The absolute first home media series provides the very first selection of shorts to be released on home media. While cut short in the United States and Canada, Europe would continue to receive a whopping nineteen volumes and 170 shorts.
Background
The VHS format was first made available in 1976, and by that point it had quickly risen in popularity. By 1982, Warner Bros. Home Video was ready to begin releasing their Looney Tunes shorts onto home media shelves.
Earliest volumes were also released on Betamax tapes, a videotape format that competed with VHS. The failure of Betamax resulted in later volumes being released on VHS only. For simplicity purposes of this website, only the VHS format will be documented.
These sets initially retailed at $39.95 USD each and were initially released in the first wave as a set of three volumes. Volumes 1-3 were initially released around November 1982, while later volumes slowly arrived. However, due to mediocre sales in the American market, later volumes were withheld in that country. The Canadian and European markets would go on to receive volumes 4-7.
The first wave of volumes had 7 shorts each, with some notably dipping feet into the DePatie-Freleng and Format Films era of shorts. Due to rights issues, only shorts in the post-1948 package were considered for release.
Outside the North American market, the series proved to be rather popular in the European market. Thus, around January 1984 would see the release of a new wave of volumes (volumes 8-13), alongside a final set of volumes around August 1984 (volumes 14-19). These volumes were only mastered for the PAL 576p resolution and thus will not play on North American NTSC devices. Most of these volumes now had 10 shorts due to time compression for PAL televisions and thus were sped up (in both speed and pitch) by about 4%. For most contemporary hardcore collectors, having a worldwide VHS player was vital if one was to attempt to play all the volumes.
As the earliest set of home media releases of the series, the picture and audio quality did not age too well later on. Most of the prints shown here were sourced from 35mm film, but they were then transferred to videotape. While on the surface it was a decent way to broadcast these shorts for analog television (as these were the same prints that were later sent to a few television networks at the time), they were suffering ghosting and smearing issues. Videotape tends to be notoriously hard to properly restore later on, so those ended up being the best set of versions made available for a select handful of shorts. The prints from this series would eventually turn up on Cartoon Network and Boomerang years later, largely on shorts that did not get a better print by the end of the Platinum Collection.
A total of 170 shorts were released in all volumes, with only a single one being double dipped, "14 Carrot Rabbit", which appeared on volumes 2 and 12. While a good portion of the shorts have later been restored for digital disc media, a handful have yet to appear, particularly the post-1964 shorts. Currently, the entirety of the third wave of shorts has been restored to digital disc media, while 11 other shorts have yet to appear on digital disc media. "Design for Leaving" and "Daffy's Inn Trouble" are available uncropped in this series but are released restored in a cropped state on DVD.
