Ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages, we love Hanna Barbera.

Welcome to the fantastic world of Hanna and Barbera, a celebration of Bill, Hannah, Joe, Barbera and the thousands of people, past and present who have shared in their entertainment tradition.

And now your host, Greg Airbar.

Thank you, Chris Anthony.

Welcome to the fantastic world of Hannah and Barbera.

This is Greg Airbar, author of Hannah Barbera, The Recorded History.

And we are welcoming back the wonderful George Feltenstein.

Tell me your title again because I want to make sure.

My title currently is Warner Brothers Discovery Library Historian.

But to us, he is a gift giver that keeps on giving and we have such cool stuff to talk about.

This has been a banner year for new releases from Warner Archive, especially for us who have been craving.

And before we begin, let's go over the golden rules of physical media.

Be it DVD, Blu-ray or CD.

If you want this stuff to keep on coming, it has to convince the front office, as we say, to know that it's selling and they only look at pre-orders as soon as you can pre-order and the first couple of weeks of sales, just like with films and theaters, if you wait, and of course you know, everybody's got budgets, if you wait for sale prices, that's probably not going to have an impact, but you have no idea how much you matter to further sales.

That can't be underscored enough.

And I really appreciate your saying that.

I mean, as we record this, we're in a golden position with the Tom and Jerry Golden Era anthology, which we just announced and which will be arriving December 2nd.

This is something that's going to be really, really popular based on 85 years of those two characters being at the forefront globally of animation fans of all ages.

But the fact that they're all together and that they're uncut, this is a big, big thing for us.

It's been in the top 10 on Amazon site, which represents a great deal of total sales.

It hit #1 two or three times in the last few days.

So that is immediately something that I can go to management with and say, look, people are buying this, there's interest.

But yes, absolutely the initial performance dictates what will be greenlit to follow.

And in defense of the front office, they have to report to people and they have to say the same thing.

Look at how this performed.

This is why we want to do this, because they're going to their superiors and they're saying, well, why do we want to do this?

Well, let me show you what George showed me.

Here are the results.

So honestly, it really does matter.

The other thing is we want to just talk a little bit about, you know, sometimes there are comments about I they move their dates.

Sometimes it's technical, but sometimes when you get a shipping date, you know, you see trucks on the highways, they've got Huckleberry Hound in them, you know they're trying to get things to where they want to go, but there are all kinds of complications that arise.

Be assured that we want to get them to you.

Priority number one, sometimes it falls out of our control and that's really, really frustrating.

Can you offer some retail options?

You know, of course, as Amazon.

Can you order online through Barnes and Noble and Target and Walmart too you?

Can order from Barnes and Noble.

Most of our stuff shows up on walmart.com.

I can't say 100% of it does, and that's out of our control.

Of course, we offer everything to everyone.

The one place I can send people to and guarantee that their order will process as soon as possible is Movie Zing MOVIEZYN, g.com.

Moviezing.com is the retail storefront of our manufacturing and distribution partner, Allied Vaughn Entertainment.

People are really starting to learn about movies saying and how it's very dependable as a company to getting product to the consumer quickly.

There are also many other online companies like moviesunlimited.com, deepdiscount.com.

Our stuff is on all of those sites.

And I urge people, if you know, if they're concerned about not getting their titles on time, that they look around at the various options.

One of the big problems that the industry is facing right now, and this is not just Warner Brothers, this is everybody, There is only one manufacturing plant for 4K discs, Blu-ray discs and DVD discs in all of North America.

One plant.

And that plant is in Mexico.

There is no plant in the continental United States.

The ones that were operative shut down.

So it all comes into this bottleneck of this one facility, of this one company and all the studios use this one company and the small companies as well.

So it does make things very, very difficult.

My understanding, I don't have direct communications with the plant and the, you know, we have operations divisions that take care of that.

But my understanding is that this plant is very cognizant of their responsibility and they're doing the best they can despite all of these doom and gloom rumors.

People who want clicks on YouTube, you know, physical media is dying and everything.

