Shrunken Cinema/Termite Terrace
From Eccentric Flower
Termite Terrace
Hi! If you have somehow managed to stumble across these pages by accident, please be aware that they are an unfinished (indeed, barely begun) project and a lot of pages do not exist yet. Also please note that this site is entirely unrelated to the "Termite Terrace Trading Post" forums, and has no affiliation with Time-Warner or anybody else who actually has some claim to ownership to the cartoons discussed here.
These pages are a personal project which I am doing for the sheer enjoyment of it. I didn't intend for them to have any other purpose. Heaven knows, if you wanted the information in these pages, you could use the same sources I did; you too could go back and forth between Wikipedia and IMDb and thirty or so other sources and arrive at the same compilation. However, if I have saved you some legwork, then that's a bonus!
This bizarre opus came about because I realized just how many jokes and cultural references in classic-era Warner Brothers cartoons now require footnotes. Ideally we'll still be showing these now seventy-plus-year-old cartoons to our children and our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren because they're still entertaining and funny - and in that respect they age well; but there's another aspect to them, the aspect where they reflected upon and parodied the culture of their times - and that aspect threatens to be lost.
In particular, one of the most important sets of jokes in these cartoons - Carl Stalling and Milt Franklyn's offbeat musical cues - is now almost meaningless to the average adult, let alone the average eight-year-old. To this end, I have tried to make careful note of these in particular. (See also the page on Stalling and Franklyn.)
The definitive source for Warner cartoons at present is the Golden Collection DVDs, so the main index below has been organized along the lines of those DVDs. As will quickly become obvious, there are still a whole lot of cartoons that aren't in those six sets, and Warner has apparently decided there is no money in a Golden Collection 7, so this may be the only set of restored cartoons we get from them. (Warner is apparently releasing some of the cartoons that weren't in these six sets in their "Looney Tunes Super Stars" series. These are not considered below because I won't buy them. Here is why.)
What do you do if you want to see cartoons which aren't in the Golden Collection? (I am, of course, assuming you own all six boxes of the Golden Collection. If you don't, and you want to show these cartoons to your kids one day, you'd better go buy them now, before Warner decides the DVD is dead.) Well, I'm not going to tell you to go look at stolen copies of a cartoon - and any one of these cartoons you may find on YouTube or elsewhere is theft if it's not in public domain, please have no illusions about that. On the other hand, if Warner won't let us see the cartoons any other way ....
Alternate Listings and Information Thereof
You might be trying to find a cartoon you know Chuck Jones directed. Or you might be looking for a cartoon you know had Bugs and Daffy. One of these other listings might help you. On each of these pages, in addition, you'll find text about related topics, such as the facts about Jones, or the history of the Schlesinger era.
Chronology
Characters
Directors
We also offer a straight alphabetical listing for your searching convenience, assuming you know the cartoon's title.
Or you could try these rather odd listings:
Lost and Found - answers questions like "Which is the one with the singing frog?"
Scoreboard - a number of things it amuses me to keep count of
The Cue Sheet - every piece of quoted music I can identify
Additional Brain Dumps
These fellows don't have their own listings because there would be no point; they are essential to nearly every cartoon here. If you don't know why, then read their pages and find out.
The Music: Carl Stalling and Milt Franklyn (plus Raymond Scott and Harry Warren)
The Sound: Mel Blanc, Treg Brown, and Arthur Q. Bryan (who?)
Golden Collection DVDs
For the listings below, as with everywhere else in these pages, I have used the film's copyright date, not release date. I have included some bonus materials if they were a Warner-released cartoon intended for American theatrical release, and primarily for entertainment; this means I have omitted, for example, the Private Snafu cartoons (although these are worth a look) because they were intended for the Army, but have left in the wartime cartoons such as "Herr Meets Hare" which were intended for general audiences. I've also omitted informational pieces such as the (award-winning) "So Much For So Little." I was tempted to strike "Horton Hatches the Egg" as not really being of the same ilk as the rest of this, but it's within the time frame and it's a Warner cartoon, so I suppose it can stay.
[Memo to the Warner exec who thought it was a good idea to put the Whoopi Goldberg intro on Golden Collection 3 at all, much less on every disc: You need to be taken out and shot.]
Golden Collection 1Disc 1
Disc 2
Disc 3
Disc 4
|
Golden Collection 2Disc 1
Disc 2
Disc 3
Disc 4
|
Golden Collection 3Disc 1
Disc 2
Disc 3
Disc 4
|
Golden Collection 4Disc 1
Disc 2
Disc 3
Disc 4
|
Golden Collection 5Disc 1
Disc 2
Disc 3
Disc 4
|
Golden Collection 6Disc 1
Disc 2
Disc 3
Disc 4
|
Noted but unavailable
This isn't a comprehensive list of cartoons which aren't on the Golden Collection. They're ones I specifically missed because they are favorites of mine, or because they are noted elsewhere in these pages (historically significant, censored, related to another cartoon here, et cetera).
- Porky's Duck Hunt - the first Daffy Duck cartoon - see comments at Daffy Duck and Egghead
- Porky's Hare Hunt - basically a clone of the above, with the first proto-Bugs
- Prest-O Change-O, Hare-um Scare-um, and Elmer's Pet Rabbit - other proto-Bugs cartoons (see comments on Characters page)
- A/The Wild Hare - thought by many to be the first "real" Bugs cartoon (although an unrestored version appears in some Golden Collection bonus materials)
- Piker's Peak - notable for Carl Stalling's "Bad Swiss Band"
- The Hasty Hare, Hare-Way To the Stars, and especially Mad as a Mars Hare ("It's aluminumininum!") - because having even one Tweety or Speedy Gonzales cartoon in the collection when you don't have all five Marvin the Martian cartoons is a crime
- Shishkabugs - "I want hassenpfeffer!" Not a great cartoon, but memorable
- Really Scent and several other Pepe le Pew cartoons - see comments at For Scent-imental Reasons
- Rushing Roulette - the third instance of the "Those Endearing Young Charms" gag
- Hare Brush - where Bugs and Elmer trade places, and Elmer wins! (See The Hare-Brained Hypnotist)
- Curtain Razor - a Porky cartoon that has the predecessor of the final gag in Show Biz Bugs
- Little Orphan Airedale and A Hound For Trouble - the other two Charlie the Dog cartoons (no great loss)
- Catty Cornered, The Unmentionables, and Bugsy and Mugsy - the other three of the five Rocky the gangster cartoons (also no great loss)
- Racketeer Rabbit - the prototype of Rocky the gangster (as Edward G. Robinson), and this is a loss
- Apes of Wrath - debatable whether this is better or worse than Gorilla My Dreams
- Pullet Surprise - the other Pete Puma cartoon (one of their more intelligent omissions) - see Rabbit's Kin
- A Witch's Tangled Hare - the third Witch Hazel cartoon
- Rabbit Punch - the Bunny Hugged of boxing
- Any Bonds Today? - only 90 seconds long but well-known (but it's in public domain, watch it here)
- And, of course, all of the Censored Eleven
