above do apply to not just the Looney Tunes redrawn colorized versions of the 1960s, but also other redrawn colorized versions of other popular classic animation produced at the same time such as Mickey Mouse (from Disney), Betty Boop and Popeye (both from Fleischer Studios and Famous Studios), amongst others.

Trivia

  • The earliest cartoon redrawn from the original 1968-69 era is "Plane Dippy" from 1936, and the most recent is "Puss n' Booty" from 1943, the final Looney Tunes short produced in black-and-white.
    • In the 1970s, Radio & Television Packagers also produced multiple redrawn cartoons, extending back to the Harman-Ising era of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. The redraws included earlier works like "Ain't Nature Grand!" from 1931. These redraws are often criticized more harshly than those by Color Systems and later Entercolor due to their choppier animation, the replacement of original title cards with renames, and the occasional use of stock music (with spliced or bootleg prints commonly chosen for redrawing). "Country Boy," originally a Technicolor Merrie Melodies cartoon, was among the works redrawn by Radio & Television Packagers.
    • In 1988, Turner commissioned Entercolor Technologies to redraw cartoons from the Harman-Ising era of Merrie Melodies, complete with dubbed ending cards in 1995. While still criticized much like the previous redraws, they were often considered better than the Color Systems and Radio & Television Packagers redraws.
  • Although the redrawn colorized versions of Looney Tunes cartoons have not been officially released on home video, likely due to their unfavorable reception, some of these cartoons have entered the public domain due to copyright neglect. Consequently, these redrawn colorized versions have appeared on various unofficial bootleg VHS and DVD releases from low-budget home video labels.
    • In contrast, only a small handful of 1990s computer-colorized versions of the Looney Tunes cartoons have been officially released on home video. These include:
      • "Porky's Hero Agency" (1937) (appears on the "Porky Pig: Days of Swine and Roses" VHS)
      • "Porky's Party" (1938) (appears on the "Porky Pig: Days of Swine and Roses" VHS)
      • "Porky & Daffy" (1938) (appears on the "Daffy Duck: Tales From the Duckside" VHS)
      • "The Lone Stranger and Porky" (1939) (appears on the 2015 Blu-ray release of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939, not to be confused with the 1996 Disney animated film of the same name))
      • "Pilgrim Porky" (1940) (appears on the 2007 DVD release of The Fighting 69th (1940))
      • "You Ought to Be in Pictures" (1940) (appears on the "Carrotblanca: Looney Tunes Go To The Movies" VHS)
      • "Patient Porky" (1940) (appears on the "Porky Pig: Days of Swine and Roses" VHS)
      • "The Impatient Patient" (1942) (appears on the "Daffy Duck: Tales From the Duckside" VHS)
      • "Porky Pig's Feat" (1943) (appears on both "Daffy Duck: Tales From the Duckside" VHS and "Ham on Wry: The Porky Pig Laser Collection" Laserdisc set)
    • Due to historic preservation of the original black-and-white media, none of the colorized versions are available on HBO Max and haven't aired on US television since the late 2000s, although some of these 1990s computer-colorized versions of the Looney Tunes cartoons are still shown on certain non-US Boomerang feeds such as Italy, as well as the Latin American channel Tooncast as of today.
    • A small handful of computer-colorized Porky Pig cartoons have been made available for streaming on the Boomerang app as of 2019.

Videos

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A riff on the negative impact of the redrawn colorized versions of the B&W Looney Tunes cartoons and how they do not do their original B&W source materials justice.

See also

References

  1. ↑ https://www.retrojunk.com/article/show/5038/the-radio-television-packagers-redrawns

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