I think we're actually in a renaissance period because not only are diehard film fans and television fans wanting to own physical media, but the generation that grew up with streaming services as what they thought was the only option are suddenly discovering, hey, you can buy a Blu-ray player for very little money and have better quality and not have to worry if your Internet is down.

Not have to worry.

There's too many people using the Internet not having to worry about files being incredibly compressed to a tiny size.

For some people, it's fine, They like the convenience, but you're not going to have the selection and more importantly, you won't get the quality and to hold something tactile in your hand.

Especially when I look at our Huckleberry Hound set, you know, I was very insistent that the packaging be sturdy.

I didn't want it to be one of these big plastic honking cases where you open it up and the discs fall out on the floor.

A Warner Archive release will not have that kind of packaging.

And I I would rather we make a little more investment in the sturdiness of the packaging that equals the work we put into making our masters look as good as they can.

So we want to deliver the best consumer experience and we're grateful to be in that position.

You know, one of the things that also has become a habit of content watchers, myself included.

But I think, like you said, generations that grew up with streaming is depending on the streaming service, you want to see all the episodes, especially if you get hooked on a show, you want to see all the episodes almost at once or at least within a certain amount of time because she's like, Oh my gosh, I can't wait to see what happens next.

And actually, I used to do this with certain TV series.

I would wait the season came out on DVD instead of waiting week to week because I just could not enjoy it as much.

I got so used to that.

And when you get an entire series, you have the ability to binge exact.

So there's another thing to enjoy about that.

Huckleberry Hound is doing well.

I would assume Huckleberry.

Hound is exploding and I, I can't tell you how gratifying it is after basically close to three years of work putting that together.

And so many people within our organization worked so hard to make that happen.

All the different groups, the preservation team, the mastering team, the colorist set, Warner Brothers Motion Picture Imaging, the audio department, and archival mastering as they're called.

But they basically try to find the best audio source.

And then to put all that together and make sure that we were as close to what documentation we had in order to get everything there as a reference anthology.

And we're really, really thrilled with the very positive response we've gotten for the set.

And hopefully that will bode well for more of the characters that people want to see in their original form.

Can we assure that a lot of long-awaited and favorite titles are in the hopper?

Most definitely.

See, that's nice.

So as I've always said, never say never when it comes to these things.

Well, and The thing is, you have to be very patient, and that's been very frustrating for me.

When we started Warner Archive, I was looking at all of the animated programming and television programming and of course films that had never been given a DVD.

And with Huckleberry Hound, you had season one that was released on DVD, albeit without the theme song.

I will never understand that.

And the bumpers and bridges and, you know, doing it the right way.

And I immediately requested season 2 and three and four for DVD release.

And this is 1415 years ago.

And then I was told about all the clearance issues that had to be addressed with the music because as we've probably discussed you and I on your podcast before, Hanna Barbera had their own music department.

They were using library license cues and all of those had to be re cleared and paid for because they were only licensed for free television and non theatrical.

The cost of music clearance is enormous and we had to do this the right way.

And we still come across that on a lot of the early HP stuff.

We haven't yet opened the door to explore what would be involved with getting rough and ready cleared, but it would be the same situation.

The fact that it was produced in 16mm is not as frightening because we can make things look better than we could even four or five years ago.

You can't change the diminished quality of a film element that is half the size, but you can make things better than we could just a couple of years ago.

So I can be clear in saying we would like to do that series.

We haven't even begun to explore it because there are others of more popularity and importance.

I think everything is important, but specifically we want to attack the big guns 1st and then see what follows.

What I find particularly interesting is that we did release on DVD a myriad of Hanna Barbera shows that had been neglected and forgotten about initially, using masters that had been created in the mid 90s at the very end of Turner Broadcasting's ownership of Hanna Barbera, before Time Warner bought Turner Broadcasting.

So around 19951996 they had created new masters from interpositives on several good shows.

So we did put a lot of those out.

But then we moved into another phase where we were remastering for DVD release and the source masters were high definition, but they weren't cleaned and given the color correction, we didn't have the budget for it.

So they weren't given that kind of, you know, pristine perfection, which we now can do for what we're releasing on Blu-ray because fortunately our budgets have been increased so that we can address this higher end market.

