LOONEY TUNES SPOTLIGHT COLLECTION: VOLUME 4

"Did you ever find Bugs Bunny attractive when he put on a dress and played girl bunny?"

Garth: Did you ever find Bugs Bunny attractive when he put on a dress and played girl bunny?
Wayne: No. (laughing) No!
Garth: Neither did I. I was just asking.
-Wayne's World

Call me crazy, but when it comes to Bugs Bunny I'm with Garth. I've loved that wascally, wise-cracking wabbit since I could watch television, so I was delighted by the first disc in the Looney Tunes Spotlight Collection: Volume 4. It offers up a solid hour of Bugs Bunny cartoons, and yes, he even puts on a dress and plays a girl bunny in one of them.

There's not much to complain about when it comes to the Bugs Bunny disc. He outsmarts Wile E. Coyote and Yosemite Sam, fends off an amorous Slobovian girl bunny, and tries to return a little lost penguin to the South Pole. He falls in love with a decoy bunny at the dog track, and in the fabulous "Hurdy-Gurdy Hare", he hits the streets with a gorilla instead of a monkey. He professes his love for composers like "Bee-Toven, Batch, and Brams", and regards his giant, unwieldy gorilla with utter disdain. To its antics, he says simply, "shove off King-Kong" or "stop breathing in my cup!" Stop breathing in my cup?! That is so classic. I still use his "quit breathin' on my fur" line in reference to close talkers, and I got it from a cartoon I watched at least fifteen years ago.

All in all, the first disc is a satisfying sampling of Bugs cartoons that left me wishing for more. Where is the one about Hansel and Gretel? The one with the hairy red monster? The Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde one? Buying Looney Tunes DVDs is undoubtedly a slippery slope, because there will always be a cartoon you're dying to see that's contained in the volume you don't have.

The second disc is entitled "Kitty Korner", and sadly, it took me about four cartoons to figure out why they were all about cats and mice. Duhhh. At first I was happy with old timey classics like "The Night Watchman", but they wore out their welcome fairly quickly, and I was ready to see Sylvester, Tweety, and Grandma have at it. Shockingly, there is only one Sylvester cartoon, and Tweety is nowhere to be seen. There are two shorts featuring that insanely adorable kitten who sleeps on the bulldog's back, and there's an ancient black and white Porky Pig cartoon. Though there are some memorable classics, it's tiring to have the cats and mice all in one place. The clever, surly mice outsmart the cats every time - how many variations can there be on this theme?

All of the original Looney Tunes are smart and funny, so any compilation is bound to be entertaining. However, devout fans will remember Merrie Melodies that were smarter and funnier, and may be disappointed by Volume 4 of the Spotlight Collection. Even so, we get a hearty dose of Bugs at his best, and glimpse a bygone era of pre-computer animation that is hard to beat.