Today's Video Link

I'll bet a lot of you have never seen this. It's one of a couple of openings for The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show that ran on Saturday morning in the 1990's. The folks at Warner TV Animation kept fiddling with the opening of their Saturday AM series that ran vintage Looney Tunes, trying to make it seem "new" without losing that great theme song and Mel Blanc's vocals. The body of the show was, after all, old cartoons that nine-year-old kids had seen eighty quadrillion times…so to make something seem fresh, they kept reconfiguring the main titles.

At one point when the show was back on CBS, the execs there asked me if I had any idea how to freshen the program. All I could think of was to suggest that they get WB to dig into its vaults and see if they had any of the interstitial segments that were animated for the prime-time Bugs Bunny Show back when it was on ABC in 1960-1962. A search was conducted and the result was that they had lost most of that footage. They had a few black-and-white prints in 16mm and I believe there was a brief discussion of whether it was feasible to pull some clips from those, colorize them and throw them on the air but that was deemed impractical.

One of the lessons the big studios have learned in this era of cable and home video is "Never throw anything away." Every week, some exec at every company curses his predecessors for not doing a better job of protecting the vaults and preserving some movie or TV show that they'd now like to market somewhere but can't. One of the reasons some movies are not out on DVD is that the company that owns the copyright doesn't own a good print or negative. Sometimes, they obtain one by dealing with the kind of collector they used to call a Film Pirate and sic the FBI on.

Anyway, I am — as I so often am — off-topic. Here's a 90's opening of The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show…a nice bit of animation but no one will ever improve on the original.