It's also wonderful that it's now not just that you have to buy a disc.

The fact that Me TV Tunes is a thriving place where people can watch cartoons on television just like we did when we were growing up.

It's wonderful and it's a joint venture between our company and why go broadcasting.

So the fact that Me TV Tunes is so successful, I think that network and their programming is a wonderful advertisement for people who want to own it to go and buy it.

So I don't look at it is anything that takes away from what we're doing.

It's additive, it's promotional.

And you know, for people who can't afford to buy these things, at least they can get to see them.

They don't need cable or satellite or whatever.

You can get it over the air.

So their success and the folks who run that Channel, from what I understand, are as passionate about these wonderful classic animated works as you and I are.

They're one of us, one of us.

Google Gobble, You know, it's a wonderful thing.

The cartoons are also streaming on To Be, which is a free advertising service.

You've choices of where you can go and watch these things, which people did not have until very, very recently.

And to put something together in a wonderful package where it's comprehensive and the best possible quality, that's the goal.

But having these alternative methods just spreads the word.

And I think it's it's really a great time for those of us who are passionate about this kind of historic filmmaking.

Because that's the way I look at it.

I don't look at it as making cartoons.

It's filmmaking.

They made individual films.

They may have been shown on a television screen.

The work that went into producing an episode of The Flintstones is just as important as the work that went into producing an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show or I Love Lucy.

This is part of our heritage and it's an honor to be in the position to help further the availability of all of these great works.

The fact is that this wonderful, wonderful work, this world that this company and group of people put together is out there again for fans to see, for new audiences to discover.

I love seeing comments about.

I had no idea this show was even made.

It's really good.

Or I had no idea how sophisticated and funny the Huckleberry Hounds and the Yogi Bears were because they weren't around as much.

That's a major thing to someone like me who knows that, but it isn't that.

There is evidence.

So it's all there for people to enjoy.

And in recent decades, if you're speaking specifically about the Hannah Barbera cartoons, they were not given proper attention and care in the television world.

World, really, until me TV tunes came along.

Suddenly there was someone who said, wait, this is not babysitter pablum to keep the kids quiet.

No, they're actually perfectly fine for kids.

But they also thought about the adults who were watching characters like Pixie and Dixie and Mr.

Jinx.

They're really, really funny and very much a product of that late 50s, early 60s sensibility.

They referenced the time in which they were made.

That's what I find so refreshing about them because as and I'd like your opinion on this.

My belief is that as HB continued into the 60s, they lost a little bit of that adult edge in their humor.

And I'm, when I say adult, I mean not intended for little kids, but something adults could enjoy as well.

It's not to say the writers weren't smart, they were, but they kind of, I felt moved towards a more childlike audience as opposed to like adults and kids.

Do you agree with that?

Oh, well, yeah.

And one of the things that I like to point out to people about Hanna Barbera in the late 60s and then on to the 70s and 80s is that they were supplying material for different things.

And when they moved into Saturday morning, their audiences were children.

And they were contending not only with networks and standards and practices, but also sponsors and then the rise of the pressure groups.

And so they had to figure out ways to make these like superheroes.

There was a big controversy about shows like Space Ghost, Shazan and things like that.

And scooby-doo actually brought Batman and Robin to the point where they were convincing these groups we could make these acceptable, have a lot of action, but not have the degree of violence.

And that's why we had super friends.

So Hanna Barbera, their artists and writers were always trying to get the best stuff on the air under excruciating circumstances.

Time, money, and everybody looking at them.

John Semper Junior, the wonderful writer, was on the podcast, and I could identify with him because I went through the same thing.

He said, I know when I went into a meeting with these folks that the joke I love the most was going to be the one they zeroed in on.

He said I would sit there and like, no, I love this joke.

And it wasn't that the joke was necessarily offensive.

It's just that they may not have gotten it or they didn't think.

It worked or whatever, so a lot of stuff never made it in because it went through so many hands.

So I admire Hannah Barbera in the later years for what they did get on the air.

