Looney Tunes
GOLDEN COLLECTION
Perhaps the pinnacle of all Looney Tunes collections, the Looney Tunes Golden Collection represents the most widespread release to get the shorts out onto the DVD format for the first time in the global market.
Background
Heading into the early 2000s, the analog VHS format was beginning to grow obsolete. Studios were beginning to move forward to the new digital age of media, allowing for much better stability and video/audio quality. As movies began to move to this format, cartoons and TV shows were no exception, either.
In 2001, Disney released their Walt Disney Treasures collection, a series of (now out-of-print) DVDs that aimed to release uncensored and restored Disney shorts from the Golden Age to the hands of collectors, Disney enthusiasts, and casual families alike. The success of this series prompted Warner Bros. to expand on the concept to their huge library of Looney Tunes shorts. By 2003, the first volume had been released, with new volumes releasing annually.
Of course, with 1,002 shorts that could be selected, among several other related miscellany from Warner Bros., this was already quite a daunting task. The series was originally intended to release ten volumes (about 600 shorts), but poor sales in later volumes nearly resulted in the series being cancelled after the fifth volume. The restoration team's demands fortunately secured one final volume, which was released in 2008.
Concurrently running with this series was the Spotlight Collection, a more family-friendly, budget version of the Golden Collection that included far fewer shorts. It surprisingly outlasted the original Golden Collection run, with eight volumes released before its end in 2014, but still omitted 154 of the restored Golden Collection shorts.
This set was reissued in multiple ways, ranging from renewed releases to entirely "new" home media discs labeled as new but actually just repackaged Golden Collection discs. The set was first reissued as a box set in 2011, containing all six volumes in a single package. This came before the Blu-ray releases, putting new collectors ahead of the game outside the Super Stars releases. Later, in 2020, the collection was reissued again with new Amaray disc cases, with each volume sold separately and no box set option.
If purchasing this set, it is highly recommended to get the Amaray reissues from 2020 (preferably from GRUV Entertainment) instead of the box set, as this series is one of the most counterfeited of the Looney Tunes discs. Several bootleg box sets report having 375 shorts instead of 356 shorts and are often compressed to single-layer DVDs when the DVDs were originally released as dual-layer DVDs.
Volumes
Looney Tunes Spotlight Collection
- Volume 1
- Volume 2
- Volume 3 (Movie Collection; contains no original shorts)
- Volume 4
- Volume 5
- Volume 6
- Volume 7
- Volume 8
