Product Description
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Looney Tunes The Chuck Jones Collection Mouse Chronicles (DVD)
From animation legend Chuck Jones comes the big cheese of mouse
collections! Enjoy 19 remastered animated shorts featuring some *
Mouse Wreckers – Short Subject (Cartoon) 1949 mischievous mice
and their daring adventures! Introducing Sniffles. He's cute,
curious and got a heckuva cold! In Naughty But Mice, audiences
came to know Sniffles as a sweet, wide-eyed simpleton with a
talent for getting himself into trouble. But over the years,
Jones had evolved Sniffles into an overly talkative but endearing
nuisance. A trouble-loving twosome with a passion for pranks,
Chuck Jones let loose the mice, Hubie and Bertie, in the short
The Aristo-Cat. A departure from his previous cute and naivé
characters, Hubie and Bertie solidified a new direction for
Jones. The change paid off with the O®-nominated Mouse
Wreckers*, which finds Hubie and Bertie tormenting their favorite
nemesis Claude Cat with rapid-fire humor and gags galore.
So steal a snack and scurry back to your hideout for some laughs
and mouse-chief with the latest Chuck Jones Collection!
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Legendary animator and director Chuck Jones first began
animating cartoons for Warner Brothers in the early 1930s. By
1939, Jones had become an integral part of the Looney Tunes and
Merrie Melodies cartoon-creation team with his animated shorts
about Sniffles the mouse. The first disc in this two-disc,
remastered Chuck Jones collection is devoted completely to
Sniffles cartoons. The 1939 "Naughty but Mice" opens the
compilation and introduces Sniffles the mouse as a cute little
rodent with a very big head cold. Sniffles's trip to the
drugstore yields some unexpected side effects from an
alcohol-laden cold remedy, including a surprising friendship with
an electric razor. This first Sniffles cartoon is a slow-paced
short ed at kids (though modern parents will question the
appropriateness of the extended drunken mouse scene), and it's
just as enjoyable today as it was in 1939. The pace speeds up,
the gags get progressively funnier, and Sniffles becomes a real
chatterbox as Jones's work evolves. Sniffles encounters
everything from protective owls and their eggs to a silent little
bookworm, the noisiest nature walk ever, a little chick who grows
up to be a hawk, and, of course, a cat who would like nothing
more than to eat that little mouse. Also included on disc one is
a commentary on "Naughty but Mice" featuring Jerry Beck. The
second disc opens with the 1943 cartoon "The Aristo-Cat," which
showcases groundbreaking background art that is bright, abstract,
and expressionistic, and stars a new mouse duo, Hubie and Bertie.
Hubie and Bertie are two mice who are about as different from one
another as two mice can be, but the one thing they do share is a
particular tendency for finding trouble. In "The Aristo-Cat," the
mouse duo is pitted against a spoiled cat who's ed of
everything--including mice! The spoiled cat returns in later
Hubie and Bertie cartoons as Claude Cat, whose nervous
disposition and hypochondriac tendencies are the source of much
comedy. There are just seven Hubie and Bertie animated shorts on
the second disc, but there's plenty more to watch with 11 bonus
Warner Brothers mouse cartoons, including "Country Mouse,"
"Little Blabbermouse," and "Merlin the Magic Mouse," as well as
two commentary tracks for "The Aristo-Cat" (the first featuring
Eddie Fitzgerald, and the second, Greg Ford). Additional
commentaries include Ford on "Mouse Wreckers" and Beck on "The
Hypo-Chondri-Cat." The "Of Mice and Men" featurette details the
evolution of mice in cartoons, beginning with Disney's
introduction of Mickey Mouse in 1928, as well as Jones's growth
as a director. Finally, there's a storyboard reel for "The
Hypo-Chondri-Cat." The picture certainly isn't perfect in these
cartoons and the sound is low and at times dull and muffled, but
one can't really complain considering the age of the source
material. What is spectacular is that this Chuck Jones collection
finally offers all the Sniffles cartoons on one DVD and really
highlights Jones's development as an animator and director.
--Tami Horiuchi