Because if you look at the Daffy Ducks of the later period, or you know, who'd Klute and the Blue Racer that the Patty Freeling did when they started to be under the same restrictions, Hanna Barbera always seemed to be able to And filmation also, they were able to figure out ways too.

It's remarkable how entertaining.

And even if they're weird, like Yogi Space Race is insane, but I watch it to be entertained by how nuts it is because you know, it was like, put this in here, Joe, put that in here, Joe throw disco into it.

It's like, what am I looking at?

But to me, that's part of the fun.

You know what I mean?

Absolutely, and I'm glad you brought up Hoot Clute.

You know, it's that if you were lucky enough to be in a boutique in which some of these studios were, the Patty Freling was when The Mirage Company and United Artists were funding them and they were making, you know, the luxury of a cartoon every month, every two months.

And Chuck Jones was always a boutique.

He could do specials and a couple of features and stuff, but he was in the unique position.

But the companies that had to get content out and had to support thousands of people, I just look at the Hanna Barbera stuff and I marvel at how well and how they're still very entertaining and how many people are extremely attached to the ones they grew up with.

Without question.

I mean, and if you think about it, the fact that people are watching, I think a lot of people are watching the Huckleberry Hound show as it was originally conceived and constructed for the first time.

Unless you're of a certain age because the original shows vanished from the air.

I think sometimes you could tell me probably better than I would know.

I'm assuming sometime around 196465 they were gone.

Yeah, and then they were spotty in the 70s once they'd start popping on a local station, but almost always in a mix with other cartoons and completely at random.

Mcgilligorilla and Peter Potamus individual cartoons just re emerged in like 197778 but they were randomly distributed.

So you're right.

Being able to see these in the context, especially the interstitials were Huck and the characters are together and they're, you know, introducing the cartoons except for Gerald Mcboing Boing and he didn't speak except in sound effects.

The announcer did the introducing.

Huck was the first cartoon character to really host a show, so that's kind of monumental too.

Absolutely.

And that underscores what I guess three years later or two years later, Warner Brothers did with ABC and the Bugs Bunny Show.

That's true.

That's absolutely true, and because the Bugs Bunny show and some of those interstitials kept getting shown and the hucks were not, Huck kind of got pushed to the side.

The gags in them are super funny and highly rewatchable.

I didn't realize for sure that rough and readies were all done on 16.

Yep.

All done on 16.

But you know, it makes my head spin actually to think how quickly they went from getting pink slipped by MGM to having their own studio being up and running and you don't look it rough and ready and say, oh, this is slack Dash put together work for a quick buck.

It's quality.

Well, I sometimes draw parallels and I do this in the book between Disney and Hannah Barbella.

Not line for line and putting one next to the other.

But business wise in the 30s it was a depression and a lot of really good artists from all over the world needed work and many of them went to California to bring their portfolios to Disney and that's why they had such incredible people.

It was a goldmine of talent, especially for the 1st 5 features.

Hanna Barbera benefited from the fact that animation shorts were starting to dry up and that Disney had just experienced a disappointment in the box office was Sleeping Beauty.

I mean, that's where you want Takamoto worked on and a lot of those things in Willie Ito worked on a lot of the 50s ones.

Charles Nichols who became a director there, right?

And they went to Hanna Barbera.

They really benefited.

Then they created the foundation with the crown jewels.

With Disney it was Pinocchio, Snow White, Fantasia, Bambi and Dumbo.

With Hanna Barbera, it was Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Quick Draw, and then The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Top Cat, Johnny Quest.

So they had the crown jewels too.

And those are the foundation they built on.

And that's perfectly great because now, now we have access to most of them and God willing, more of them.

We shall see.

But Speaking of 16 and yes, 5.

I was about to make that connection because we were setting up.

Yeah, we were.

The next topic of discussion so it there couldn't be a better Segway.

Well, touché away.

Tell us about that.

Well I have a dim memory as a toddler of new Hanna Barbera shows popping up on WPX channel 11 in the early more not early morning, the mid morning hours.

And so this is before I, I was in kindergarten, but I was a very strange kid.

