Warner Brothers Cartoon Companion (1998)

109 pointsposted 5 days ago
by joebig
(warnercompanion.com)

47 Comments

forgingahead

3 days ago

Nice find. My favourite was always "I shoulda turned left at Albuquerque".

Good explanation from Quora[0]:

The old Route 66 (often referred to as “The Mother Road”)—which opened in 1926 to drive from Chicago to Los Angeles—was the main method of heading west until the 1950s and the building of modern superhighways. (The trek of numerous Okies and other rural families made destitute by the Dust Bowl in the 1930s has been memorialized in Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.”) Route 66 travels through Albuquerque—and actually intersects itself in the middle of downtown (ie., you can stand on the corner of Route 66 and Route 66)—so lots of people likely got confuddled and turned around while driving through Albuquerque…like Bugs!

[0]: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-origin-of-the-statement-in... (Sean Griffin's answer)

staticman2

3 days ago

I'm guessing younger people don't understand what a big deal the Looney Tunes used to be. With less channels and less cartoons in the old days, they were something kids would watch repeatedly in reruns. You didn't have a choice of several "cartoon only" channels if you wanted to watch a cartoon.

trbleclef

3 days ago

Just remember, you can't watch a Warner Bros. movie without a Warner Bros. ball cap: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSMj5M9w2qA

dylan604

3 days ago

<shudder> 1-900 numbers. So they give you a number to order something from their catalog, but not only will they get money from you for the items, it's also $1.50 per minute for the call. "I'm sorry sir, but our systems are running a little slow today" to the point your 1-900 fees are more than the items your ordering.

function_seven

3 days ago

No, no. It's ok. The 900 number is just to order the catalog itself. Once you get that, then you place your orders the regular way.

(Or, that's what the scumbags told themselves, I'm sure)

I think the only thing that outdoes this is the Santa Claus commercial that would play the DTMF tones for the kids who didn't know how to dial a phone. I can't find an example now, but I've seen it before, and Wikipedia has a reference to it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premium-rate_telephone_number#...

vadansky

3 days ago

Haha, closest modern equivalent would be blasting "Hey Alexa, order the latest Peppa Pig Bluray!"

leephillips

3 days ago

This is an amazing resource (for those of us who love these cartoons). Thank you for sharing it.

user

3 days ago

[deleted]

lupusreal

3 days ago

Seems to be missing entries for the Censored Eleven.

shermantanktop

3 days ago

Good riddance. It’s antiquated trash.

Others may cherish this stuff as a tribute to free thinking or whatever, but I’m happy to see the lack of distribution as a sign we’ve learned some things. This isn’t Chesterton’s Fence or the Mona Lisa, this is just racist humor aimed at boomer kids.

pessimizer

3 days ago

Not including this stuff where it belongs is gaslighting. Black people should know what their boss laughed at when he was a kid.

It's also literal whitewashing to take all of the black people out of the past, even if white people depicted us as clowns and monsters. I should be able to say "your grandfather depicted me as a clown and a monster." Better than being a problem swept out of frame.

shermantanktop

3 days ago

There's still tons of it around! The Marx Brothers movies are a great example of high-quality content with questionable segments that perfectly capture those old stereotypes. And as a classic movie fan, there are tons of movies with incidental black characters like that. I don't think those should all go in the bin, they are a product of their time.

The WB content is aimed at kids, and I think that makes a difference.

lupusreal

3 days ago

I don't think anybody is arguing for those Censored Eleven to be shown on TV. They're still out there for any adult who cares enough to find, I think that's enough.

For that matter, I wasn't even criticizing the OP document for missing those eleven. Given the time it was written it's quite possible the author didn't even have access to them. In any case, the omission of those few from what seems to be an otherwise comprehensive document is, I thought, notable.

krustyburger

3 days ago

So they were aimed at boomer kids despite all 11 cartoons having been released before 1945? How odd.

shermantanktop

3 days ago

Technically you are correct, which is the best kind of correct. Should have said “pre-boomer”. But many were made or reissued in 1944, and as I understand it, cartoon shorts were replayed for years.

Dalewyn

3 days ago

[flagged]

dangus

3 days ago

Literally none of the censored eleven cartoons involve Speedy Gonzales.

Maybe you should learn your history before you accuse others of whitewashing it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censored_Eleven

Dalewyn

3 days ago

Don't care; there is a huge push to whitewash history including most if not all of Looney Tunes for "racism". I find that nothing short of stupid and disturbing, 1984 isn't supposed to be a manual of our future and present.

dangus

2 days ago

Who specifically is pushing for the whitewashing of most looney tunes episodes? Can you provide any evidence on that claim or sources?

There really are just 11 specific episodes that are very obviously and nefariously racist.