And I was already aware of like, you know, I was fascinated by like, I didn't know the word syndication, but you know, how shows were on certain channels and I wanted to learn all about that.

So it's kind of my clue that maybe there is something about, you know, souls continuing or something.

I mean, well, how does a toddler know or care?

But I did, and I remember Touché Turtle, Libby the Lion, Wally Gator suddenly being on WPIX, and I guess that was late 1962.

And I love those cartoons.

They just were a continuation of what I had loved about Yogi and Huckleberry Hound and Quito McGraw and all the other Hanna Barbera syndicated shows, not the network shows because of my age, you know, I missed a lot of those early Flintstones, and I only saw a top cat on Saturday morning reruns years later.

But, you know, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear, Quickdro McGraw, and then these three new characters, which were called, I believe, the Hanna Barbera new cartoon shows or something like that.

There was a marketing name for them, right?

It was a business.

They packaged these things for Syndicate vacation companies.

And like, there was a thing called Captain Inventory, which was all superhero shows.

And as far as I know, I've never saw anything that was listed as the new Hanna Barbera cartoon show.

And when I was growing up, it was the same thing.

They were either inserted among, you know, cartoon carnival, cartoon Playhouse.

They were shown in the hosted kid shows.

And when a station had time after, like an Abbott and Costello movie, they'd toss one.

And you know, Channel 7 in Miami, WCKT at the time, they would show one of these cartoons when a movie ended early.

And then when they were running out of time, they'd turn it off.

And they had that lippy the line.

I'll never forget it with the evil violin man of Melbourne.

Yeah.

And that's a great cartoon.

And we never saw how it ended.

And I remember my dad saying that's a pretty good story.

I wonder what happens and it so it was at the whim and at the time.

5 minute cartoons stations love them.

That's why they took all the total televisions, they took the Jay Wards, they had the Popeyes and then the King feature ones out of the inkwell.

At the time there were a great length to put together and Hanna Barbera made 52 of each.

I mean, that's a load of.

It is, it is.

And so when it came to these cartoons, we wanted to release all three from this grouping, the syndication grouping on DVD, through an archive.

I would say probably less than 10 years ago.

It was late in the game.

I had been hesitant about these because the film elements were a mess and we couldn't remaster.

The existing masters on Lippy the Lion and Wally Gator weren't too bad, but the existing masters on Touché Turtle were horrible and I just couldn't justify releasing that with our name on it, even though our quality standards were admittedly not the perfectionist standards we have now.

You need money to have those standards and the business had not grown to where it is now.

So we skipped over to shave, we released Lippy, we released Wally Gator.

They did nicely.

They didn't look great, but at least we were getting them out there to the people, and that was very important.

And with this new initiative to resurrect as much of the Hanna Barbera library as we can, there were plans afoot to really tackle all three series.

And the reason why Touché Turtle is coming out first is because there was no DVDI find it really interesting based on input we get.

There are some people that are obsessed with Hanna Barbera programming that never was released on DVD.

And the ones that weren't released on DVD with rare exception like a Rough and Ready where there's a music issue and so forth and so on.

Quick Draw McGraw, same thing.

It was really the later cartoons that some of those haven't gotten released yet or they were these large 90 minute shows that some of the content within the show was tied into a third party character license.

And so to try to reconstruct those would be legally impossible or close to impossible.

So Touché Turtles absence of not being available at all was the reason why we did this first.

And Wally Gator and Lippy the Lion will follow at some point fairly soon.

But I wanted touché to kind of have his own, you know, his own stage for release.

And I think of those three, they were all good shows.

They were all good characters, but I think the one people have the most vivid memory of, because he was very distinctive, is touché Turtle.

More than Lippy the Lion and Hardy RR or Wally Gator.

Not dramatically more, but just a little bit more beloved, I think.

And I think some of that has to do with the fact that Bill Thompson, the voice of Droopy, was the voice behind Touché and he was a wonderful voice artist.

Yeah, and that's part of the appeal.

I should have mentioned earlier, too, that some local stations might have said Wally Gator and his friends or touché Turtle and his friends, but I think that was probably the station's option in the case.

Yeah, in the case of Touché Turtle, that is a goldmine of voice acting by two actors that you didn't always hear doing multiple voices unless you were, unless you go to old time radio and hear both Alan Reed and Bill Thompson doing a tremendous amount of voices.

Bill Thompson was not only droopy, but he was for Disney was the White Rabbit and Ranger Woodlore and King Hubert in The Sleeping Beauty and several Dogs and Lady and Shrimp.

So he he really was a fixture in Hollywood voiceovers, but didn't do a whole lot of TV.

So not only do you hear him do touché, but he also plays other character along with Don Messick and Mel Blanc and Janet Waldo and people like that.

But you're hearing Bill Thompson and how many voices he can do.

And then Alan Reed is dumb dumb and a lot of people I would think wouldn't have necessarily realized he was dumb dumb.

And he's doing his life with Luigi voice and his Frederick voice.

And he was very versatile as well.

So Alan Reed and 52 cartoons doing all these voices, just the audio is gold.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I I remember as a kid thinking Dum Dum sounded a lot like Fred Flintstone.

You did see I catch it at first.

It took me a little while.

Because, you know, there would be sometimes where like Fred would get hit over the head or something and go to go, you know, and it sounded like dum dum.

I remember, you know, you know, because I could read at a very young age, so I could read the credits and so forth and so on.

So I knew was the same person after a while.

But I loved all three of these cartoons and the way they were presented in the New York area.

Initially they were on different days and they were not mixed together at all.

But I wondered why there wasn't like a main theme song and the structure that had been put on Huck and Yogi and Quick Draw.

But this is different, you know, and I, I found that interesting.

And my poor parents, I was always asking them questions about these things and they were civilians.

They didn't know anything about it.

You know, my father tried to solve the problem when I was a little older by bringing home a copy of Weekly Variety from the Grand Central Newsstand.

Say, George, I think you might like reading this.

And of course, I've been addicted to trade publications ever since.

These cartoons are so entertaining.

And because they're only 5 minutes long, they just wet the pallet and you can watch all of them or you can watch one of them.

It's going to be tremendously entertaining.

I like the fact that they have so much packed into a 5 minute.

Hanna Barbera really knew how to work a format.

They would do fives, they would do 6 or sevens, they would do 11 or 12 minutes and then they had the 30 minutes.

And with scooby-doo movies, they had the fill like 52 minutes.

And it's so cool to look at these 5 minutes and look at how the stories go.

It really is an art form to structure stories to work in that format.

Plus everyone one of them had running gimmicks like touché had the phone in his shell and the trusty Soward.

And I can't say sword without saying Soward.

Of course not.

There was a lot of fun gags, a lot of that sophisticated humor, but done very gently so everybody could watch them.

It's so true, but again, I don't want to misuse the word adult, but there is an adult sensibility, meaning not condescending in the writing.

It's really meant for a broad group of audience members.

I would say the same thing goes and then some with a lot of what Jay Ward and Total Television were doing.

That was very refreshing for adults as well.

Yeah, they did put just enough to make, as the parents are taking a glance at it, to chuckle over like the Kerrwood Derby on Bullwinkle.

And they would still laugh at that.

Yeah, yeah, that kind of thing.

So they were very flexible and who could watch them?

There were critics at the time who remarked that these early Hanna Barberas did not talk down the kids.

You know, dumb, dumb was dumb dumb.

But generally the characters were not, for lack of a better word, stupid.

You know, they may be clueless, but not stupid, especially to and that kind of thing.

It wasn't, as I heard as a kid, sometimes babyish.

Without question.

Can I ask you this?

And this is a question that has come up with the presentation of the touché turtle package.

Originally people were wondering why it changed.

I will explain why it changed.

We don't have a lot of.

Artwork.

In our corporate archive for a lot of the early Hanna Barbera works, you may know that when they shut down the Hanna Barbera studios on Cuenga, there were a lot of very unhappy people that were out of the job.

They had to leave the building and along with them may likely have gone a lot of pieces of archival artwork as well as film elements as well as all sorts of things.