And to be clear, the US government isn’t censoring them. You are allowed to go watch them if you can find them. 3 are in the public domain. It’s just that the company that owns the rights to them (United Artists) isn’t interested in airing them or selling them.

If you wrote a book or a song and decided later that you didn’t want to sell it or perform it anymore, that’s just you exercising your personal copyright and property rights, not 1984-style government censorship. That is actually the opposite of state control.

Dalewyn

2 days ago

>Who specifically is pushing for the whitewashing of most looney tunes episodes?

Most so-called "liberals", aka "the Left". Of course, this concerns everything overall instead of just Loonie Tunes. This is not unlike villifying Columbus or the Founding Fathers or the Confederate boots on the ground and attempts to remove them from history. Who- or whatever the subject being put up for whitewashing is, it's stupid and disturbing and they are not getting my vote come hell or high waters.

We must appreciate and respect history, both the good and the bad, lest we are doomed to repeat them.

>It’s just that the company that owns the rights to them (United Artists) isn’t interested in airing them or selling them.

The media goes where the money is, for better or worse. The money right now is in whitewashing everything including history. "Diversity", "Equity", and "Inclusion" (aka DEI), which you might be more familiar with.

Speaking as a minority (Japanese-American), sincerely fuck that noise with a rusty spork.

user

2 days ago

[deleted]

poki89

3 days ago

what is this ?

mrweasel

3 days ago

Briefly I thought it was cartoon characters man pages.

Would be kinda fun to do "man 9 Daffy Duck"

0xEF

3 days ago

It's the Warner Brothers Cartoon Companion.

Sardtok

3 days ago

Thank you for clarifying. It's now as clear as a crystal glass filled with tar. /s

mapt

3 days ago

Warner Brothers & Hanna Barbera cartoons introduced us to a great deal of culture by repetitive memes. This cinematic universe has hundreds of hours of short-form content, which back in the dark ages of television was fed to us intravenously age 2 to age ~12. Reruns played for decades after the original airdate in the hours after getting off from school or on weekend mornings.

I didn't have any idea who Orson Welles was until I recognized him in school as the person that The Brain ('Pinky and the Brain' on Animaniacs) was a parody of.

To this day I've never seen Peter Lorre, but there was a quite distinctive caricature that repeatedly played on Looney Tunes, and it took half a day of Googling to figure out what that memory referred to.

There are lots of other reference jokes - repeated tropes, voices, facial poses, and musical themes assumed by these shorts that clearly carried some cultural meaning that we intuited by repetition, even if we never understood the source material. It's nice to have a "TVTropes For WB Cartoons" if only because we don't know the name of many of these things to be able to look them up.

Unfortunately the maintainer seems to be largely focused on the 1940's and early 1950's, with most of the references.

sumtechguy

3 days ago

Is it just me or is the format of that page distinctly odd. Narrow column down the middle with a decently small font.

wil421

3 days ago

How young are you? Looks like what the internet used to look like. It appears the website is from the 90s and had some form of resurrection in 2014. You can still email the original guy on his aol email.

firesteelrain

3 days ago

Reminds me of many ham radio pages. Amateur hobby not meant for mobile screens.

Spastche

3 days ago

I feel like radio dudes they make their sites and software look terrible on purpose

mapt

2 days ago

* The peak of ham radio was the 70's and 80's.

* It appealed to tech-oriented people.

* Those were many of the same people who went on to make websites in the mid 90's.

* Teaching yourself new things becomes harder the older you get. Migrating old content costs time that can be spent on other things.

* Why change what works?

maxwell

3 days ago

Looks perfectly normal on a 640x480 VGA.

firesteelrain

3 days ago

I know this has /s but I am with you on this one. I don’t know why people feel free to not post productive comments.

rogerclark

3 days ago

Is "what is this ?" even a productive comment in itself? That's the point the parent is trying to make. If you click on this link, and you can't tell what it is, you probably don't care what it is. And after that, if you don't care enough to search "Daffy Duck" on Google or whatever, you really don't care what it is. Why would we possibly need a Hacker News comment explaining what Warner Brothers cartoons are?

firesteelrain

3 days ago

Again another non productive comment. Commenter didn't know what the companion meant. That's all he/she was asking. Why is that hard?

hagbard_c

3 days ago

Would that be a glass of coal tar, pine tar or bitumen?

GTP

3 days ago

This would help clarifying it.

Stratoscope

3 days ago

Clarified tar is a beautiful thing.

Just don't turn it into dip!

flobosg

3 days ago

(1998) or (2014)

> This page was originally maintained by Stephen Worth. Thanks to John K. for funding its production. Preserved by Kip Williams and restored in 2014 by Harry McCracken.

> The Warner Brothers Cartoon Companion is Copyright © 1996-1998 E. O. Costello. All rights reserved.

dang

3 days ago

Added above. Thanks!