So we had that piece of art that we initially were going to use and too many people came to me and said, you know, that looks an awful like the Bemelman S artwork from Madeleine.

And I said, well, I don't think we should even waste a moment trying to trace it back to see if it is or it isn't.

It looked very much that way to me.

And I said, that's got to go.

We flipped the art I think the same day as we had announced it.

However, it's still around on various retail websites because they haven't changed the cover.

There have been people who come to me and said, no, that is what was designed by Hanna Barbera.

And then there were other people who came to me and said, no way.

Can you not see that?

It's exactly the same thing.

So we are incredibly respectful of the rights and copyrights and ownership of other people.

And we're not about to breach copyright.

You know, if something is, let's say it's a film or a television series or a cartoon where the owner neglected to renew the copyright.

People say it's public domain.

We would never if it belongs to someone else.

We would never go near doing anything with something that belong to someone else, copyright renewal or not.

And we would hope other people would show us the same respect.

That's a long standing Warner Brothers rule.

Unless we make a deal with the owner, we have no right to use something that we know isn't ours.

And based on all the information, as soon as it came in, I was like, we got to flip that right away.

And fortunately, our creative director and the gentleman who does a lot of our artwork, they were very quick to find a solution that we felt was in line with a lot of our other packaging.

And that's what would be on this packaging.

And we're very happy about that.

But that's what happened.

It was just too obviously something that might have been Frankenstein together.

By someone making a joke or whatever.

That's why it's not our packaging and not anything we're going to distribute looking like that.

Well, you know, a lot of us have been waiting for touché.

Thank you for mentioning also that we can have Wally and Lippy and Hardy maybe in the months ahead so to.

I would say in the months ahead, yeah.

Can I ask you about some titles?

Would that be OK?

Well, let's try it and I'll let you know.

I'm very very hesitant to talk about things that haven't been locked down and sealed because I got bitten and.

Yeah, I understand before.

OK, I'll do a disclaimer.

You know, Walt Disney did that in his famous Epcot film.

He tapped on the blueprints and he said all of this is probably going to change.

You know, that's the part that folks don't realize when they say Epcot isn't at all what Walt Disney wanted.

You know, we don't know what Epcot might have been.

And he said, I'm not promising you this.

These are our plans and our projections.

So given that, I'm going to name one that is obscure to an awful lot of people.

Catanooga Cats.

Probably at the top of my list of things we need to do.

To me, that's like, why didn't that happen 20 years ago when the initial efforts were made to bring Hanna Barbera to DVD?

Those very nice packages.

The packaging was nicer than the content on the discs, frankly.

Because, you know, how do you put Magilla Gorilla out without the theme song?

There were no legal issues there.

I just was, I was, I had no involvement in those releases and I was very disappointed.

I hope we're correcting those errors, but Cat Nooke Cats was more than just, it was an hour show.

It wasn't 1/2 hour show.

And I think it's up there with Banana Splits as something that people really, really want to see.

Think Banana Splits is a bit higher and Banana Splits has been distributed in those hybrid, you know, half hour cut downs and whatnot.

And that it's such a massive, overwhelming initiative that has to be undertaken that it's been hard to get the financial support to do that.

But I'm pushing for that.

I think we'll probably get to cat nuke cats before we get to Banana Splits, but it's our intention to do both.

The cat Nuke cats have any issues with the Mike Curb music?

We haven't even been able to locate all the queue sheets to determine that.

I don't think there is any problem there in terms of limitations on certain pieces of music.

I haven't completed all of my initial legal research yet to determine that, but right now we're focusing on, yeah, other characters, other shows, but those are probably the two that I think warrant the most further investigation and work.

How about Alice in Wonderland?

That is very clearly a clearance issue that we have yet to been able to find a way to address.

That's the bad news.

The good news is we just completed creating new preservation elements on the program.

The program is protected.

Once we can clear it, it'll be out there.

I have very dim memories of seeing it as a child when it was broadcast, so I'd like to see it again.

Oh yeah, that's a favorite.

And that'll be like a brand new Fred and Barney appearance to a lot of and then maybe just and I don't want to put you on the spot too much because it's not really fair, as we said, because Epcot may change.

All these things will change.

But as far as like non Hanna Barberas, Rankin Bass made a few specials that never saw the light of day on either DVD or Blu-ray.

One of them was a mouse on the Mayflower.

One of the most important things they did The Hobbit, which was on Warner, but it wasn't a really good version of it.

I'm well aware of those.

Our rank and bass ownership begins I think mid 1974 and we went quite aggressive in getting a lot of their rarities out.

Not just the animated ones either.

We did things like the Last Dinosaur and the Bermuda Depths, and so this has been kind of a very important thing to me to liberate that library.

So in the DVD world, we got a lot of those specials out, and we also got a lot of the Hanna Barbera specials out, you know, based on famous books and stuff like that.

There are so many tributaries, there are so many nooks and crannies to hold the melted butter, as they'd say about an English muffin.

There is just so much in that other tier.

And I don't believe we own Mouse on the Mayflower.

I don't believe that's ours.

I think that's in the yeah, because what happened was Rankin Bass, I believe was purchased by Telepictures and Telepictures was purchased by Lorimar, which we purchased in the late 80s.

So it comes to us via this very complicated chain of title and so forth and so on.

And there were certain things that Rankin Bass did as works for hire that we don't have rights to from that later point.

But we really made a concerted effort to try and highlight all the different opportunities and get these things out there.

And on the hand of Barbaric side, we looked at a lot of those after school specials and you know, putting out the last of the curlews was like a really important thing to do.

That's another one that has just gone through preservation, which is really, really important because it means that not only are we taking into consideration what elements do we have, what can we do?

Is the camera negative intact, the audio elements intact, But if someone isn't looking in on those things, something could turn vinegar and we would have a problem.

We want to protect everything.

And so it is a company wide edict to try and protect and preserve and make available as much as we can from this amazing library.

Yeah, that's it's a daunting task, but one that we take very seriously and with deep.

Dedication.

We are so grateful that you're doing this.

I've said this over and over, but I'm sure everybody's listening, is also beaming with gratitude and is very excited about the future releases.

Can you come back and talk about Tom and Jerry?

Because that's a big deal.

It's a huge deal and it warrants its own conversation.

All I will say about that is that one of my colleagues made it an essential mission to open up the doors to get everyone in the corporation to support doing this complete, uncut, uncensored, from beginning to end of the Hanna Barbera period at MGM.

And at the beginning of 2025 when we released the Tom and Jerry Cinemascope cartoons, I think in February, it was an impossible dream.

We didn't know we were going to do this.

A lot of people are now saying, oh, that was a cash grab.

And of course, the people always want to have something bad to say.

You know, it's just, it's how you get noticed on the Internet.

But no, we had no idea that such a thing would be possible.

After all that we went through as a company pulling the second golden collection that never happened and all the nasty comments and well, everybody got together and looked at this and said this is a wonderful opportunity.

The characters are celebrating a birthday.

What can we do to get everybody on board to bless this without concern?

And it happened.

And it'll be under people's Christmas trees this year because the release date is December 2nd.

And the Warner Archive version of this comes with a bonus disc and a booklet and deluxe packaging.

And that's a big deal for us because we usually don't have that opportunity.

The new documentaries have been made.

A half made documentary that was never finished was finished thirteen years later.

There will be commentaries, there will be some bonus cartoons.

It's just going to be Tom and Jerry fans Uber delight and we're very excited about it.

So I would love to come back to your podcast and talk about it.

Well, that would be great and we're looking forward to that.

We always look forward to talking to you on our happy little fantastic world.

I thank you again George Feltenstein, for being with us so many times to share the excitement and some of the backstage stories of the Warner Archive releases.

Well, thank you, Greg.

It's always a pleasure.

We are kindred spirits, you and I, so it's wonderful to join forces and get the word out about Bill and Joe and the legacy they left by.

Thank you and thank you all for listening.

Please subscribe and like and all those podcast Y things and until next time, bye bye.

We hope you enjoyed the fantastic world of Hannah and Barbera with Greg Airborne.

Please join us again and Many thanks for listening.